Abstract
The prehistoric human settlement of the Lakshadweep islands remains a mystery for various reasons. Uncertainty about the existence of indigenous tribes in these islands and the lack of folklore records present major obstacles to the reconstruction of Lakshadweep ancestry. However, with extant population data, we seek to understand the maternal ancestry of the Kavaratti islanders. Mitochondrial control region variation analysis of 80 individuals from this island shows maternal links with the populations in the northwestern region of the South Asian mainland. The founder clade R30b2, observed in the Kavaratti islanders, is so far present only in the Scheduled Castes from the Punjab region, Jat Sikhs and Nairs. All other mainland populations carry basal R30 or R30a subclades. The presence of a specific Uralic U4 lineage in our samples, in addition to the Indo-European affinity observed in the phylogeny tree, substantiates a northwestern maternal ancestry of the Kavaratti islanders and implies an ancestral admixture with early humans in the Near East at the time of the last glacial maximum (LGM). Based on our Bayesian analysis, we furthermore propose that a group bearing mostly R30b2 during the LGM recovery, moved eastward and southward, where they received Indian-specific M haplogroups. Hence, the maternal ancestry of the Kavaratti islanders is evidently a consequence of the demographic changes in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent caused by the Last Glacial Maximum. The haplogroup distribution pattern and nucleotide sequence data produced in this study will enrich the forensic database of the Lakshadweep islands.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the supplementary file.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) of the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India (EEQ/2021/000465) in New Delhi. AMT acknowledges the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) for providing a fellowship. The authors thank Dr. Kumarasamy Thangaraj from the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting (CDFD) at Hyderabad for his support and guidance. The authors are grateful to the Lakshadweep Administration, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Directorate of Health Services of Kavaratti Island for their support during this study. The authors also acknowledge the participants, lab technicians and research staff involved in the study.
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This study was funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (EEQ/2021/000465), New Delhi, India.
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AMT and JJS have contributed equally in conceptualisation, mtDNA analysis, statistical analysis and lab work. MSM and IB has collected the blood samples and outlined the manuscript preparation. LK evaluated the analysis. GvD, MSM and IB have reviewed the manuscript. All the authors have contributed to the manuscript and approved the final draft.
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Tayyeh, A.M., Sequeira, J.J., Kumar, L. et al. The maternal ancestry of the Kavaratti islanders and the last glacial maximum aftermath. Mol Genet Genomics 298, 1467–1477 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-023-02072-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-023-02072-8