Thread by @RavikanthS_

1/ frontline.thehindu.com/arts-and-cultu…

2/ WE ALL CAME OUT FROM AFRICA, BUT SOME WERE HERE BEFORE OTHERS. SANSKRIT CAME AFTER TAMIL.

South Asia is one of the most diverse places on earth, with many hundreds of languages, reflecting great human diversity, and there is great genetic diversity as well. One of the

3/ things that we see when we look at genetic data from diverse people in India is that the great majority of groups in India, but by no means all groups, speak Indo-European and Dravidian languages. These are the two largest language families in India, and which are genetically

4/ well described as being arrayed on a gradient of different proportions of ancestry, different proportions of inheritance, from two very different ancestral populations, as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians. We have known for 11 years in India with this

5/ gradient of different proportions of these two highly divergent ancestries.

This came out of the work that we did in collaboration with K. Thangaraj in Hyderabad’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology [CCMB]. We spent a lot of time over the past decade, trying to

6/ understand the origin of this major gradient of ancestry in South Asia that accounts for almost all of the ancestry in people speaking Indo-European and Dravidian languages, but does not account for unique and special ancestry that is common in people speaking Austro-Asiatic

7/ and Burmese languages. So most of the work we have done is focussed on that gradient. I’m happy to tell you what we have learned in the last decade about the origin of that group.