Researchers have long speculated on the possibility of Dravidian speakers migrating through Iran to India. This view is supported by the presence of Indian haplogroups in Iran (Gonzalez et al. 2007), and the close relationship between the Dravidian and Elamite languages (McAlpin 1974, 1981). Eleven of Iran’s M haplogroups are found in India. In Iran hg M is found predominately in the Sussa region. Around 5% of Iranians carry the M haplogroup.
The most frequent Indian haplogoup in Iran is M3 (Metspula et al. 2004). Even though most molecular anthropologists believe the Dravidians originated in situ in India. The spread of common archaeological assemblages associated with the C-Group, genetically related languages and genes from Africa across Arabia and Iran into India support a recent expansion of Dravidian speaking people from Africa to India.
The archaeological and molecular evidence provides footprints of a recent hg M ancestral migration from Nubia to India. The existence of the L3a-M motif in the Senegambia characterized by the DdeI site np 10394 and AluI site np 10397 in haplotype AF24; the presence of the nucleotides characteristic of the Indian macrohaplogroup M in Africa and Arabia; and the reality that M1 does not descend from an Asian M macrohaplogroup (Sun et al. 2005) make a ‘back migration’ of M1 to Africa highly unlikely.
The presence of Indian M sequences in Africa, Arabia, Iran and Yemen (Gonzalez et al.. 2006) in conjunction with the linguistic (Aravanan 1976, 1979; Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya 1976, 1979), archaeological (Lal 1963; Lahovary 1963; Rao 1972) and anthropological (Nayar 1977; Sergent 1995; Sastri 1966) evidences suggest that the Dravidian speakers formerly lived in Nubia and migrated to India over 5000 years ago and the Indian M macrohaplogroups do not have an in situ origin.