Reconstructing the population history of the largest tribe of India: the Dravidian speaking Gond

Chaubey, Gyaneshwer; Tamang, Rakesh; Pennarun, Erwan; Dubey, Pavan; Rai, Niraj; Upadhyay, Rakesh Kumar; Meena, Rajendra Prasad; Patel, Jayanti R.; van Driem, George; Thangaraj, Kumarasamy; Metspalu, Mait; Villems, Richard (2017). Reconstructing the population history of the largest tribe of India: the Dravidian speaking Gond. European journal of human genetics, 25(4), pp. 493-498. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/ejhg.2016.198

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The Gond comprise the largest tribal group of India with a population exceeding 12 million. Linguistically, the Gond belong to the Gondi–Manda subgroup of the South Central branch of the Dravidian language family. Ethnographers, anthropologists and linguists entertain mutually incompatible hypotheses on their origin. Genetic studies of these people have thus far suffered from the low resolution of the genetic data or the limited number of samples. Therefore, to gain a more comprehensive view on ancient ancestry and genetic affinities of the Gond with the neighbouring populations speaking Indo-European, Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages, we have studied four geographically distinct groups of Gond using high-resolution data. All the Gond groups share a common ancestry with a certain degree of isolation and differentiation. Our allele frequency and haplotype-based analyses reveal that the Gond share substantial genetic ancestry with the Indian Austroasiatic (ie, Munda) groups, rather than with the other Dravidian groups to whom they are most closely related linguistically.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Linguistics
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Linguistics > Comparative Linguistics

UniBE Contributor:

van Driem, George

Subjects:

400 Language > 410 Linguistics
500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology

ISSN:

1018-4813

Publisher:

Nature Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

George van Driem

Date Deposited:

06 Nov 2017 10:22

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:05

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/ejhg.2016.198

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.99646

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/99646

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