Reconstructing the population history of Sinhalese, the major ethnic group in Śrī Laṅkā:
Interestingly, we found an unexpected excess of smaller chunks sharing between Marāṭhā and Sinhala (>16%) than the Marāṭhā and STU, thus supporting the linguistic hypothesis of Geiger, Turner and van Driem. To confirm the excess sharing, we looked for the population which was sharing maximum IBD with Sinhala and STU.
Looks like confirmation of Sinhala western Indian origins rather than eastern Indian origins.
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Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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did they cross compare with sufficient Bengali and other East Indian samples?