PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vagheesh M. Narasimhan
AU  - Nick Patterson
AU  - Priya Moorjani
AU  - Iosif Lazaridis
AU  - Mark Lipson
AU  - Swapan Mallick
AU  - Nadin Rohland
AU  - Rebecca Bernardos
AU  - Alexander M. Kim
AU  - Nathan Nakatsuka
AU  - Iñigo Olalde
AU  - Alfredo Coppa
AU  - James Mallory
AU  - Vyacheslav Moiseyev
AU  - Janet Monge
AU  - Luca M. Olivieri
AU  - Nicole Adamski
AU  - Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht
AU  - Francesca Candilio
AU  - Olivia Cheronet
AU  - Brendan J. Culleton
AU  - Matthew Ferry
AU  - Daniel Fernandes
AU  - Beatriz Gamarra
AU  - Daniel Gaudio
AU  - Mateja Hajdinjak
AU  - Éadaoin Harney
AU  - Thomas K. Harper
AU  - Denise Keating
AU  - Ann Marie Lawson
AU  - Megan Michel
AU  - Mario Novak
AU  - Jonas Oppenheimer
AU  - Niraj Rai
AU  - Kendra Sirak
AU  - Viviane Slon
AU  - Kristin Stewardson
AU  - Zhao Zhang
AU  - Gaziz Akhatov
AU  - Anatoly N. Bagashev
AU  - Bauryzhan Baitanayev
AU  - Gian Luca Bonora
AU  - Tatiana Chikisheva
AU  - Anatoly Derevianko
AU  - Enshin Dmitry
AU  - Katerina Douka
AU  - Nadezhda Dubova
AU  - Andrey Epimakhov
AU  - Suzanne Freilich
AU  - Dorian Fuller
AU  - Alexander Goryachev
AU  - Andrey Gromov
AU  - Bryan Hanks
AU  - Margaret Judd
AU  - Erlan Kazizov
AU  - Aleksander Khokhlov
AU  - Egor Kitov
AU  - Elena Kupriyanova
AU  - Pavel Kuznetsov
AU  - Donata Luiselli
AU  - Farhod Maksudov
AU  - Christopher Meiklejohn
AU  - Deborah Merrett
AU  - Roberto Micheli
AU  - Oleg Mochalov
AU  - Zahir Muhammed
AU  - Samariddin Mustafokulov
AU  - Ayushi Nayak
AU  - Rykun M. Petrovna
AU  - Davide Pettener
AU  - Richard Potts
AU  - Dmitry Razhev
AU  - Stefania Sarno
AU  - Kulyan Sikhymbaeva
AU  - Sergey M. Slepchenko
AU  - Nadezhda Stepanova
AU  - Svetlana Svyatko
AU  - Sergey Vasilyev
AU  - Massimo Vidale
AU  - Dmitriy Voyakin
AU  - Antonina Yermolayeva
AU  - Alisa Zubova
AU  - Vasant S. Shinde
AU  - Carles Lalueza-Fox
AU  - Matthias Meyer
AU  - David Anthony
AU  - Nicole Boivin
AU  - Kumarasamy Thangaraj
AU  - Douglas J. Kennett
AU  - Michael Frachetti
AU  - Ron Pinhasi
AU  - David Reich
TI  - The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia
AID  - 10.1101/292581
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 292581
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/31/292581.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/31/292581.full
AB  - The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations has been unclear because of an absence of ancient DNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from 362 ancient individuals, including the first from eastern Iran, Turan (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), Bronze Age Kazakhstan, and South Asia. Our data reveal a complex set of genetic sources that ultimately combined to form the ancestry of South Asians today. We document a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE). These Steppe communities mixed genetically with peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) whom they encountered in Turan (primarily descendants of earlier agriculturalists of Iran), but there is no evidence that the main BMAC population contributed genetically to later South Asians. Instead, Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout the 2nd millennium BCE, and we show that they mixed with a more southern population that we document at multiple sites as outlier individuals exhibiting a distinctive mixture of ancestry related to Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gathers. We call this group Indus Periphery because they were found at sites in cultural contact with the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and along its northern fringe, and also because they were genetically similar to post-IVC groups in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. By co-analyzing ancient DNA and genomic data from diverse present-day South Asians, we show that Indus Periphery-related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia—consistent with the idea that the Indus Periphery individuals are providing us with the first direct look at the ancestry of peoples of the IVC—and we develop a model for the formation of present-day South Asians in terms of the temporally and geographically proximate sources of Indus Periphery-related, Steppe, and local South Asian hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. Our results show how ancestry from the Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age, and identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.One Sentence Summary Genome wide ancient DNA from 357 individuals from Central and South Asia sheds new light on the spread of Indo-European languages and parallels between the genetic history of two sub-continents, Europe and South Asia.