Understanding South Asia

Geography Chronology Political divisions DNA Migrations Census Peoples Power Names Faiths Epics

DNA

Fifty thousand years of who came, and how they mixed, as the ancient and modern genomes record it. Choose a story; step through it above the map, or press the space bar to play.

The streams

Ancestry streams are modelled from genomes (Narasimhan 2019, Shinde 2019, Moorjani 2013, Kerdoncuff 2025 and others); their dates are model estimates and their paths join the sites the papers name, not traced journeys. A component such as "Steppe-related ancestry" describes shared descent over thousands of years, not a person or a community. The atlas never maps ancestry onto caste, rank or religion.

Every fact in this atlas carries a source and a grade. Recorded items are drawn solid; tradition and argument are dashed and named.