India: Politics and Genomics


David Reich:
The tensest twenty-four hours of my scientific career came in October 2008, when my collaborator Nick Patterson and I traveled to Hyderabad to discuss these initial results with Singh and Thangaraj. Our meeting on October 28 was challenging.  
Singh and Thangaraj seemed to be threatening to nix the whole project. Prior to the meeting, we had shown them a summary of our findings, which were that Indians today descend from a mixture of two highly divergent ancestral populations, one being “West Eurasians.” Singh and Thangaraj objected to this formulation because, they argued, it implied that West Eurasian people migrated en masse into India. They correctly pointed out that our data provided no direct evidence for this conclusion. They even reasoned that there could have been a migration in the other direction, of Indians to the Near East and Europe. Based on their own mitochondrial DNA studies, it was clear to them that the great majority of mitochondrial DNA lineages present in India today had resided in the subcontinent for many tens of thousands of years.21 They did not want to be part of a study that suggested a major West Eurasian incursion into India without being absolutely certain as to how the whole-genome data could be reconciled with their mitochondrial DNA findings. 
Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Kindle Locations 2514-2524). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 
The genomics of ancient India is controversial for reasons of both history and contemporary politics.  The historical reason has to due with uses the Nazis and earlier European racists made of the fact that many Indian languages, including the ancient sacred language of Hindu religion/culture, Sanskrit, are related to the languages of Europe (and other places).  The oldest Sanskrit epic, the Rig Veda, tells the tale of Aryan chariot riders conquering the fortresses of their impure Dasa enemies.

The Nazis appropriated the role of the conquerors, the ancient Hindu symbol the Swastika, and claimed to be the original "Aryans," who brought civilization and the Indo-European languages to India.  India today is controlled by a Hindu nationalist party, which endorses the mythological million year history told in the great Hindu epics, bans books that challenge the party line, and has responded very weakly to outrages against religious minorities, including this disgraceful incident in which an eight year-old Muslim girl was raped, tortured, and murdered in a Hindu temple, and the accused rapists protected by Hindu activists.

Anyway, the Hindu nationalists really don't care for the picture that ancient DNA has revealed: that India, like Europe, is a mixture of indigenous HGs, farmer immigrants (in India's case from Iran rather than Anatolia), and pastoral peoples from Central Asia who very likely brought the Indo-European language and many elements of the ancient Hindu culture.

One crucial element of the story is still missing: the genomics of the members of the pre-steppe invader Indus Valley Civilization.  Attempts to decode some of the DNA are underway, and Reich reports three theories were bet on in his lab: Ancestral North Indians (ANI, indigenous HG plus Iranian farmers plus steppe pastoralists, Iranian farmers only, and Ancestral South Indians (ASI, indigenous HG plus Iranian farmers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more