Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 231 posts

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#91

Post by concordDance »

ImaCake wrote: post #56
nhchris wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from ge…

Yes, ppl in the same country have more similar genomes. But modern population genetics has found that 1. There is more similarity than difference between any 2 humans on earth (there are africans and europeans who share more dna than with others of their own ancestry. And, 2. People move around, a lot! We knew this already but there are a huge number of undocumented migrations that are being revealed by these studies…

Note that your statements don't seem to contradict the idea of strong correlations based on ancestry that are visually inferrable

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#92

Post by valarauko »

viewtransform wrote: post #45
valarauko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 characterize…

I don't have the raw sequence. The project handled DNA data in total privacy. I did send my DNA swab a second time about 5-6 years later, this time to look at my maternal line (mitochondrial dna). The report had changed quite a bit possibly because the project had gathered more data in the intervening years. . I've stopped looking into this further - I really don't care about my ancestors or genetics. More interested…

The field has advanced incredibly since then - uniparental markers like mitochondria or Y are a helpful clue, but we have so much genome wide information now. Indian population genetics is still in its infancy, though, since Indian government rules around the export of biomaterial means only Indian labs can work on them, and honestly most of them have strong biases they're looking to confirm. So much of the Indian population information in databases is simply extrapolated from tiny, non-representative samples collected from Indians abroad.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#93

Post by runsWphotons »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #31
runsWphotons wrote: post #2

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 s…

both dingo and the spread of this family are around 5000 years give or take and roughly contemporaneous with this introgression in OP. None of the dates are known with that much precision afaik. It seems the theory that the languages are indian is disputed, so lets just say a lot of new stuff was happening around that time.

There is disputed circumstantial evidence for other waves of migration. For example the Bradshaw paintings have long been thought to be the work of newer peoples (maybe from papua). Some people dispute this and say it discounts the abilities of the natives there, and that may be true, there could be just one group always there who did them and then stopped. But the art bears little resemblance to earlier art there or in other regions of australia, which is often little more than handprints or slightly cartoonish looking things. The bradshaws are quite different and it at least makes sense to ask if there wasnt some new wave of peoples with unique tools and art style. Or otherwise some kind of "golden era" where there was more population and other interesting things happened. Something to look for in future. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings)

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#94

Post by Jedd »

ajross wrote: post #40
Jedd wrote: 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.

> None of that stuff happened.

Could you please be slightly more specific about what you're contesting?

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#95

Post by nhchris »

rootusrootus wrote: post #81
nhchris wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from ge…

> most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries I'm surprised that anyone would really think otherwise. There is so much obvious similarity between people in different countries (well, the old countries, I mean, such as in Europe and Asia) that sometimes I wonder if each country has a relatively recent common ancestor.

> I'm surprised that anyone would really think otherwise

Usually they disprove a much stronger, extreme claim (e.g. some sort of racial purity, or the idea of entirely discontinuous, clearly-delimited races), then imply this means peoples are entirely interchangeable, and that the weaker, obviously-true claim of closer kinship within countries/regions is somehow false and/or meaningless.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#96

Post by runsWphotons »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #80
verytrivial wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is compelling but rare evidence of habitation back as far at 60,000 years. But there is zero reason to assume the continent was sealed to migration at any point. In fact it was disconnected and reconnected by land bridges more than once over that period. Culture is a process not an artifact. Regarding the speed of change, tally the vocab contribution of Norman French, Anglo Saxon, Roman and Brittonic languages…

Australasia has not been joined to the rest of the world by land bridges for tens of millions of years. That's why so much of the fauna is strange and unusual. Humans are one of the few mammalian species that have managed to cross the deep water barriers on our own.

New Guinea was until end of ice age though I believe.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#97

Post by biorach »

runsWphotons wrote: post #93
EdwardDiego wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

both dingo and the spread of this family are around 5000 years give or take and roughly contemporaneous with this introgression in OP. None of the dates are known with that much precision afaik. It seems the theory that the languages are indian is disputed, so lets just say a lot of new stuff was happening around that time. There is disputed circumstantial evidence for other waves of migration. For example the Bradsh…

you really need to cite some sources for all these claims you're making spread over many different comments

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#98

Post by Jedd »

ImaCake wrote: post #61
Jedd wrote: 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…

> the original population was partly / mostly replaced Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.

You're right. I should have chosen better phrasing - perhaps gene pool instead of population, and diluted (but that still seems awkward) rather than replaced.

Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations? I don't know, TFA doesn't hint, and I suspect we don't have an abundance of natural experiments to compare with.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#99

Post by [deleted] »

valarauko wrote: post #92
viewtransform wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the raw sequence. The project handled DNA data in total privacy. I did send my DNA swab a second time about 5-6 years later, this time to look at my maternal line (mitochondrial dna). The report had changed quite a bit possibly because the project had gathered more data in the intervening years. . I've stopped looking into this further - I really don't care about my ancestors or genetics. More interested…

The field has advanced incredibly since then - uniparental markers like mitochondria or Y are a helpful clue, but we have so much genome wide information now. Indian population genetics is still in its infancy, though, since Indian government rules around the export of biomaterial means only Indian labs can work on them, and honestly most of them have strong biases they're looking to confirm. So much of the Indian po…

[deleted]

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#100

Post by 10g1k »

Merely looking at aborigines will reveal to anyone with adequate IQ that they are similar to Indians.

Listening to them will reveal similarities to Indian languages.

The genetic evidence of multiple waves of migration from India, through south-east Asia, to Australia has been available for many years.

These things have all be ignored or denied by the government, media, and lobby groups for years. Because facts do not support the narrative.

Post reply on HN