Abstract
Afghanistan has held a strategic position throughout history. It has been inhabited since the Paleolithic and later became a crossroad for expanding civilizations and empires. Afghanistan's location, history, and diverse ethnic groups present a unique opportunity to explore how nations and ethnic groups emerged, and how major cultural evolutions and technological developments in human history have influenced modern population structures. In this study we have analyzed, for the first time, the four major ethnic groups in present-day Afghanistan: Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, and Uzbek, using 52 binary markers and 19 short tandem repeats on the non-recombinant segment of the Y-chromosome. A total of 204 Afghan samples were investigated along with more than 8,500 samples from surrounding populations important to Afghanistan's history through migrations and conquests, including Iranians, Greeks, Indians, Middle Easterners, East Europeans, and East Asians. Our results suggest that all current Afghans largely share a heritage derived from a common unstructured ancestral population that could have emerged during the Neolithic revolution and the formation of the first farming communities. Our results also indicate that inter-Afghan differentiation started during the Bronze Age, probably driven by the formation of the first civilizations in the region. Later migrations and invasions into the region have been assimilated differentially among the ethnic groups, increasing inter-population genetic differences, and giving the Afghans a unique genetic diversity in Central Asia.
Highlights
Afghanistan is a landlocked country at the intersection of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East that has held a strategic position throughout history
Reduced Median (RM) networks of C3-M217 (Figure S1A) and R1a1a-M17 (Figure S1B) show that when a haplogroup was infrequent in an ethnic group, its haplotypes existed on branches not shared with other Afghans, suggesting that the underrepresented haplogroups are not the result of a gene flow between the ethnic groups, but probably a direct assimilation from source populations
This study describes for the first time the Y-chromosome diversity of the main ethnic groups in Afghanistan
Summary
Afghanistan is a landlocked country at the intersection of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East that has held a strategic position throughout history. It was a crossroad of ancient trade routes and human migrations. In northern Afghanistan, flake tools found in Dara Dadil, Darra Chakhmakh, and elsewhere indicate the probable existence of Middle Paleolithic industries [1]. Northern Afghanistan sits in a region of the development of the earliest agricultural communities, marked by domestication of the wheat/barley, sheep/goat/cattle complex leading to the Neolithic revolution (10,000–7,000 ya), later supporting the economy of early urban Bronze Age civilizations in Central Asia at the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (4300–3700 ya) and in India at the Indus Valley (5300–3800 ya) [2]. It has been proposed that the decline of these early civilizations was accompanied by, or was the result of, the expanding populations from the Eurasian steppe, reaching the Indian subcontinent in the late Harappan period [3]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
