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The Hindu
13-07-2025
- Science
- The Hindu
The peopling of the Indian subcontinent
How and from where did we, the people of India, come from? Based on genetic analysis of 25 diverse groups in India, a paper in 2009 titled 'Reconstructing Indian Population History', jointly authored by David Reich and colleagues from Harvard and MIT in the US and K. Thangaraj and Lalji Singh from CCMB Hyderabad, provided strong evidence for two ancient genetically divergent populations, which are ancestral to most Indians. I recommend the reader download the paper and see Figure 1 (shown above) and read Table 1 of the paper. How divergent are we? One group called 'Ancestral North Indians' (ANI) is genetically close to people from West Asia, Central Asia, and Europe. A higher proportion of ANI ancestry is predominantly found in the people in the northern states of India. The other, 'Ancestral South Indians (ASI)', is distinctly different from ANI and is of East Eurasian origin. In a more detailed analysis, they analysed ancient genome-wide data from over 500 individuals from Central Asia and Northern South Asia, and concluded that ASIs are direct descendants who live in tribal groups in South India. All these migrations by the ANIs and ASIs seem to have come about over 3,000-4,000 years ago. There is thus an admixture of North Indian and South Indian (also called Dravidian) people across the country. Groups with ANI ancestry ranging from 39-71% are seen in traditional (so-called) upper caste people across the country. But people with distinct ASI ancestry are seen in some South Indian states. However, the true ASIs, also named AASI, are the Adivasis of the Andaman-Nicobar Islands, who had migrated from the East Asian-Pacific regions over 60,000 years ago, and don't mix socially or genetically with Indian mainlanders. A recent paper in Cell pointed out that all people of Indian descent have their roots in a single, large migration that happened when humans travelled out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. Note the term 'upper caste' mentioned above in the Harvard-CCMB papers. When did the 'caste system' arise? It has been discriminatory for over 2,000 years among the Hindus. In its four-tier system, way at the bottom are the Adivasis. Inter-caste marriages are seldom practised, and if they are, they can lead to violence. Ethnicity and haplotypes A 2003 paper from Prof. P.P. Majumder's group looked at ethnicity using what are called 'haplogroups', which are genetic markers of common parentage (paternal or maternal) shared within a social group. The paper pointed out that haplogroup details of various populations across India provide insights into the caste system of India, with certain ancestral components being highest in tribes, somewhat less in lower castes, and least in upper castes. This system of ethnicity is slowly changing with time, particularly in educated classes, with democracy and modernisation of the country. As people began going to schools and colleges, learning more languages and moving beyond their native places for jobs and other opportunities, inter-caste and inter-regional marriages have begun rising. According to the 2011 Census, inter-caste marriages were about 6% and inter-faith ones about 1%. It is likely these numbers will have risen significantly, particularly among urban groups, when the forthcoming 2027 Census offers the numbers. The author is grateful to Dr Thangaraj for his advice and critique of the manuscript.
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
First Human Genome from Ancient Egypt Sequenced from 4,800-Year-Old Teeth
Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt. The remains are 4,800 to 4,500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as of people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature. 'It's incredibly exciting and important,' says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. 'We always hoped we would get our first ancient DNA from mummies.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Numerous labs have tried to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian remains. In 1985, evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo reported the first ancient DNA sequences from any human: several thousand DNA letters from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy of a child. But Pääbo, who won a Nobel prize in 2022 for other work, later realized that the sequences were contaminated with modern DNA — possibly his own. A 2017 study generated limited genome data from three Egyptian mummies that lived between 3,600 and 2,000 years ago. The hot North African climate speeds up the breakdown of DNA, and the mummification process might also accelerate it, said Pontus Skoglund, a palaeogeneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who co-led the Nature study, at a press briefing. 'Mummified individuals are probably not a great way to preserve DNA.' The remains that Skoglund's team sequenced pre-date widespread mummification: the person was interred instead in a ceramic pot, a sign of high, but not elite, status. The remains were found at an archaeological site called Nuwayrat, 265 kilometres south of Cairo along the Nile river. The teeth and bones were discovered in 1902, when Egypt was under British colonial rule. They were donated to institutions in Liverpool, UK, where they have been ever since, even surviving German bombing during the Second World War. Skoglund says his expectations were low when his team extracted DNA from several teeth from the Nuwayrat individual. But two samples contained enough authentic ancient DNA to generate a full genome sequence. Y-chromosome sequences indicated that the remains belonged to a male. The majority of his DNA resembled that of early farmers from the Neolithic period of North Africa around 6,000 years ago. The rest most closely matched people in Mesopotamia, a historical Middle Eastern region that was home to the ancient Sumerian civilization, and was where some of the first writing systems emerged. It's not clear whether this implies a genetic direct link between members of Mesopotamian cultures and people in ancient Egypt — also hinted at by similarities in some cultural artefacts — or whether the man's Mesopotamian ancestry arrived through other unsampled populations, the researchers say. The rest of the ancient Egyptian man's bones revealed more details about his life. Evidence of arthritis and osteoporosis suggest he died at an advanced age for the time, possibly in his sixties. Other signs of wear indicate a life of physical toil, sitting hunched over on hard surfaces. On the basis of this and imagery from other tombs from this period, he might have been a potter, said co-author Joel Irish, a bioarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University, at the press briefing. 'The publication of a whole-genome data set of an ancient Egyptian constitutes a significant achievement in the field of molecular Egyptology,' says Yehia Gad, a geneticist at Egypt's National Research Centre in Cairo, who praises the researchers for presenting the provenance of the remains clearly. But he points out that the genome is from one individual and might not fully represent ancient Egypt's gene pool, which was probably a melting pot of different ancestries. For this reason, researchers are eager for more ancient Egyptian genome data — perhaps even from a mummy. Advances in ancient-genomics technology and local capacity — Gad supervises an ancient DNA lab at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo — means it hopefully won't take another 40 years. This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 2, 2025.
Scientific American
03-07-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
4,800-Year-Old Teeth Yield First Human Genome from Ancient Egypt
Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt. The remains are 4,800 to 4,500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as of people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature. 'It's incredibly exciting and important,' says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. 'We always hoped we would get our first ancient DNA from mummies.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Numerous labs have tried to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian remains. In 1985, evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo reported the first ancient DNA sequences from any human: several thousand DNA letters from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy of a child. But Pääbo, who won a Nobel prize in 2022 for other work, later realized that the sequences were contaminated with modern DNA — possibly his own. A 2017 study generated limited genome data from three Egyptian mummies that lived between 3,600 and 2,000 years ago. The hot North African climate speeds up the breakdown of DNA, and the mummification process might also accelerate it, said Pontus Skoglund, a palaeogeneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who co-led the Nature study, at a press briefing. 'Mummified individuals are probably not a great way to preserve DNA.' The remains that Skoglund's team sequenced pre-date widespread mummification: the person was interred instead in a ceramic pot, a sign of high, but not elite, status. The remains were found at an archaeological site called Nuwayrat, 265 kilometres south of Cairo along the Nile river. The teeth and bones were discovered in 1902, when Egypt was under British colonial rule. They were donated to institutions in Liverpool, UK, where they have been ever since, even surviving German bombing during the Second World War. Low expectations Skoglund says his expectations were low when his team extracted DNA from several teeth from the Nuwayrat individual. But two samples contained enough authentic ancient DNA to generate a full genome sequence. Y-chromosome sequences indicated that the remains belonged to a male. The majority of his DNA resembled that of early farmers from the Neolithic period of North Africa around 6,000 years ago. The rest most closely matched people in Mesopotamia, a historical Middle Eastern region that was home to the ancient Sumerian civilization, and was where some of the first writing systems emerged. It's not clear whether this implies a genetic direct link between members of Mesopotamian cultures and people in ancient Egypt — also hinted at by similarities in some cultural artefacts — or whether the man's Mesopotamian ancestry arrived through other unsampled populations, the researchers say. The rest of the ancient Egyptian man's bones revealed more details about his life. Evidence of arthritis and osteoporosis suggest he died at an advanced age for the time, possibly in his sixties. Other signs of wear indicate a life of physical toil, sitting hunched over on hard surfaces. On the basis of this and imagery from other tombs from this period, he might have been a potter, said co-author Joel Irish, a bioarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University, at the press briefing. 'The publication of a whole-genome data set of an ancient Egyptian constitutes a significant achievement in the field of molecular Egyptology,' says Yehia Gad, a geneticist at Egypt's National Research Centre in Cairo, who praises the researchers for presenting the provenance of the remains clearly. But he points out that the genome is from one individual and might not fully represent ancient Egypt's gene pool, which was probably a melting pot of different ancestries. For this reason, researchers are eager for more ancient Egyptian genome data — perhaps even from a mummy. Advances in ancient-genomics technology and local capacity — Gad supervises an ancient DNA lab at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo — means it hopefully won't take another 40 years.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries
Thanks to the creative application of new technologies, the 2020s are quietly shaping up to be a golden age of archaeology. In 2023, then-21-year-old Luke Farritor (now with the Department of Government Efficiency) combined machine‑learning pattern recognition with high‑resolution CT scans to decipher the first word from the Herculaneum scrolls—a Roman library charred by Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Fully decrypting the library could ultimately double the surviving corpus of Ancient Greek and Roman literature—an unprecedented bonanza for classical scholarship. Analysis of ancient DNA has resolved long-debated questions about human migrations. After sequencing hundreds of Bronze Age human genomes, David Reich's research team at Harvard positively identified southwest Russia as the geographical origin of the Indo-European languages, while other genomic work has dated Homo sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding to 47,000 years ago, several millennia prior to earlier best guesses. Fossilized human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, have been conclusively dated to about 23,000 years ago—proof that people were in North America during the last Ice Age and forcing scholars to rethink when and how humans first crossed into the New World. Lidar has recently revealed massive ancient cities under jungle canopies, from the Mayan platform of Aguada Fénix in Mexico—larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza—to mysterious urban centers in the ancient Amazon. These developments—whether driven by artificial intelligence, the decryption of ancient genomics, or airborne lasers—promise to momentously expand society's understanding of humanity's past. Notably absent from this bounty, however, are the fruits of traditional, physical, Indiana Jones-style archaeology. The world of bits, as has often been the case these days, is leaving the world of atoms in the dust. While the storied bits over atoms problem is a complicated one, legal mechanisms are straightforwardly to blame for throttling archeological discovery. The case of Italian antiquities policy is paradigmatic. Since the 1930s, Italy—along with Greece, Turkey, and Egypt—has vested ownership of all antiquities in the state. Commerce in freshly unearthed artifacts is outlawed, and unauthorized excavation is punishable by hefty fines and sometimes prison time. Even using a metal detector requires a permit. Edward Luttwak, a historian and author of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, explains that in Italy, "if you find something, you report it to the authorities. The authorities take it, goodbye. Most often, what they take from you, they put in a depot, a basement, a warehouse, and it never even gets shown." This is the unfortunate lot of the fortunate discoverer of an Italian artifact. Report a Roman coin? It'll be confiscated. Find an Etruscan urn while planting olives? Your land will be turned into an archaeological site the government may never have time to excavate. It's unsurprising, then, that Italians frequently don't report their findings to the government. Many artifacts end up on the black market (in 2023, Italy's Carabinieri Art Squad seized nearly 70,000 illegally excavated artifacts), or are even simply destroyed or hidden away. Private hoarding is an especially pernicious problem: When "illegally excavated" (read: most) Italian artifacts are privately held in people's houses, they are lost both to scholarship and public view. "You could fill twice the museums that exist in Italy from what people have hidden in their houses," says Luttwak, "which they wouldn't hide if you could report [them] to the authorities like they do in England." The British model provides a striking contrast. Since the 1996 Treasure Act, British law has required that significant archaeological finds be reported. Instead of simply seizing them, if the state wishes to retain an item, it must compensate the finder and landowner at its full market value. To capture the far larger universe of objects that fall outside the law's narrow legal definition of "treasure," the state-sponsored Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) established a voluntary nationwide program through which average Britons can log any find, whether or not the state intends to acquire it, into an open scientific database. As of 2020, over 1 million objects have been logged in PAS. According to Michael Lewis, head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, over 90 percent of PAS-recorded items are found by metal detectorists on cultivated land, indicating how the scheme has turned what was once seen as a threat into a fountainhead of archaeological data. Thanks to these policies, Britain has been increasingly outpacing Italy in Roman archaeology despite its relatively modest classical history, as seen in this viral map of the provenance of hoards of Roman coins. Notice the sheer quantity of Roman coin discoveries reported in the U.K., far surpassing those in Italy. This disparity isn't explained by Roman Britain being richer than Roman Italy (quite the opposite), but by modern Britain recognizing and leveraging incentives to bring history out of occultation. The Great Stagnation of physical archaeology is a choice. The failure of policymakers to get the basics right—to make physical archaeology worth anyone's time—renders the richest landscapes fallow. Luttwak's attention is on one such landscape: the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers on the edge of Cosenza, Calabria. Contemporary accounts record that in 410 A.D. the Visigoth chieftain Alaric—fresh from sacking Rome—was buried beneath the temporarily diverted river along with the treasures of the Eternal City. "Alaric's treasure is located in the southern part of the city of Cosenza," says Luttwak. "It was documented by an eyewitness." Alaric took "gold and silver objects…statues, and all kinds of things—possibly even the Temple menorah….When Alaric died in Cosenza, he got as the king one third of the treasure [to be] buried with him." "It could be found," explains Luttwak, "with hovering metal detectors, because he was buried with his weapons, too." Alaric's hoard—and maybe Judaism's most iconic physical symbol—should be discoverable today with an aerial anomaly survey and some clever hydraulics. The technology is ready; the incentives are not. Change the rules, and the payoff could be extraordinary. The post The Dreadful Policies Halting Archeological Discoveries appeared first on
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Who's a Carthaginian? Genetic Study Revises Ancestry of Rome's Ancient Nemesis
The Phoenicians were a confederation of maritime traders who emerged from the chaos of the Levant about 3,100 years ago and developed the most extensive commercial network in antiquity. Despite their contributions — which included boatbuilding, navigation, town planning and, perhaps most significantly, an alphabet — no literature and few written records survived, beyond funerary inscriptions. The most powerful and prosperous of the Phoenicians' independent city-states was Carthage, founded around the ninth century B.C. in what is now Tunisia. The Carthaginians, also known as the Punic people, established an empire that eventually extended across northeastern Africa and into the south of modern-day Spain. Then came the rivalry with Rome and the three Punic Wars, which ended in 146 B.C. after a brutal siege as the Romans razed Carthage, destroyed its libraries and, tradition says, sowed its ground with salt. For more than 2,000 years, the general assumption was that the Carthaginians derived from the Levant, specifically Canaan, the source of their language and religion. But an eight-year study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests that, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., Levantine Phoenicians made only a negligible genetic contribution to Punic colonies. 'They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle,' said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard whose lab generated the data, 'but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.' An international research team analyzed the degraded DNA from the remains of 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza. The study concluded that the Phoenicians did not intermingle equally with all of the people they met. 'They had little DNA from Sardinians, Iberians or even North Africans,' Dr. Reich said. Only three of the 103 people whose bones were carbon-dated had substantial Levantine heritage, and those three — one from Sardinia, two from Sicily — may have been immigrants who arrived during the Roman period that followed the Third Punic War. Overwhelmingly, the main ancestry of the Phoenicians studied was Greek; these were most likely people whom the Phoenicians encountered and mixed with in Sicily, where Greek and Phoenician colonies existed side by side. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who collaborated on the paper, said the research showed that the restless mobility of seafaring Aegean men and women and their descendants powered the expansion not only of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians, too. Before 400 B.C., Phoenicians from the western Mediterranean who lived in North Africa had fairly simple genetic profiles: only individuals who died in North Africa had North African ancestry. After 400 B.C., traces of North African ancestry turn up in limited measure in the bones of Phoenicians unearthed in Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia. According to the authors, that may reflect the growing influence of Carthage. On the other hand, Dr. Reich said, contemporaneous Greek colonists did not integrate with the local peoples; DNA from Empuries in Spain or Himera in Sicily suggests that they kept to themselves. 'Staying culturally Greek in these places meant sticking to yourself, and not incorporating outsiders into your growing communities,' he said. In the foundational myth of Carthage that appears in Virgil's 'Aeneid,' the settlement was founded by the fugitive princess Dido, who acquired land from a local Berber ruler. Dexter Hoyos, the author of several books on Carthage and on its greatest general, Hannibal, said that nothing in the accounts of Greek and Roman historians indicated a steady post-settlement flow of migrants from the city-state's eastern Mediterranean homeland. Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. 'Certainly there's no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists' wives,' Dr. Hoyos said. From the start, he proposed, both male and female settlers found partners in the surrounding regions. 'We know of a few marriages between Carthaginian nobles — two of whom were Hannibal's sisters — with princes of the Numidian peoples to the west of Carthaginian-controlled territory,' he said. Besides aligning with existing theories, the new findings point to a demographic shift around the sixth century B.C., when Carthaginians adopted a new dialect (Punic) and the dominant form of burial changed from cremation to interment. 'The genetic data make it clear that these cultural changes accompanied a profound change in the population,' Dr. Reich said. A goal for future research, he added, should be to better understand the nature of that change, integrating the genetic, archaeological and historical evidence. The relatively small sample size of the new study makes generalization difficult, said Eve MacDonald, a historian at Cardiff University and author of the forthcoming 'Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire,' who was not involved with the project. 'But the paper shows us how we need to broaden our understanding of the ancient worlds beyond simplistic narratives of us and them, or Roman and Carthaginian,' she said. For Dr. MacDonald, the results prove that being Carthaginian was not a specific genetic marker and underscore the complexity of the city-state and its people. 'Today, we are so much more than just our genes, and identity cannot be reduced to a singularity,' she said. 'What made someone Carthaginian would have been many things, including a link to Carthage itself, its myths, stories, cultures and families.'
