Genetic link between Lankan tribe and Indians

20 April 2024 09:59 am - 11 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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(Telegraph India) - Sri Lanka’s Vedda people, long believed to be the island’s earliest human inhabitants, share close genetic bonds with five Indian tribal populations, a new study has found, bolstering evidence for their roots in the Indian subcontinent’s earliest modern human populations.

A team of Indian and Sri Lankan scientists has found that the Vedda share a strong genetic similarity with the Austroasiatic Munda-speaking Santhal and Juang tribes in Odisha and the Dravidian-speaking Irula, Paniya and Pallar found in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Their study, published this week in the scientific journal Mitochondrion, has revealed that the Vedda have a greater genetic similarity with these five tribes than with either Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese or Tamil populations with whom they have shared the island for centuries.

“This was a surprise — it shows Sri Lanka as an amazing place where three populations living side by side interacted very differently with one another,” Gyaneshwer Chaubey, a population geneticist at the Banaras Hindu University who supervised the study, said.

“The Sinhala and Tamil are massively mixed — you could call them genetically nearly indistinguishable, but the Vedda have remained largely isolated, they’ve maintained their identity by very low mixing,” Chaubey told The Telegraph.

Archaeological excavations show that modern humans have been occupying Sri Lanka for the past 30,000 years, perhaps longer. The Vedda, originally hunter-gatherers, are the island’s only indigenous population and are believed to be the direct descendants of the island’s earliest inhabitants.

“The Vedda have long intrigued anthropologists, historians and scientists because of their distinct language and culture,” said Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a scientist and study collaborator at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

Kumarasamy added: “Our study unravels their genetic origins and affinities with Indian populations.”

The Vedda’s original language is linguistically isolated, unrelated to any known language. Chaubey said it was one of three such linguistically isolated languages on the subcontinent, alongside Nihali, spoken in central India, and Kusunda in Nepal.

For their study, the scientists extracted genetic material from blood samples collected from 37 healthy, maternally unrelated Vedda individuals and compared their genomic segments with those from other populations.

Their maternal ancestry analysis suggests that the Vedda are the descendants of people who arrived from the Indian subcontinent some 55,000 years ago and who were likely an offshoot of a branch of modern humans who moved out of Africa into India and Asia.

The genetic proximity of the Vedda with Indian tribal populations that were among the earliest populations in India shows their deep common genetic roots, Chaubey said.

“The study highlights a distinct demographic history of the Vedda,” said Anjana Welikala, a scientist at Colombo University and the study’s first author. The findings show that the Vedda largely remained genetically isolated despite the geographic proximity with the Sinhalese and Tamil populations.

Ruwandi Ranasingh, the study’s lead author at Colombo University, said the study had shown that the Vedda had preserved their distinct genetic makeup with limited gene flow from neighbouring Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamil populations.

A study by Ranasingh and her Indian collaborators had last year shown that Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil populations shared exceptionally high levels of genetic similarities, implying centuries of intermingling despite the differences in their arrival history, ethnicity, and language.

The Sinhalese had arrived in Sri Lanka between 800BC and 600BC while the island’s Tamil population are the descendants of arrivals from Tamil Nadu between 600BC and 300BC.

British husband-wife anthropologists Charles Seligmann and Brenda Seligmann had in a treatise on the Vedda in 1911 proposed that they were related to the Dravidian jungle tribes in southern India but should be considered more primitive.

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Comments - 11

Volker Metzger Saturday, 20 April 2024 11:09 AM

The Veddas are part of the long history of humanity! They can consider themselves "lucky" that they have stayed away from the murderous history of modern man!!! Let them live in peace in the jungles of Sri Lanka, close to nature, and protect them from the politics in the country!

Mila Saturday, 20 April 2024 11:11 AM

Why is Vedda not going to marry a Chinese, Thai, or European? They won't do it because then this unique group of people will be destroyed. Today, our Singhalese people are mixing with Chinese and other races. They are destroying the Singhalese race when Mix-race children are born. Our unique race and culture are being destroyed because they believe they can love anyone. Someone whose parents are of the same race does not have any confusion, and they do not ask where I belong because they are from the same race and same culture, even if this race has been mixed in the past. Many mixed-race people today have the feeling that they do not belong anywhere and suffer from mental illness. Even if people have been mixed in the past, they are now a community and have their own language, culture, and land. I don't understand why people keep saying that people have always been mixed in the past and use this as an excuse to justify race mixing.

Geneticman Saturday, 20 April 2024 11:52 AM

Interesting but most totally incorrect - there are no veddahs now but the so called wanniala attho - a word coined by a Norwegian woman. Even so many decades ago, the Virchow, Sarasins ,Seligmans,

Volker Metzger Saturday, 20 April 2024 01:30 PM

The Veddas are part of the long history of humanity! They can consider themselves "lucky" that they have stayed away from the murderous history of modern man!!! Let them live in peace in the jungles of Sri Lanka, close to nature, and protect them from the politics in the country!

Kumi Saturday, 20 April 2024 02:03 PM

I can clearly say that they are trying to show the world that there Indians are the original humans in this world and that they own Sri Lanka. Have they forgotten the history where King E LK ara took ten thousand Sinhalese to India as war prisoners and then Ki no g Dutugemunu brought 20 thousand Indians from Andra Pradesh (Tamils) as pay back. But he gave these Indians freedom, land, etc. to live in peace. These are the Sri Lankan Tamils who still love and are loyal to Sri Lanka. Now do a comparison to Australian Aborigines to see any connections!!!

Genealogist Saturday, 20 April 2024 02:04 PM

Sri Lankans genes are 99% of South Indian origin and 1% from North Indians.

Sammy Saturday, 20 April 2024 11:28 PM

@Geneticman This is a scientific study of genetics. How can they do that if there are no veddahs left now?

das Sunday, 21 April 2024 01:49 AM

There is no such thing as a pure race.

Citizen k Sunday, 21 April 2024 08:13 AM

Surprised at some readers prudish comment.Never will a race become mentally unstable because of mixed marriages, in fact they adopt very well to different cultures. Hope this person has scientific basis.or is the person poorly informed.

Punchi Sunday, 21 April 2024 10:16 AM

There is a genetic link 12% between South Indian Tamils and Australian aborigines from a visit by Tamils about 4500 years ago and who brought along a dog that is now the dingo to Australia.

Mithya Monday, 22 April 2024 02:27 AM

No they came from the moon

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Genetic link between Lankan tribe and Indians

Comments - 11

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