Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

by Tony Joseph

in many parts of Europe today, the percentage of the original hunter-gatherer ancestry has gone down to single digits, though there are some exceptions in northern Europe. In India, by contrast, the ancestry of the First Indians still constitutes between 50 and 65 per cent for most population groups when you look at the whole genome (as opposed to either Y-chromosome or mtDNA separately). This difference is also visible in language distribution: 94 per cent of western Europeans today speak an Indo-European language while only about 75 per cent of Indians do so. Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 20 per cent of Indians, while western Europe has no non-Indo-European language with a similar strong presence.