Behar Paniya

Behar as in the Behar et al paper/dataset and not the Indian state of Bihar. The Behar dataset contains 4 samples of Paniya, which apparently is a Dravidian language of some Scheduled Tribes in Kerala.

I had always been suspicious of those four samples since one of them had admixture proportions similar to other South Indians but the other three were like Southeast Asians.

When I got the Austroasiatic dataset, I found out that they had the four Paniyas from Behar et al in their data. However, only one of those four was the same as Behar. The other three were different. So I now had 7 Paniya samples.

Let's look at the K=12 admixture results for these Paniyas.

Behar's GSM536916 was the one which was the same as Austroasiatic's D36 and it has regular South Indian results. The other three Behar Paniyas are very Southeast Asian (yellow in the plot) while the three Paniyas from Austroasiatic data are similar to GSM536916/D36.

Since the Austroasiatic Paniya samples originated from Behar et al, I guess at some point before the Behar data being submitted to the GEO database the Paniyas got mislabeled.

I am now excluding the four Paniyas from Behar et al dataset and only using the Paniya samples from Austroasiatic dataset.

6 Comments.

  1. I think you should break this matter to Behar.