“The present day Indian population is a mixture of two ancestral groups of the prehistoric period — Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI),” said Dr Lalji Singh, a Padma Shri awardee and CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, while speaking at a conclave — ‘Evolution, Life’s Continuum’ — organised by the Birbal Sahni Institue of Palaeobotany on Sunday.

Dr Lalji Singh quoted the facts from a study published in the journal ‘Nature’ in August 2009.

The study had been conducted by Singh and Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, Hyderabad, in collaboration with David Reich of Harvard Medical University and Nick Patterson and Alkes L Price of the Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We studied 1 million genetic markers in 132 individuals from 25 groups of Indians to conclude that they all were mixtures of ANI as well as ASI. ANI shows some lineage to the Europeans,” said Singh.

Questioning the Aryan Dravidian theory, he added: “If true, the theory would imply that only the upper castes of India should have European lineage.”

“But the study clearly shows that the mainland populations of India, irrespective of caste and tribe, have a European lineage, along with being a mixture of ANI and ASI.”

Touching on the issue of the traditional Caste System, Singh added: “The study suggests that the Caste System made people live in isolated groups and follow endogamy. Thus, each such group is likely to have a single genetic defect unique to the group. This means that now it will be possible to trace these defects through pre-natal tests and even cure them.”

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