Two Genetic Groups
Research from Harvard geneticist Priya Moorjani suggests that all people in India trace their heritage to two genetic groups: An ancestral North Indian group originally from the Near East and the Caucasus region, and another South Indian group that was more closely related to the Black people on the Andaman Islands (shown above) off the coast of the sub-continent. Today, everyone in India has DNA from both groups in different proportions, according to Moorjani.
Indo-Aryan Take Over
Twenty-eight percent of the Indian population is identified as Dravidian (above), among the oldest inhabitants of India. They primarily live in South India, where people tend to have darker skin. However, it is believed by some linguists that the Dravidians lived all across the Indian sub-continent before a group of foreigners from the North, known as Indo-Aryans, migrated over various periods of time, took over and, as some scholars argue, eventually established the caste system to suppress the indigenous groups.
