In the largest ever modern whole-genome analysis from South Asia—published as a preprint last month on bioRxiv—researchers reveal new details about the origin of India’s Iranian ancestry and when ancient hunter-gatherers settled the region.
Most Indians are primarily a mixture of three ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers who lived on the land for tens of thousands of years, farmers with Iranian ancestry who arrived sometime between 4700 and 3000 B.C.E., and herders from the central Eurasian steppe region who swept into the region sometime after 3000 B.C.E., perhaps between 1900 and 1500 B.C.E.