The genetic origins of the Indus Valley Civilization

Angela

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The actual paper is expected momentarily.

Meanwhile, this is an article on it:
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/10.1038/nindia.2019.121

"[FONT=&quot]Ancient human remains found in various sites of Indus Valley hardly yield intact DNA. The hot and humid conditions in these regions destroy any trace of DNA. To overcome this, Reich and post-doctoral scientist Vagheesh Narasimhan at Harvard, teamed up with Vasant Shinde from the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune and Niraj Rai from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow. They painstakingly screened 61 skeletal samples excavated from graves in Rakhigarhi and were eventually able to detect a very small amount of DNA in a single sample from a woman’s remains.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]After more than hundred attempts, they were able to sequence the DNA. Comparing this DNA with those of 11 individuals from two sites in Turkmenistan and Iran, the researchers prepared a genetic profile of the Rakhigarhi woman.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The profile, they say, has signs of Iranian-related ancestry but no evidence of pastoralists who lived in the grasslands of Asia and Europe. “We say ‘Iranian-related’ because we don’t know where they lived,” Reich says. They could have lived in the Iranian plateau, but the team’s data point to them having lived in South Asia for many thousands of years before the Indus Valley Civilisation, he adds."

"Ancient DNA studies have shown that the hunter-gatherers in western Anatolia, a region in modern-day Turkey, adopted agriculture from their neighbours in the east. They then spread agriculture as they moved into Europe.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]“Something similar might have happened in the vicinity of South Asia, where a hunter-gatherer population could have copied farming innovations from their eastern neighbors, and then spread them further through movement of people,” Reich points out."

The bolded part is an exaggeration if not absolutely false. I would be stunned if Reich said that.


[/FONT]
 
I guess if they adopted it from other people it might be these guys?

92EVL09.png


Is it necessarily a given that because certain ancestry was already present more wasn't brought by these Iranian like farmers?

Honestly, the Iranian farmers are turning up everywhere. :)
 
The bolded part is an exaggeration if not absolutely false. I would be stunned if Reich said that.
Probably a reference to the finding of high genetic continuity between AHG and early Anatolian Farmers in a relatively recent study. Plus, the beginning of Neolithic transition in Anatolia (AAF period) would have been associated to a minor gene flow from the East.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09209-7

This supposedly explains the bolded part.
 
Hot off the presses:
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5

"[h=2]Highlights[/h]
  • The individual was from a population that is the largest source of ancestry for South Asians
  • Iranian-related ancestry in South Asia split from Iranian plateau lineages >12,000 years ago
  • First farmers of the Fertile Crescent contributed little to no ancestry to later South Asians

[h=2]Summary[/h]We report an ancient genome from the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). The individual we sequenced fits as a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians (the largest component) and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers, a unique profile that matches ancient DNA from 11 genetic outliers from sites in Iran and Turkmenistan in cultural communication with the IVC. These individuals had little if any Steppe pastoralist-derived ancestry, showing that it was not ubiquitous in northwest South Asia during the IVC as it is today. The Iranian-related ancestry in the IVC derives from a lineage leading to early Iranian farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers before their ancestors separated, contradicting the hypothesis that the shared ancestry between early Iranians and South Asians reflects a large-scale spread of western Iranian farmers east. Instead, sampled ancient genomes from the Iranian plateau and IVC descend from different groups of hunter-gatherers who began farming without being connected by substantial movement of people.

[h=2]Graphical Abstract[/h]
fx1.jpg
 
"The only fitting two-way models were mixtures of a group related to herders from the western Zagros mountains of Iran and also to either Andamanese hunter-gatherers (73% ± 6% Iranian-related ancestry; p = 0.103 for overall model fit) or East Siberian hunter-gatherers (63% ± 6% Iranian-related ancestry; p = 0.24)"

we have already known that lake baikal pottery was found in Hotu cave.
 
gr3_lrg.jpg


it would be interesting to have DNA from 9 ka Mehrgarh
archeology suggests that Mehrgarh is one of the earliest contributers to the IVC
 
[FONT=&quot]"However, these conclusions should be viewed as tentative, warned Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, an archaeologist and expert on the Indus Valley Civilization at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the new research. Archaeological evidence suggests that Indus Valley cities were cosmopolitan places populated by people from many different regions, so one person's genetic makeup might not match the rest of the population. Furthermore, Kenoyer said, burial was a less common way of dealing with the dead than cremation. [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]"So whatever we do have from cemeteries is not representative of the ancient populations of the Indus cities, but only of one part of one community living in these cities," Kenoyer said."

https://www.livescience.com/south-asians-descend-from-harappan-civilization.html[/FONT]
 

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