THE first humans to arrive in India from Africa about 65,000 years ago left a genetic “footprint” still visible in the DNA of the country’s tribes.
Anthropologists have hotly debated the country’s genetic make-up because of its complex history of migrations. So Vadlamudi Raghavendra Rao of the in Kolkata and his team analysed 2768 samples of mitochondrial DNA – inherited only through our mothers – from 24 tribes all across the Indian subcontinent (BMC Evolutionary Biology, ).
The team looked for a set of mutations called the M2 haplogroup, which is unique to India and…
