Live data from Hacker News

Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

nature.com

31–40 of 231 posts

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#31

Looks like this is quite old...they will probably find even more introgression. Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago), so there basically had to be a substantial amount of gene flow as well. Only a minority of the aboriginal languages come from an earlier substrate. It would be surprising…

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)

I'm assuming you're referring to the Pama-Nyungan family, which predates the dingo by nearly 2000 years?

I can't find any documentation of the Indian language families connection, do you have any?

This reminds me of the Tamil nationalists who, like some Serbs, like to claim that their language is the ur-language.

https://imgur.io/YxC5Rz1

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#32
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families Nonsense.

He is correct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3

The abstract of that article does nothing to support the claim that any Australian languages are originally from India.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#33
It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective.

The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived.

There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did appreciate Dr Yuval Noah Harari's summary of the phenomenon in his book Sapiens.)

If it turns out that the original population was partly / mostly replaced (linguistically, culturally, genetically) relatively recently, that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning.

As I say, it's a shame, as the migration (including ethno & linguistic) paths over the past ~100k years are just amazing.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of Australian languages are classified as Pama–Nyungan languages. Are you saying they are based off of an Indo-European language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pama%E2%80%93Nyungan_languages

dravidian languages are not indo-european

The entire country of India doesn't speak only Dravidian languages. You can understand where the confusion comes from right? The person I was replying too didn't say Dravidian, it says Indian languages.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happened in England after the Battle of Hastings. Upper crust English is still dominated by french words.

My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following: spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).

I've heard it put more crassly as "barbarian grammar with french nouns"

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#36

More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…

That there is some Indian introgression into Aborigibal genomes is completely not surprising based on phenotypic characteristics of their faces as well as other aspects of their cultures like language. It was remarked upon by "previous simplistic pre-scientific" British settlers, who it turns out were quite right. Many other older theories have turned out to get support from the genetic evidence.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago) Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/14/most-... .

Your article doesn't provide any evidence that Pama–Nyungan languages are from India. You'd think the Wikipedia article on Dravidian wouldn't say "The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages" if there was some evidence of the language families relation.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#38

More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…

If you have the raw sequence, services like yfull.com can help provide more detailed information. At this point, new haplotypes are being called every month. When I sequenced my own haplotype about 20 years ago (I was in the Indian lab partner of the Genographic Project at the time), the best we could do was call a few handfuls of mutations by hand (I used to run the gels myself) and my own haplotype was characterized out to maybe 3 mutations - the current haplotype is perhaps out to 20?

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#39

More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…

That there is some Indian introgression into Aborigibal genomes is completely not surprising based on phenotypic characteristics of their faces as well as other aspects of their cultures like language. It was remarked upon by "previous simplistic pre-scientific" British settlers, who it turns out were quite right. Many other older theories have turned out to get support from the genetic evidence.

India was just a waypoint on the journey of human genes from Africa to Australia.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#40
post #33

It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective. The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived. There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did app…

> emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate [...] The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative [...] that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning. [...] it's a shame

Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.

Post reply on HN