I’ve been looking at the data from the recent Munda paper. Standard stuff, admixture, treemix, and f-statistics.The northern Munda samples were collected in Bangladesh. So I thought: I can test the hypothesis that the East Asian ancestry in Bangladesh is to a large part Santhal. After looking at it every which way, I think that in fact, the Munda may not have ever been very populous in much of northeast India. The Santhal is just not a good donor population to Bengalis, at least not when comparing mixes such as Dai + Tamil.

Additionally, the Santhal are really not that well modeled by mixing South Asians with any particular Southeast Asian group, though it works. I think that’s suggestive of the possibility that the Austro-Asiatic group which gave rise to the Munda don’t exist in their current form anywhere in Southeast Asia. Additionally, the Lao samples that are provided in the new paper I think may have Indian ancestry via admixture from Austro-Asiatic Mon or Khmer groups.

Basically, there is so much bidirectional gene flow that I think it’s really hard to get a grip on what’s going on. Additionally, the Burmese and northeast Indian populations (e.g., the Mizos) clearly have a strand of ancestry that derives from relatively recent migrants that came down from the region of eastern Tibet, and perhaps Sichuan or even further north. And this component shows up in Bengalis as well.

On top of this, there is the “Australo-Melanesian” substrate that is present all across Southeast Asia, and probably was present in modern southern China in the early Holocene, which has distant affinities with the “Ancient Ancestral South Indians” (AASI).

At this point, I keep my own counsel. But there may be an interesting story to tell related to how efficient and effective different forms of agriculture were, and how that interplayed with genes and language.