Well, here we are. Razib and Amey talk about Sri Lankan genetics, casteism or lack thereof in the USA, the FUBAR of American immigration and finally how William Dalrymple triggers Amey’s Maratha pride.
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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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Razib, firstly there seems to be a problem with the website. It’s home page is frozen in August. I had to manually change the date to September to get to this post. You might want to look into this
Regarding the Sinhala DNA discussion, the claim that Sinhalese is descended from Marashtri prakrit is not consensus among linguists, there is actually more evidence pointing to a eastern prakritic origin, check these references out:
Muhammad Shahidullah, “The Origin of the Sinhalese Language,” The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, New Series, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1962): 108-111, accessed on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45377492.
Sisil Walimunidevage Karunatillake, “Historical Phonology of Sinhalese: From Old-Indo-Aryan to the 11th Century A.D.,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1969, Language and Literature, Linguistics, 140-141.
Also in this particular study they have seemed to have be biased by this preconceived notion that Sinhala is from Marashtri prakrit and centered their study on this theory.
They only compared SL Tamils, Sinhalese and Marathas in terms of IBD sharing. Of course Sinhalas will share more with any northern population regardless of whether it’s east or west.
They never compared SL Tamils, Sinhalese and Bengalis together in an IBD analysis. If they did they would almost certainly get the same conclusion.
23andme itself points to majority Bengali DNA among the Sinhalese northern ancestry:
https://sldna.blogspot.com/2020/03/sinhala-dna-results-2019-update.html
It’s the same with Maldivians who are descended mainly from Sinhalese:
https://www.tiktok.com/@about.maldives/video/7196997738431597825
I think you would do a much better analysis than the authors of this study.
Further to the above, if you look at the supplementary tables of the study by Singh et al, the lowest f3 score was with the combination of bengalis and savaras, not marathas and kurumbas in regards to the Sinhalese. Even their own data points to the Bengal affinities. They really should have done a full comparison with all the info Aryan speaking coastal populations.