Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)
nature.com
nature.com
My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South India and eventually thousands of years later to Australia. My ancestors are from the west coast of India. About 5% of Indians carry this mutation (shared with indigenous australians) according to the data that was available at that time.
As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features: Aryan invasion, Dravidian etc. Human migration appears to be much richer. There have been many migrations of humans groups both in and out of the Indian subcontinent going on for more than 50K years.
I did send my DNA swab a second time about 5-6 years later, this time to look at my maternal line (mitochondrial dna). The report had changed quite a bit possibly because the project had gathered more data in the intervening years. .
I've stopped looking into this further - I really don't care about my ancestors or genetics. More interested in humans as a whole - and for that we need more data.
Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from geography, and the simplistic categorization of humans into ~5 races corresponds well to clusters on a genetic map. See:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...
For a longer examination, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-c...
You're probably referring to the "greater variation within than between races" argument. But it's only true when looking at single genes, not collections of genes - that is how genetic tests can accurately determine race. And most traits are polygenic, so it does not even make sense to compare using only individual genes.
That's the reason Asian couples don't spontaneously give birth to European-looking children, and vice versa. And genes not expressed in superficial appearance were exposed to selection pressure just as much.
Whenever you see a theory so obviously contradict the evidence of your eyes, you should be at least skeptical of it (though not dismissive - e.g. quantum mechanics are true, however counterintuitive)
And that's not even getting into how you're giving off creepy eugenicist vibes.
Regardless the genetic distance between any two people remains tiny compared to the distance between even closely related species or sub-species elsewhere.
I don't think PCA plots really tell us much beyond there being distinct genetic clusters? One could do a PCA only on people with european ancestry, or people living in a small town, and there would be plenty of interesting structure to look at.
"One could do a PCA only on people with european ancestry, or people living in a small town"
No, there aren't. That's not a thing.
It's not even that modern. A human shares over 98% of the DNA of a pig, and about 50% of the DNA of a tree. Anything much closer to us than a tree has "more similarity than difference" to humans on a genetic level.
https://thednatests.com/how-much-dna-do-humans-share-with-ot...
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." - Orwell
I'm surprised that anyone would really think otherwise. There is so much obvious similarity between people in different countries (well, the old countries, I mean, such as in Europe and Asia) that sometimes I wonder if each country has a relatively recent common ancestor.
Usually they disprove a much stronger, extreme claim (e.g. some sort of racial purity, or the idea of entirely discontinuous, clearly-delimited races), then imply this means peoples are entirely interchangeable, and that the weaker, obviously-true claim of closer kinship within countries/regions is somehow false and/or meaningless.
These charts don't show what you apparently think they do. The samples in the larger datasets (like the HGDP) are chosen for their differentiation, often from indigenous groups, with admixture samples usually removed (the first adds in a few admixture types for the specifics of their study).
The first chart shows a direct counterexample with "African American", "Mexican American" and "North America" groups more separated from each other than from other groups and yet many of them live in the same country. These are also not the only groups of people you'd find in North America, they're just the ones used in the study of Northwestern american indigenous groups that this is screenshotted from. This is, again, poor evidence for your claim.
But your first graph shows all of their African samples clustered relatively tightly together.
A better graph would be a "pairwise interracial-fucking distance" with the y axis the percentage of healthy babies born. That would be just one cluster.
Are you familiar with principal component analysis? That’s what was used to generate the very clearly clustered charts that you linked to. It’s useful for analysis because it exaggerates the density and distinctness of clusters based on major features. But what that means is precisely that those clusters are not real! You’re mistaking a visual/analytical aid for raw data. A bit like looking at a false-color diagram of the human body and concluding based on it that blood is blue.
It does the opposite - the PCA graph shown is 2D, meaning points in the N-dimensional space are projected onto a single plane. In this projection, information is lost - i.e. point-clouds that are distinct in 3D may overlap in 2D. While we are shown the axes along which the data is most distinct, the true clusters are even more distinct, as every added dimension would contribute additional 'distinctness'.
(No, of course they shouldn’t. It’s just that extracting features to artificially cluster points along the most characteristic axes is what PCA is for.)
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...
I believe I described PCA accurately, so could you elaborate which part of my statement is wrong?
> extracting features to artificially cluster points along the most characteristic axes is what PCA is for
How is the clustering "artificial"? Because if you generate data without clusters (e.g. points evenly distributed within a sphere), applying PCA to it won't show clusters either.
Here's the same image in black and white: https://i.imgur.com/x2QzHgB.png. Do you see five clear clusters? I only found four: https://imgur.com/AFj2GWG.png.
Perhaps more dimensions would reveal five or so clear clusters that correspond exactly to the races listed in the US census, but I suspect what it would actually reveal is that population genetics is really complicated and has lots of counter-intuitive cases that defy most people's naive expectations.
I won't go into too much detail here to avoid doxing myself, but I've had a few decent discussions about some of my and my friends' ancestors/likely ancestors as historical figures.
Depending on who you're (un)fortunate enough to be descended from, you might find yourself viewing certain historical events in a different light.
Now as an adult it's perhaps less interesting, but I still know significantly more random trivia about historical figures I'm distantly related to compared to others.
"Cool"
It's funny you should mention this, as I saw the documentary and I seem to remember some North American indigenous tribes refusing to participate. Their reasoning was the Nat Geo was just trying to prove they were immigrants like everyone else.
It's primarily because many American tribes try to maintain religious beliefs in conflict with an immigrant identity. Although, evidence points to most of the earliest American humans immigrating across the Bering Land Bridge ~20,000 years ago. The religious stories tribes tell depict that they came from American caves, soil, water sources or other nature-related points of origin.
It's religious-based denialism, no different than what other major religions do when their beliefs conflict with reality.
Except it's no longer 1610.
The details are fascinating a nuanced, highly recommend this book if you would like to pursue this rabbit hole.
The book from Svante Pääbo [3] is equally fascinating which goes into the details of how DNA sequencing works to determine ancient ancestry. In a way it takes off from where the Y-chromosome study ends.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/paabo/facts/
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-and-...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19243883-neanderthal-man
The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived.
There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did appreciate Dr Yuval Noah Harari's summary of the phenomenon in his book Sapiens.)
If it turns out that the original population was partly / mostly replaced (linguistically, culturally, genetically) relatively recently, that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning.
As I say, it's a shame, as the migration (including ethno & linguistic) paths over the past ~100k years are just amazing.
Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.
I mean, I get it. People are mean. People are unreasonable. Lots of good discussion can't happen because people are mean and unreasonable. But you're not making things better by assuming bad faith and throwing shade at everyone else preemptively. That's just being mean and unreasonable.
Were you just pretending not to understand?
Even more so, in this case, considering my country's historical "handling" of ATSI culture, and the mobs in general.
The (only recently created) legal privileges of native title are severely limited and can be effortlessly extinguished. These limited privileges are based on (belated) recognition of prior occupation, but irrespective of how long people were here before colonisation.
on the other side of the ledger, significant legal harms are imposed on predominantly Indigenous regions, including apartheid-style laws that are applied on the basis of race, and lower standards of basic services provided through dedicated streams again predicated on race.
the sustained deficit of public housing? the lack of safe drinking water? the big blue signs slandering entire communities as drunken perverts? the mass sackings to force people onto quarantined welfare? the draconian star-chamber powers granted to the ACC? the systemic theft of hard-won social infrastructure?
because all of these 'advantages' are granted to anyone living in predominantly Indigenous postcodes of the NT, regardless of how long you dare to admit their ancestors were here.
No, they do not all do this, and I'd caution you on speaking for a people that aren't a monolith within their mobs in the first place.
(Long time no see)
In Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), judgments of the High Court inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law.
The High Court recognised the fact that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs.
I mean, if we are going to make these kinds of broad generalizations and comparisons, could we at least change “Native Americans” to “Christian fundamentalists”.
It’s not any less true.
if locals abandoned their knowledge and accepted the 40,000ya story told when I was a kid, they'd be out by just as much given the 80,000ya now indicated by artefacts at M2, Madjedbebe; the oldest site of continual human habitation.
Could you please be slightly more specific about what you're contesting?
The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived
Is absolutely what a lot of, if not the majority of people, believe.
Anyway, I looked up the author's name as I didn't trust my memory.
Does this affect your interest in the book?
Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.
Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations? I don't know, TFA doesn't hint, and I suspect we don't have an abundance of natural experiments to compare with.
I am not sure either. However, we do have a lot of natural experiments (and lab experiments) to explore this.
The 11% number comes from a clustering analysis. The user supplies k = number of ancestry groups, and the algorithm estimates proportion of genetics specific to each of k ancestry groups. So basically fancy k-means clustering. I don't know how robust it is and I would suspect a biased estimate.
As for over time... also complex. But I would imagine the best models would use exponetial distributions or similar as their basis (i.e. initially fast decrease in percentage followed by a slower rate of loss until equilibrium is reached).
Isn't the fascinating question "How did they arrive" ?
My understanding is that timeline vastly pre-dates any kind of ship to make that voyage.
[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/profile-o...
https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/212/5/lessons-learned-ge...
While there is considerable genetic diversity between Aboriginals as a whole, the diversity of individual communities is often quite low, and in response many communities evolved elaborate kinship systems to avoid too much intermarriage.
Agreed, and for no good reason too. All these notions of "purity of the blood" and that nonsense are shown up to be completely false when studied. We all collectively share lots of genetic code from many diverse ancestors, so I don't see why folks get all worked up about it.
This theory went down the drain when Europeans discovered Aboriginal shields (i.e. very fast). Spears and clubs are useful for hunting, shields only help against homo sapiens. They were fighting over resources just like anybody else, and their everyday lives were violent as hell, evidenced by parry fractures and skull cracks on fossil bones.
Also "living in harmony with the land" means watching your children starve to death after a dry spring.
I thought it was generally accepted that IVC was an outside people too, from modern middle east, who emigrated less than 10,000 years ago (But much prior to Indo-European migrations).
> That potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning.
It should not. Most of the today's Indian culture formed in India despite some PIE roots.
It is a "must watch" for everybody who really wants to understand Genetics/Migration.
Have you got a source for that?
Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.
I also understand that the native languages are mostly spoken and not written, are these Indian languages written?
I wasn't aware of this Australian language family example, but it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/03/mind-the-gap... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-island-hopping-route-people-au...
The same set of languages definitely will not have survived for 60,000 years. Tribes come and go, merge and split. Outside influences bring in new words and grammatical structures. Oral tradition is a low fidelity carrier of language and culture, and easily accommodates change in language.
Nonsense.
>An expansion [ of the family from the Gulf of Carpentaria] at this time is consistent with evidence from early genetic studies for gene flow into Australia from India ~4–5 ka21, but more recent work has called these findings into question
It doesn't talk about Indian languages specifically. The Gulf of Carpentaria is on the Australian side of the gulf between Australia and Indonesia.
I was with you up until this point. Do you have a source for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pama%E2%80%93Nyungan_languages
Same question: Are you saying they are based off of a Dravidian language?
I'm assuming you're referring to the Pama-Nyungan family, which predates the dingo by nearly 2000 years?
I can't find any documentation of the Indian language families connection, do you have any?
This reminds me of the Tamil nationalists who, like some Serbs, like to claim that their language is the ur-language.
There is disputed circumstantial evidence for other waves of migration. For example the Bradshaw paintings have long been thought to be the work of newer peoples (maybe from papua). Some people dispute this and say it discounts the abilities of the natives there, and that may be true, there could be just one group always there who did them and then stopped. But the art bears little resemblance to earlier art there or in other regions of australia, which is often little more than handprints or slightly cartoonish looking things. The bradshaws are quite different and it at least makes sense to ask if there wasnt some new wave of peoples with unique tools and art style. Or otherwise some kind of "golden era" where there was more population and other interesting things happened. Something to look for in future. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings)
"Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants <may?> also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo."
The pama-nyungan proto-language has been estimated to be around 5,000 years old, roughly. There are sources for this claim in the wikipedia article, and also for the claim that 306/~400 aborginal languages are in this family. The "out of india" theory is more disputed than I thought (corrected this elsewhere), but is a proposed theory. There are several theories here, but the paper argues for basically what Ive said elsewhere: https://langev.com/pdf/442ac40068c1d8a67a561d0d7f0fcd95c429c...
I talked about the bradshaw paintings somewhere else, the wikipedia article on these has good sources i also have some papers somewhere. Notnsure what else you want to get started.
No one really knows until we sequence way more people and more bones.
This is wrong. No known relationships exist between any Australian Aboriginal language and any language from India. For much of far northern Australia, no known relationships exist between even neighbouring languages! (The non Pama-Nyungan languages, to be specific.)
"Thus, the f4 statistics indicate a signal of gene flow from India to Australia and, furthermore, that the source population is more closely related to present-day Dravidian-speaking Indian groups than to Onge."
They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.
The best bow woods are all at the top of this list, along with a few that should be good in theory but aren't used likely for other reasons (i.e. the plant just doesn't produce the kind of limbs you need to make a bow). The best Australian woods are fairly ordinary by comparison. On average they're hopeless. This isn't to say you can't do it (people do with spotted gum, which isn't a good bow wood), just that there are better ways of going about it if you want to hunt.
I'd be surprised if northern Australians at least didn't know about the bow, because there was frequent contact with Indonesia and people from PNG, all of whom practiced archery. There are oral traditions in places like Arnhem land testifying to this contact going back generations.
https://fremantlestuff.info/streets/blocks.html#:~:text=Aust....
I did find this which appears to rank them: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ but I don't know which if any of those are Australian.
Australian river red gum is theoretically decent, and I know that people have made serviceable bows from it. I think merbau backed with bamboo is about as good as it gets for Aussies, and merbau is an import.
I was watching a video the other day about samurai bows which are made of laminated bamboo.
Quite comparable to the English longbow as those things go.
It's tempting to chalk it down to some kind of strong cultural taboo, e.g. to keep the wars at a "manageable" level of destruction. But then why did Maori eagerly adopt firearms once they got access to them, and used them in warfare between themselves?
Although traditionally thought of as Australian, boomerangs have been found also in ancient Europe, Egypt, and North America. There is evidence of the use of non-returning boomerangs by the Native Americans of California and Arizona, and inhabitants of South India for killing birds and rabbits.But I sure would like to have a near miss not being followed by a search for the weapon.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/a-three-hour-tour/
>Here’s a scenario. A ship from some Indian civilization about 4000 years ago [maybe Indus] loses its way and ends up crashing on the shore of Arnhem Land. Like most ships, its crew is all male. They survive the landing, and end up warring with a local tribe. Eventually, they kill off most of the men and annex the sobbing women. The new tribe has 5x higher carrying capacity, essentially due to better technology, and they’re militarily superior as well – better weapons and tactics. They expand and expand, picking up more and more old Australian genes as they do so. Not as an empire – they’re too simple for that – but the tribes that descend from them keep winning. They speak the ancestor of the Macro-Pama-Nyungan languages, which originates as a mix between their old-Dravidian language (from the men) and some local Australian tongue (from the women).
>One funny thing about this scenario: the sailors lose almost all of their civilization, and probably thought they were descending into savagery. On the other hand, the locals probably thought of the castaways as incredibly advanced, magicians or gods. They were both right.
“Let assume that this new analysis is correct.”
Yeah okay mate. I wouldn’t say that “this is a known fact”
Saying that one boat accidentally crashed and took over Australia culturally is technically possible but completely without evidence, “11%” or not.
Four thousand years ago pre-dates the Bronze Age in southern India by quite a bit, so not really that advanced.
Listening to them will reveal similarities to Indian languages.
The genetic evidence of multiple waves of migration from India, through south-east Asia, to Australia has been available for many years.
These things have all be ignored or denied by the government, media, and lobby groups for years. Because facts do not support the narrative.