Genetic Relationships between Indian Populations and Their Neighbors

Abstract

The Indian population may be divided into two main divisions, tribal and non-tribal. About 450 tribes and subtribes, constituting about 7% of the total population are distributed in five regions, namely, the Northeast, the sub-Himalayan region of the North and Northwest, eastern and central, western, and southern India (Roy Burman, 1972). Morphologically, the tribals are different from the nontribal populations in stature and in cephalic, nasal, and facial indexes. The tribes in central and southern India are of short stature, have curly hair, dark pigmentation, are dolichocephalic, and have broad depressed noses when compared to the nontribal populations (Malhotra, 1978). Anthropometric measurements of five tribes in western India show that they have much in common racially and, as a group, differ from neighboring nontribal populations more than from each other (Shah, 1962). Differences in fingerprint patterns between tribal and nontribal populations are found in one state of southern India. Nontribal samples with high frequencies of loops and relatively low frequencies of whorls are markedly different from most of the other tribal samples (Basu, 1980).