Two years ago Reconstructing Indian Genetic History reframed how we should view South Asian historical genomics. In short, Indians can be viewed as a hybrid between a West Eurasian group, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and a very different group, “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), which had distant connections to West and East Eurasians. At least to a first approximation. Last fall I posted on a new paper which surveyed the Austro-Asiatic speaking peoples of India, and concluded that they were exogenous to the subcontinent. This is an interesting point. Prehistoric treatments of South Asia often use linguistic terms to denote putative ancient populations. One model is that first it was the Munda, the most ancient Austro-Asiatics. Then the Dravidians. And finally the Indo-Aryans. These genetic data imply that the Munda arrived after the initial ANI-ASI synthesis. The Munda people of India can be thought of as ANI-ASI, with an overlay of East Eurasian ancestry.

Zack Ajmal’s K = 11 ADMIXTURE run has highlighted some further issues. He has a set of Austro-Asiatic samples, as well as a host of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speaking populations. I now believe we can now further clarify and refine our model of the peopling ...