Ancient genetic imprint unites the tribes of India

New Scientist ^ | September 11, 2008 | Anil Ananthaswamy

[SunkenCiv]

The first humans to arrive on the Indian subcontinent from Africa about 65,000 years ago left a genetic imprint that can still be found in the tribes of India...

"Whether the original inhabitants of India were replaced by more modern immigrants or contributed to the contemporary gene pool has been debated," says Michael Bamshad of the University of Washington in Seattle, who has studied the genetic diversity of India.

One way researchers have used to figure this out is to use linguistic groups.

The tribes speaking Indo-European languages, for instance, are known to be descendants of the people who migrated into India relatively recently from Central Asia and the Caucasus. It was also thought that the Austro-Asiatic speakers were direct descendants of the original settlers.

To determine which groups can trace their ancestry to the founding population of India, Vadlamudi Raghavendra Rao of the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata and his colleagues analysed 2768 samples of mitochondrial DNA taken from 24 tribes all over India...

The new study shows that both the Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic language groups share these same genetic markers.

Rao agrees. "Biologically, there are no castes and tribes, there are only communities," he says.

[Verginius Rufus]

I believe that Sumerian was an agglutinative language. So far as I know no one has established a relationship between Sumerian and any other known language (of course it may have had relatives that went extinct without ever being recorded in writing).

Some people think that Elamite may have been related to the Dravidian languages, but as far as I know that hasn't been proven.

[Verginius Rufus]

Perhaps the Munda-speakers ancestors were there first, and the Dravidian-speakers’ ancestors had Dravidian imposed on them by a small number of conquerors. Compare how Spanish became the first language of large parts of Latin America where the people are mostly descended from the pre-1492 population, or how Haitians speak a French creole despite being almost entirely of African ancestry—DNA testing would no doubt show much closer affinities to people speaking unrelated languages in West Africa than to people in France.

[colorado tanker]

Yes, LOL! Fossilized excrement seem a good description for some of the stuff being sold this election cycle. :-))

[colorado tanker]

Good point. That may well be what happened.

[SunkenCiv]

That does ring a bell — seems like some folks have thought they discern agglutinative structure in the very fragmentary surviving Elamite inscriptions. And you’re right, Sumerian was agglutinative. The Sumerians (who called themselves “the black headed people”, if memory serves) gave us cuneiform (possibly as a consequence of the agglutinative nature of their language) which really caught on as a medium for international relations in ancient times, peaking long centuries after the Sumerian and the Sumerians had vanished. There are no known relatives, living or dead, although it one looks around, there are some fringe thinkers who claim otherwise. :’)

[Verginius Rufus]

Elamite is one of the three languages of the Behistun inscription which gives Darius' version of how he became king--that's a fairly substantial text. I don't know how many other Elamite texts are of some length.

Elamite speakers are mentioned in Acts 2:9, and a king of Elam figures in Genesis 14, but neither passage says anything about the structure of the language. Missed opportunities!