Chinese share Indian genes

[S.A.T.A]

Chinese share Indian genes

Kalyan Ray, New Delhi, Dec 10, DHNS

East and South East Asians – including the Chinese – may trace their ancestral routes back to India.

One of the biggest ever studies to genetically grasp the pan-Asian diversity, suggests almost 60,000-70,000 years ago, early humans came first to India from Africa and subsequently moved out to East and South East Asia in “one single wave of migration.”
Analysing 1900 individual samples representing 73 populations, it strongly advocates that the most recent common ancestors of Asians arrived first in India.

Published in ‘Science’ on Friday, the research shows a “single primary wave of entry of humans into the continent.” It was undertaken by a consortium of 40 Asian laboratories under the Human Genome Organisation.

Academics so far have struggled to fully understand the great Asian diversity. The continent has thousands of ethnic groups, native languages and dialects.

“We have breached political and ideological boundaries to show that the people of Asia are linked by a unifying thread,” said Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR and head of the Indian team.

While the research seems to suggest Indian ancestry even to the Chinese population, some of the senior researchers in the same project, have a word of caution. They said more data is required before jumping the gun. “I would not speculate on the immediate ancestry of Chinese to Indians. We need to look at more genetic data from the Middle East before arriving at any conclusion,” Partha P Majumder, head of the human genetics unit at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, said.

Currently there are two theories to describe peopling of Asia. The dominant one illustrates two waves of migration from Africa – the first one moving along the shore line to arrive at India and subsequently to East Asia and the second wave of migration going straight to the Eurasian steppe and turning south to the Asian mainland.

The second theory proposes only one wave of migration from Africa along the coast line.
“This new analysis strongly concludes the southern route made a more important contribution to East and Southeast Asian population,” said Li Jin, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai.

In the absence of more concrete evidence, the researchers declined to put a definitive time-line on the great Indian exodus. “But it may have taken place 40,000 to 60,000 years ago,” he said.

The pan-Asian family tree and the migration pattern were studied by analysing the genes of almost 2000 Asians in 40 laboratories.

It signifies coming of age for Asian genome studies because so far most of the Asian genome analysis was carried out by European and American scientists.

 

[RPK]

Ancestors of Chinese came from India: Study

Ancestors of Chinese came from India: Study - India - The Times of India


BANGALORE: The ancestors of most Asian populations, including the Chinese and southeast Asians, came from India, a new genetic study across 10 countries has revealed. The study found that humans first migrated to the Indian subcontinent from Africa some 100,000 years ago and then spread to other parts of Asia.

"When humans moved out of Africa, there was a migration to India and from India to southeast Asia and then east Asia, and finally to the Americas. So, all Asians have a genetic connection with India," Mitali Mukerji, a scientist from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology who was in the team, said.

The study — Mapping Human Genetic History in Asia — was conducted in 10 Asian countries including India. Apart from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research DG Samir Brahmachari, the Indian study team comprised eight members and some students from IGIB, New Delhi, anthropologist Partha Majumdar and researchers from the Centre for Genomic Applications.

The study contradicts earlier findings that humans directly went to East Asia from Africa. The study found remarkable similarities between the Dravidian population of south India and specific populations in Malaysia and Singapore. More interestingly, north Indians and Dravidians, too, were found to be genetically connected — meaning there are similarities in their gene structures.

 

[qilaotou]

It sounds like a strange claim. Are we not all from Africa? It's known that there were three different routes of human migration into China. Of course some of them passed through central asia or Indian subcontinent. It does not mean "Ancestors of Chinese came from India". Funny!

 

[sob]

India is 'thailand' to Asia, say scientists

Since "thai" means "mother" in classical Tamil, the language of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu and said to be the oldest living language in the world, "thailand" means motherland. However, India could be an ancient "motherland" of Thailand and Asia in a more literal sense, according to a new investigative study, "'Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia".

The findings, from an unprecedented collaboration of over 80 researchers and 40 scientific institutions across Asia [1], reveal a twist in the history of human migration. It points to India, then Thailand and Southeast Asia, being the ancestral home to most Asians.

The paper, titled "Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia", published in the Science journal issue of December 10, is the first of its kind on Asian populations. Undertaken by the Singapore-based Human Genome Organization (HUGO), the study follows earlier multiple genetic studies on European populations.

The HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium, as the project is called, overturns accepted knowledge that multiple migrations of populations directly went to East Asian countries from Africa, nearly a hundred thousand years ago.

According to the new study, Dravidians - the race of people who inhabit south India, including Tamils - could be a common ancestral link to most modern-day Asians.

The news would be an early mega Christmas gift to chauvinistic Dravidian political parties, such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhalgam (DMK, or the Dravidian Progressive Party) and its 85-year-old chief, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, currently ruling Tamil Nadu.

Historically, Dravidians are considered India's original settlers. A more disputed theory says Dravidians were the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilization. Aryan invaders from Europe pushed them south of the Vindhaya Mountains into the Deccan Plateau in southern India, over 3,500 years ago.

But while the new HUGO study could support anthropological knowledge of Aryans invading India, the findings also say modern India shares a closer genetic ancestry with Europe than with Asia. "Most of the Indian populations showed evidence of shared ancestry with European populations," observed page four of the six-page report in Science.

"The current Indians received more genetic input from Aryan invasions which brought more Caucasian genes," says Dr Edison Liu, executive director at the Genome Institute of Singapore and president of HUGO. "So in fact, excluding modern-day Indians, there is clear indication that we are all genetically related in Asia."
Modern-day Indians, Liu says, would mean those in post-Aryan India. In effect, the new HUGO study could point to India having a large Eurasian population, like Russia.

"We have redefined the genetic history of Asian migration," declared Liu. "Previously, it was thought - because of archaeological, anthropological, and limited genetic data - that Asia was populated by two waves of migration. One wave was from Southeast Asia, called the Southern route, and the second from Central Asia, called the Northern route."

Liu informed Asia Times Online that the HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium findings now point to a single wave of migration from Southeast Asia. "This places disparate ethnic groups like the Negritos [in the Philippines], Dayaks [in Borneo, Indonesia] etc. within the Asian fold," says Liu. "The reconstruction is out of Africa to India."

Caucasians and Asians were then divided, with the Caucasians moving to the Levant, or the Asian side of the Mediterranean Sea. The people wave continued to India, and then to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. From Southeast Asia, settlers migrated to other parts of Asia, including China.

If the study is accurate, the Han Chinese - the single-largest ethnic group in Asia and in the world - have ancestral linkages to southern China, northern Thailand and earlier in India.

Sections of the Indian media highlighted the Chinese angle in the HUGO report. The Times of India, with a readership of 13.3 million, headlined its report as "Ancestors of Chinese came from India: Study". The Mumbai-based Daily News and Analysis went further, calling its report "The Chinese evolved from Indians: Study".

So do Chinese have Indian ancestors? "It is probably more correct to say that Dravidians [in southern India] and Chinese had common ancestors, than to say that Chinese ancestors originated in India," said Liu, who was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to the United States in 1957.

"What we are seeing is the transit of our ancestors in their travels out of Africa through India and into Southeast Asia and North Asia," Liu explained. "Along the way, they deposited progeny that later expanded, or contracted."

Benefits from the findings include unified health solutions across Asia. A common ancestral link enables clinical trials for medicines that would be applicable across a wider region. Liu has worked on leukemia and breast cancer research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"This research is also significant for furthering the research in medicine," Samir Brahmachari, director general of the New Delhi-based Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, told Indian media.

"The findings have great potential for collaboration with these countries in finding treatment to many diseases like flu, HIV and other pandemics," said Brahmachari, who is also a member of the 18-person HUGO governing council, and a professor of molecular biophysics and genetic engineering.

"The paper not only presents a fantastic genotype database but also provides vital clues to scientists of diverse fields - from linguistics to archeology to human genetics," says Vikrant Kumar, a post doctoral fellow of the Genome Institute, Singapore, and an investigator in the study.

Kumar, who earned his doctorate from the University of Calcutta, calls this the only effort of its kind where 73 populations scattered across 10 Asian countries are studied together. About 2,000 samples covering almost the "entire spectrum of linguistic and ethnic diversity" were genotyped for about 50,000 single nucleotide polymorphic markers, [2] he said.

Apart from redefining the migratory origins of Asian people, the HUGO project marked a new high in pan-Asian scientific collaboration. "This study was very unusual," Liu says. "Perhaps the proudest achievement was that 10 Asian countries mounted this study on our own steam, funded and completed it internally, with each member working as equal partners."

Liu, whose academic career includes stints at Washington University, Stanford University, University of California and University of North Carolina, calls this study a "milestone not only in the science that emerged, but the consortium that was formed. We overcame shortage of funds and diverse operational constraints through partnerships, good will, and cultural sensitivity."

One of the hurdles was the disparity in technological access among the project team in various countries, with their varying access to expensive technologies. The problem was resolved by developing a host-guest structure, in which the technologically better off countries hosted working scientists with lesser technology access.

"We transferred technologies, expanded capabilities, forged friendships and now have an Asian scientific network of considerable worth," says Liu, a nice enough initial outcome of a project that found a common ancestral link to Asians.

 

[sob]

For the above study Apart from over 80 individual researchers and scientists, the project involved 40 leading scientific organizations in Asia. It included Malaysia's Human Genome Center in Kelantan; India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi; Thailand's National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Pathumtani; the Korean BioInformation Center in Deajeon; the University of Philippines in Manila; Taiwan's Institute of Biomedical Sciences; the Genome Institute of Singapore; Japan's National Institute of Genetics and the Chinese Academy of Medical Science.

 

[Anshu Attri]

The Chinese evolved from Indians: Study

http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_the-chinese-evolved-from-indians-study_1322647

The Chinese evolved from Indians: Study

A genetic study has found that Indians are the ancestors of the Chinese and other East Asian populations.


The study, a joint project of 10 Asian countries, found that India received a wave of migration from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago and these early humans subsequently moved to East and Southeast Asia. The earlier belief was that humans from Africa reached India and East and Southeast Asia separately.

The study has important implications, especially in the understanding of human migratory patterns and in the investigation of genetics and disease.

The findings of the five-year study -- conducted by a group of 90 scientists, including those from India, in a consortium of 40 Asian laboratories under the Human Genome Organisation -- have been published in the journal Science.

The study analysed genetic data of 1,900 individuals representing 73 population groups. The findings showed that Asian genetic ancestry correlated highly with ethnic and linguistic groups and "considerable gene flow was observed among sub-populations of the clusters" that were studied; the clusters included "groups believed to practice endogamy (marriage within a group) based on linguistics, cultural and ethic information".

"This large study establishes that Indians are ancestors of the Japanese, Chinese and all other East Asians. All these populations have a common genetic origin and it shows that India represents a microcosm of Asia's genetic diversity," said Samir Brahmachari, director-general, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research -- a participant in the study.

 

[Phenom]

Is this news worthy of having two threads, I mean if you look at it we are all Africans but we don't consider Africa to be the cradle of our civilization. After all there was no India or China at that time, there was just Earth, India came into being after the Indian Civilization came into existence, same with China. Ofcourse the stupid media hypes up every thing and are using headlines like 'Chinese evolved from Indian',,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

[Minghegy]

haha, no brain media editor=xD