Austroasiatic peoples of India: the autosomal DNA

An interesting paper published online in October 2010 (official publication date is however 2011) but that I had not visualized to date is:

G. Chaubey et al., Population Genetic Structure in Indian Austroasiatic Speakers: The Role of Landscape Barriers and Sex-Specific Admixture. Molecular Biology and Evolution 2011. Open access. 

My head is still dizzy from the pains of quitting up heavy smoking without any help whatsoev (and without the real conviction of it being worth the effort, just bored of going through an unhelpful and demanding bureaucracy of self-righteous institutionalized robbers and drug dealers to get my dose), so I won't extend much upon this one. 

Most importantly it comes up clear that Indian Austroasiatics are, in spite of often obvious East Asian male-mediated ancestry, mostly South Asian by overall ancestry:

Fig. 3 - PCA and K=7 analysis

In the structure analysis, we see that the main component (black) of Indian Austroasiatic speakers is shared with Dravidian populations of South India (but not Brahuis, who are typical Pakistanis in spite of speaking a Dravidian language). This component is also shared at lower frequencies by South and SE Asian populations. 

This is also apparent in the PC graph, where Indian Tibeto-Burman peoples cluster with East Asian ones but not Austroasiatic Indians, in spite of some lesser tendency in that direction.

In an aside, it is also notable to mention that the North Indian component (green) is clearly different from those in West Eurasia, even if there is a lesser presence of this South Asian component. This rather goes against those who claim that North Indian/Pakistani specificity is of West Eurasian origin: if anything some West Eurasian element would need to be explained as originating from South Asia. The only WEA population lacking it are, as usual, Basques, indicating it is at least a marker from outside Europe and, in Europe, surely marks Neolithic or Metal Ages (Indoeuropean) arrivals.

Back to Austroasiatics, it is worth quoting this:

The mtDNA haplogroup allocation of Munda speakers is similar to Dravidian and Indo-Europeans of the Indian subcontinent (Basu et al. 2003; Metspalu et al. 2004; Chaubey et al. 2007; Chaubey, Metspalu, et al. 2008; Chaubey, Karmin, et al. 2008; Thangaraj et al. 2009). We carried out a high-resolution analysis of those haplogroups of Munda speakers, which account for >4% of their maternal gene pool. All the seven maternal haplogroups found frequently in Munda speakers are autochthonous to India (supplementary fig. S5, Supplementary Material online) (Chandrasekar et al. 2009) and references therein, accounting altogether for 57% of the maternal gene pool of present Munda speakers. The extensive analysis of these haplogroups revealed relatively recent sharing of most recent common ancestors within these groups between AA and non-AA speakers (MRCA), suggestive of admixture; a similar result was observed recently for hg R7, which is the most frequent among these in AA speakers (Chaubey, Karmin, et al. 2008). The mtDNA lineages of Munda speakers do not cluster in basal parts of the tree (to founder haplogroups M, N, or R) but are spread among the derived branches that date to <10KYA (Supplementary fig. S5, Supplementary Material online) suggests that the mtDNA diversity found in contemporary Munda speakers is the result of admixture from neighboring populations of India.

In sharp contrast, among the geographically proximate Khasi-Aslian–speaking Khasi population, approximately one-third of the mtDNA lineages have southeast Asian ancestry (Fig. 2 and table 2).

Having these distinctions present is important to understanding what in these peoples related to SE Asia, is autochthonous from South Asia or recent (Neolithic) immigrant from SE Asia.