Peopling of India

According to Michael Petraglia, stone tools discovered below the layers of ash deposits in India at Jwalapuram, Andhra Pradesh point to a pre-Toba dispersal.

[4] Since the Toba event is believed to have had such a harsh impact and "specifically blanketed the Indian subcontinent in a deep layer of ash", it was "difficult to see how India's first colonists could have survived this greatest of all disasters".

[6] Research published in 2009 by a team led by Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford suggested that some humans may have survived the hypothesized catastrophe on the Indian mainland.

[14] The group that crossed the Red Sea travelled along the coastal route around the coast of Arabia and Persia until reaching India, which appears to be the first major settling point.

[15] Geneticist Spencer Wells says that the early travellers followed the southern coastline of Asia, crossed about 250 kilometres (155 mi) of sea, and colonized Australia by around 50,000 years ago.

"[27][note 2] Shinde et al. 2019 found either Andamanese or East Siberian hunter-gatherers fit as proxy for AASI "due to shared ancestry deeply in time.

The use of metals (copper, bronze, iron) further changed human ways of life, giving an initial advance to early users, and aiding further migrations, and admixture.

According to Silva et al. (2017), multiple waves of migration from western Eurasia took place after the last Ice Age, both before and after the advent of farming in South Asia.

[19][39][40][41] These two ancestral groups mixed in India between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago (2200 BCE – 100 CE), whereafter a shift to endogamy took place,[41] possibly by the enforcement of "social values and norms" during the Hindu Gupta rule.

[22] Reich et al. stated that "ANI ancestry ranges from 39–71% in India, and is higher in traditionally upper caste, martial races and Indo-European speakers.

[44] According to Metspalu et al. (2011), "regardless of where this component was from (the Caucasus, Near East, Indus Valley, or Central Asia), its spread to other regions must have occurred well before our detection limits at 12,500 years.

"[45] Speaking to Fountain Ink, Metspalu said, "the West Eurasian component in Indians appears to come from a population that diverged genetically from people actually living in Eurasia, and this separation happened at least 12,500 years ago.

These Neolithic farmers migrated from the fertile crescent, most likely from a region near the Zagros Mountains in modern day Iran, to South Asia some 10,000 years ago.

[59] While the IVC has been linked to the early Dravidian peoples, some scholars have suggested that their Neolithic farmer predecessors may have migrated from the Zagros Mountains to northern South Asia some 10,000 years ago.

"[69][note 9] Shinde et al. (2019) and Narasimhan et al. (2019), analysing remains from the Indus Valley civilisation (of parts of Bronze Age Northwest India and East Pakistan) and "outliers" from surrounding cultures, conclude that the IVC-population was a mixture people related to Iranian herders and AASI:[19] The only fitting two-way models were mixtures of a group related to herders from the western Zagros mountains of Iran and also to either Andamanese hunter-gatherers or East Siberian hunter-gatherers (the fact that the latter two populations both fit reflects that they have the same phylogenetic relationship to the non-West Eurasian-related component likely due to shared ancestry deeply in time)[28]According to Shinde et al. (2019) about 50–98% of the IVC-genome came from people related to early Iranian farmers, and from 2–50% of the IVC-genome came from native South Asian hunter-gatherers sharing a common ancestry with the Andamanese.

The authors found that the respective amounts of those ancestries varied significantly between individuals, and concluded that more samples are needed to get the full picture of Indian population history.

Lazaridis et al. (2016) notes that the demographic impact of steppe related populations on South Asia was substantial and forms a major component in northern India.

[39] According to Ness, there are three broad theories on the origins of the Austroasiatic speakers, namely northeastern India, central or southern China, or southeast Asia.

[88] Multiple researches indicate that the Austroasiatic populations in Central India are derived from (mostly male dominated) migrations from southeast Asia during the Holocene.

[89][90][91][92][93][note 16] According to Van Driem (2007), the mitochondrial picture indicates that the Munda maternal lineage derives from the earliest human settlers on the Subcontinent, whilst the predominant Y chromosome haplogroup argues for a Southeast Asian paternal homeland for Austroasiatic language communities in India.

[94]According to Chaubey et al. (2011), "AA speakers in India today are derived from dispersal from Southeast Asia, followed by extensive sex-specific admixture with local Indian populations.

"[90][note 17] According to Zhang et al. (2015), Austroasiatic (male) migrations from southeast Asia into India took place after the latest Glacial maximum, circa 4000 years ago.

[88] According to a genetic research (2015) including linguistic analyses, suggests an East Asian origin for proto-Austroasiatic groups, which first migrated to Southeast Asia and later into India.

[97] The ancient people, who lived in the upper-middle Yellow River basin about 10,000 years ago and developed one of the earliest Neolithic cultures in East Asia, were the ancestors of modern Sino-Tibetan populations.

O-M134, a subclade of O-M122, has a high percentage, 86.6%, among Tamangs of Nepal, with similar frequencies, ~85%, among the northeastern Indian Tibeto-Burman groups, including Adi, Naga, Apatani, and Nyishi.

[107] Most of the languages of Bhutan are Bodish, but it also has three small isolates, 'Ole ("Black Mountain Monpa"), Lhokpu and Gongduk and a larger community of speakers of Tshangla.

[108] One complication in studying various population groups is that genetic and linguistic affiliations in India only are partially correlated, especially in cases where Austric-related peoples have adopted languages from their non-Austric neighbors.