Gond tribals lineage leads to Austroasiatics

Hyderabad: Scientists from the city-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Osmania University, along with Estonian researchers, have reported that the Gond tribals share substantial genetic ancestry with the Indian Austroasiatic (Munda) groups, rather than with  other Dravidian groups to whom they are linguistically most closely related.

They filed the report in a  research paper which was to be published in the European Journal of Human Genetics and  online in  Nature. It said the 1.2 crore Gonds form the largest tribal group in India.

“Linguistically, the Gond belong to the Gondi-Manda subgroup of the South Central branch of the Dravidian language family. Ethnographers, anthropologists and linguists entertain mutually incompatible hypotheses on their origin,” they said.

“Genetic studies of these people have thus far suffered from the low resolution of the genetic data or the limited number of samples,” the paper said. To overcome this, the researchers studied four geographically distinct groups of Gonds using high-resolution data. The team comprised Dr  G. Chaubey of the Estonian Biocentre and Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of the CCMB.

“All Gond groups share a common ancestry with a certain degree of isolation and differentiation. Our allele frequency and haplotype-based analyses revealed that the Gonds share substantial genetic ancestry with the Indian Austroasiatic groups, rather than with the other Dravidian groups to whom they are most closely related linguistically,” the study said.