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

ABSTRACT: 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 degr

SUBMITTER: Chaubey G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5386418 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature