DNA Points To India's Two-pronged Ancestry / Science News

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Genetic Spread

View Larger Version | Despite India’s genetic diversity (seen on a map showing the states inhabited by each of 25 groups), a new DNA study traces today’s lineages back to just two ancestral groups. Colors denote the language families of tongues spoken by each group (see legend at right).

India’s 1.2 billion people belong to more than 4,600 ethnic and religious groups separated by caste, customs and language. But a shared genetic heritage runs deep in this teeming nation, a new DNA analysis suggests.

Indians today possess varying proportions of ancestry from two genetically distinct populations, concludes a team led by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Members of one ancient population share DNA patterns with modern Middle Easterners, central Asians and Europeans, the researchers report in the Sept. 24 Nature . The other population shows no strong connection to any modern mainland group. The first group is dubbed “Ancestral North Indians” and the second “ Ancestral South Indians .” Both of the groups existed before the founding populations that contributed to today’s genetic diversity moved to South Asia.

Members of each modern Indian group have inherited between 40 and 80 percent of their DNA from Ancestral North Indians and the rest ...

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