Ahlawat Bhavna, Dewangan Hemlata, Pasupuleti Nagarjuna, Dwivedi Aparna, Rajpal Richa, Pandey Saurabh, Kumar Lomous, Thangaraj Kumarasamy, Rai Niraj
Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, 226007, India.
Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 160014, India.
Heliyon. 2024 Jul 9;10(14):e34354. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e34354. eCollection 2024 Jul 30.
South Asia is home to almost a quarter of the world's total population and is home to significant ethnolinguistic diversity. Previous studies of linguistic and genetic affiliations of Indian populations suggest that the formation of these distinct groups was a protracted and complex phenomenon involving multiple waves of migration, cultural assimilation, and genetic admixture. The evolutionary processes of migration, mixing and merging of populations thus impact the culture and linguistic diversity of different groups, some of which may retain their linguistic affinities despite genetic admixture with other groups, or vice versa. Our study examines the relationship of genetic and linguistic affinities between Austroasiatic and Indo-European speakers in adjacent geographical regions of Eastern India. We analyzed 224 mitogenomes and 0.65 million SNP genotypes from 40 unrelated individuals belonging to the Bathudi, Bhumij, Ho, and Mahali ethnic groups from the Eastern Indian state of Odisha. These four groups are speakers of Austroasiatic languages who have adopted elements from Indo-European languages spoken in neighbouring regions. Our results suggest that these groups have the greatest maternal genetic affinity with other Austroasiatic-speaking groups in India. Allele frequency-based analyses, genome-wide SNPs, haplotype-based methods and IBD sharing further support the genetic similarity of these East Indian groups to Austroasiatic speakers of South Asia rather than regional populations speaking Indo-European and Dravidian languages. Our study shows that these populations experienced linguistic mixing, likely due to industrialization and modernization that brought them into close cultural contact with neighbouring Indo-European-speaking groups. However, linguistic change in these groups is not reflected in genetic mixing in these populations, as they appear to maintain strict genetic boundaries while simultaneously experiencing cultural mixing.
南亚地区居住着世界近四分之一的人口，民族语言极为多样。此前关于印度人群语言和基因关系的研究表明，这些不同群体的形成是一个漫长而复杂的现象，涉及多波移民、文化同化和基因混合。因此，人群的迁移、融合和合并等进化过程影响了不同群体的文化和语言多样性，其中一些群体尽管与其他群体有基因混合，但可能仍保留着语言上的亲缘关系，反之亦然。我们的研究考察了印度东部相邻地理区域中说南亚语系和印欧语系语言的人群之间的基因和语言亲缘关系。我们分析了来自印度东部奥里萨邦的巴图迪、布米吉、霍和马哈利四个民族的40名无关个体的224个线粒体基因组和65万个单核苷酸多态性（SNP）基因型。这四个群体说南亚语系语言，但吸收了邻近地区所说印欧语系语言的元素。我们的结果表明，这些群体与印度其他说南亚语系语言的群体在母系基因上亲缘关系最为密切。基于等位基因频率的分析、全基因组SNP、基于单倍型的方法以及同源片段共享进一步支持了这些东印度群体与南亚说南亚语系语言的人群在基因上的相似性，而非与说印欧语系和达罗毗荼语系语言的当地人群的相似性。我们的研究表明，这些人群经历了语言混合，这可能是由于工业化和现代化使他们与邻近的说印欧语系语言的群体有了密切的文化接触。然而，这些群体的语言变化并没有反映在基因混合上，因为他们似乎在保持严格的基因界限的同时经历着文化混合。
