Abstract
Surrounded by speakers of Indo-European, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman languages, around 11 million Munda (a branch of Austroasiatic language family) speakers live in the densely populated and genetically diverse South Asia. Their genetic makeup holds components characteristic of South Asians as well as Southeast Asians. The admixture time between these components has been previously estimated on the basis of archaeology, linguistics and uniparental markers. Using genome-wide genotype data of 102 Munda speakers and contextual data from South and Southeast Asia, we retrieved admixture dates between 2000–3800 years ago for different populations of Munda. The best modern proxies for the source populations for the admixture with proportions 0.29/0.71 are Lao people from Laos and Dravidian speakers from Kerala in India. The South Asian population(s), with whom the incoming Southeast Asians intermixed, had a smaller proportion of West Eurasian genetic component than contemporary proxies. Somewhat surprisingly Malaysian Peninsular tribes rather than the geographically closer Austroasiatic languages speakers like Vietnamese and Cambodians show highest sharing of IBD segments with the Munda. In addition, we affirmed that the grouping of the Munda speakers into North and South Munda based on linguistics is in concordance with genome-wide data.
Highlights
Surrounded by speakers of Indo-European, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman languages, around 11 million Munda speakers live in the densely populated and genetically diverse South Asia
Studies based on genome-wide genotype data have shown that the majority of present day populations of the Indian subcontinent derive their genetic ancestry to a large extent from two ancestral populations – ancestral northern and southern Indians – of which the former is genetically close to West Eurasian populations[4,5,6]
Considering the widespread sharing of words related to rice agriculture in all main branches of Austroasiatic, it has been proposed that this language family co-expanded with farming in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) and that the speakers of Munda languages spread to India as part of this farming expansion[9,10]
Summary
Received: 21 May 2018 Accepted: 13 February 2019 Published online: 07 March 2019. Kai Tätte[1,2], Luca Pagani[2,3], Ajai K. We set out to affirm the signal of the admixture event in autosomal data and to address previously unresolved questions including: (i) autosomal date of the South and Southeast Asian admixture event in Munda; (ii) characteristics of the Indian ancestry component of the Mundas; (iii) who are the closest living descendants of the source populations of the ancient admixture; (iv) and if the grouping of the Munda speakers into North and South Mundas based on some linguistic models is supported by genetic data To address these questions, we analysed 102 individual samples from Munda speaking populations (including 10 newly reported samples) in context of 978 other samples (including 46 newly reported samples) from 72 populations mainly from India, Southeast Asia and East Asia. List of all the populations, sample sizes, and some additional information on the dataset can be found in Supplementary Table S1
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