title: Reconstructing the population history of the largest tribe of India: the Dravidian speaking Gond.
abstract: The Gond comprise the largest tribal group of India with a population exceeding 12 million. 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. Genetic studies of these people have thus far suffered from the low resolution of the genetic data or the limited number of samples. Therefore, to gain a more comprehensive view on ancient ancestry and genetic affinities of the Gond with the neighbouring populations speaking Indo-European, Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages, we have studied four geographically distinct groups of Gond using high-resolution data. All the Gond groups share a common ancestry with a certain degree of isolation and differentiation. Our allele frequency and haplotype-based analyses reveal that the Gond share substantial genetic ancestry with the Indian Austroasiatic (ie, Munda) groups, rather than with the other Dravidian groups to whom they are most closely related linguistically.
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Biology Group, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Gyaneshwer
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2899-3852
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chaubey
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India.|Department of Genetics, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.
authors.forename: Rakesh
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tamang
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Biology Group, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Erwan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pennarun
authors.affiliation: Narsimhbhai Patel Dental College and Hospital, Sankhal Chand Patel University, Visnagar, India.
authors.forename: Pavan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Dubey
authors.affiliation: Bharat Addhyan Kendra, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.
authors.forename: Niraj
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Rai
authors.affiliation: Prakash Hospitals and Trauma Centre, Mau, India.
authors.forename: Rakesh Kumar
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Upadhyay
authors.affiliation: CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India.
authors.forename: Rajendra Prasad
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Meena
authors.affiliation: Narsimhbhai Patel Dental College and Hospital, Sankhal Chand Patel University, Visnagar, India.
authors.forename: Jayanti R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Patel
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: van Driem
authors.affiliation: Bharat Addhyan Kendra, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.
authors.forename: Kumarasamy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Thangaraj
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Biology Group, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Mait
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3099-9161
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Metspalu
authors.affiliation: Evolutionary Biology Group, Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia.|Department of Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Villems
mesh_terms: D005787:Gene Frequency; D006239:Haplotypes; D063426:Human Migration; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007802:Language; D010375:Pedigree; D011153:Population / Q000235:genetics*; D044465:White People / Q000235:genetics*