The Himalayas, world’s biggest mountain range, is back in the news. The identity of the Himalayan population established through genetic studies is what has brought the mountain ranges to the limelight. This has every potential to snowball into a geo-political issue in the days to some. An international team of genetic scientists have found that Himalayan population is unique and distinct and originated due to its own ‘novel genetic component’.
Although there have been a few genetic studies on the populations of Himalaya, they are underrepresented by people of Indian Himalayan regions. Hence, to understand the genetic diversity of this unique region, the international team co-led by Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CSIR-CCMB Hyderabad and Prof. Gyaneshwer Chaubey from BHU, Varanasi, together with scientists from India, Estonia, Israel, UK and Switzerland studied the DNA of 794 individuals belonging to 16 ethnic groups (including Changpa from Kashmir; Bhotia, Ban Raut from Uttarakhand, Sherpa Subba from Darjeeling and several ethnic populations from Northeast states) inhabited in Indian Himalayas.
They found that the inhabitants of Himalayan region have unique genetic structure. The research work has been dedicated to Prof lalji Singh, India’s doyen in the field of genetic studies and research , who passed away last December.
The findings by this team which has been published in “Human Genetics”, an internationally respected scientific journal, has also proved that there was no migration to the Himalayas from Central Asia as made out by earlier research by scientists from USA. The latest revelation once again debunks the Aryan invasion theory, the raison deter of Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu.
Dr Thangaraj said that the Trans-Himalayan population originated due to its own novel genetic component, admixed at different degree with East and South Asian ancestries. “This means that the Himalayan population does not have a recent common ancestry with South Asia. The population is unique and distinct with certain degree of admixture of South and East Asian genes,” said Prof Chaubey over telephone from BHU.
He also said that the migration of some of the tribes which came from Tibet to India has had happened only in the last 1,000 years which coincide with the Tibeto-Burman language expansion. The studies also disproved the earlier theory that there used to be migration from Central Asia to the Himalayas. “It is the other way round. People from the Himalayas went to Central Asia. That’s why there is a resemblance between the Himalayan population and the Siberian and the Far East population,” he said.
“The massive intra-population (Himalayan region populations) sharing of genomes, than any other neighbouring groups (East Asian or South Asian), suggested a common ancestry of the populations studied here“ says Professor George van Driem, a renowned linguist from University of Bern, Switzerland.
S Kalyanaraman, director, Saraswathi Research Centre, Chennai is of the view that the findings has underscored the similarities between the Munda and Saanthal languages and the languages spoken in Far Eastern nations like laos, Vietnam and Combodia.
It was the research team consisting of Dr Thanagarj of CSIR-CCMB and Prof Chaubey whose earlier researches in 2007, 2009 and 2015 disproved the Aryan invasion theory. “Our earlier findings that the Aryan invasion theory was bunkum and was perpetrated without scientific evidence got strengthened with these findings too. Migration was not towards the subcontinent as made out by some historians,” said both of the scientists.