Manish Kalra

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

Today Caste System is a fact & reality of Indian society. So deep rooted in its culture & traditions that we can not deny, we can not ignore

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

August 8, American Journal of Human Genetics,describe how Indian society transformed where mixture between different populations was rampant

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

to a society where endogamy—that is, marrying within the local community and a key attribute of the caste system—became the norm.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

After going through with study carried out by Harvard Medical School and CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad,

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups, found that all populations in India showed evidence of a genetic mixing.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

Of two ancestral groups —the Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are related to central Asians, middle easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans;

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

and the Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

Study provide evidence that modern-day India is the result of recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

The researchers, by measuring the lengths of the segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes,

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

were there by able to obtain precise estimates of when this population mixture occurred.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

They found that it started 4,200 years ago—the Indus Valley civilization was waning then & huge migrations were occurring across north India

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

which might have caused intermarrying. It is suspected that before that, two groups lived side by side for centuries without intermarrying.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

"The fact that every population in India evolved from randomly mixed populations suggests that social classifications,

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

like the caste system are not likely to have existed in the same way before the mixture happened."

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

The intermarrying stopped about 2,000 years ago and Indian caste system existing till today in the society originated.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

But before that widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even in the most isolated tribal groups.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

It also has a mention of The Manusmriti, forbidding intermarriage across castes, which was written around 100 BC.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

And once the caste system was established, it became genetically effective, and mixing across groups became very rare.

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

“Study also explains high incidence of genetic and population-specific diseases that is characteristic of present-day India

[Manish Kalra @ManishKalra]

is likely to have increased only in the last few thousand years when groups in India started following strict endogamous marriage,”