Post #2384103

2026-05-08 08:09 UTC

The Reich et al 2009 study, with a much more diverse sampling of population, 'showed that upper-caste groups shared greater genetic affinity with ‘West Eurasians’ (that is, ‘Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus’, as Reich put it in his 2018 book) than did low-caste and tribal groups. The researchers coined new terms for early South Asian people who, in the abstract modelling involved in the study, were classified into two groups considered ancestral to all contemporary South Asians: Ancestral South Indians (ASI) and Ancestral North Indians (ANI).' Subsequent studies further elaborated how the ASI and ANI populations came to be formed, and how they were related to the Harappans and the Aryans. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2842210/

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@RadicalAnthro@c.im 2026-05-08 08:17

But 'labels of ASI and ANI were devised by geneticists in the context of abstract modelling'...'a less technical description of these early population movements and mixing, and of the extraordinary demographic dynamism of the 2000-1000 BCE period, would read something like this: numerous small and big instances of migrations and mixing-together of different groups, along with conflicts and battles, were taking place all over the subcontinent' In The Sceptical Patriot (2014), Indian journalist Sidin Vadukut writes: 'We are all, every single one of us, the outcomes of centuries of civilisational upheaval. We are part-Greek, part-Mongol, part-Persian, part-British, part-Mughal, part-French, Part-Portuguese, part-Arab, part-Turk, part-everything.' NB interesting he misses out African, or subsumed that into part-everything, because we are all of us at least in part African.

Open ##2384104