A new paper in Quaternary International, Western Eurasian genetic influences in the Indonesian archipelago, confirms what has long been suspected by smaller batch data:
…To locate the primary areas of Western Eurasian genetic influence in Indonesia, we have assembled published uniparental genetic data from ∼2900 Indonesian individuals. Frequency distributions show that Western Eurasian paternal lineages are found more commonly than Western Eurasian maternal lineages. Furthermore, the origins of these paternal lineages are more diverse than the corresponding maternal lineages, predominantly tracing back to South West and South Asia, and the Indian sub-continent, respectively. Indianized kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago likely played a major role in dispersing Western Eurasian lineages, as these kingdoms overlap geographically with the current distribution of individuals carrying Western Eurasian genetic markers. Our data highlight the important role of these Western Eurasian migrants in contributing to the complexity of genetic diversity across the Indonesian archipelago today.
The table above highlights the distribution of paternal Indian lineages in several parts of Indonesia. These Y chromosomal haplotypes are found in the core of what was Majapahit. Some of these haplotypes might be due to shared ancient ancestry, but the presence of R1a means that it is more recently than the past 4,000 years, as I believe R1a is relatively intrusive into South Asia. Many of the other haplogroups are a diverse cross-section of those typical for South Asia.
The further question then is whether these date to the period of European colonialization, or to the first millennium A.D., when the first “Indianized kingdoms” arose in Southeast Asia. The fact that there is compelling evidence of old and even admixture in Cambodia, where colonialism was not as pervasive or longstanding as in maritime Southeast Asia, suggests that it can’t be chalked up to the Dutch presence, and their role as mediators for migration (more plainly, they enslaved many South Asians and moved them around the Indian ocean basin).
But the text of the paper makes some things rather clear:
…constant since the first contacts and exchanges between the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia in the late 1st millennium B.C.E., it is likely that this gene flow was particularly intense during the period of the Hindu kingdoms in Indonesia (7th to the 16th century AD). These assumptions, based on archaeological and historical data, are also in broad agreement with dating on unpublished genome-wide SNP markers from Island Southeast Asia (unpublished data).
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