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. 2017 Apr;25(4):493-498.
doi: 10.1038/ejhg.2016.198. Epub 2017 Feb 1.

Reconstructing the population history of the largest tribe of India: the Dravidian speaking Gond

Gyaneshwer Chaubey  1 , Rakesh Tamang  2   3 , Erwan Pennarun  1 , Pavan Dubey  4 , Niraj Rai  5 , Rakesh Kumar Upadhyay  6 , Rajendra Prasad Meena  7 , Jayanti R Patel  4 , George van Driem  8 , Kumarasamy Thangaraj  5 , Mait Metspalu  1 , Richard Villems  1   9
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Reconstructing the population history of the largest tribe of India: the Dravidian speaking Gond

Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al. Eur J Hum Genet. 2017 Apr.

Erratum in

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Principal component analysis (PCA) of the combined autosomal SNP data of individuals from Eurasia. The inset picture showed the plot of mean eigen values of Gond and their genetic neighbours. (b) Plot of population-wise unsupervised ADMIXTURE analysis (K = 9) of world population with a zoom-in of various Indian populations including Gonds. The colour codes of the Indian populations have been given according to their linguistic affiliation shown in Figure 1a. Bhil_GUJ, Bhils from Gujarat; Bhil_MP, Bhils from Madhya Pradesh; Munda_N, North Munda group; Munda_S, South Munda group.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(a) Plot of mean sharing of chunk counts donated by Eurasian populations to the Gonds; (b) plot of shared drift f3 analysis. The values were calculated as f3 = (X, Y; Yoruba), where X was another Indian population and Y a different Gond group. The colour codes of the populations followed their linguistic affiliation. Indian_TB, Indian Tibeto-Burman; SEA, Southeast Asian.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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