Tamil merchant in ancient Mesopotamia

Malliya Gounder Palanichamy; Bikash Mitra; Monojit Debnath; Suraksha Agrawal; Tapas Kumar Chaudhuri; Ya-Ping Zhang

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0109331

Tamil merchant in ancient Mesopotamia

PLoS One. 2014 Oct 9;9(10):e109331. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0109331. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Malliya Gounder Palanichamy¹, Bikash Mitra², Monojit Debnath³, Suraksha Agrawal⁴, Tapas Kumar Chaudhuri⁵, Ya-Ping Zhang⁶

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bioresources, Yunnan University, Kunming, China.
² Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bioresources, Yunnan University, Kunming, China; Cellular Immunology Laboratory, University of North Bengal, Raja Rammohanpur, Darjeeling, India.
³ State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China.
⁴ Department of Medical Genetics, Sanjay Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, India.
⁵ Cellular Immunology Laboratory, University of North Bengal, Raja Rammohanpur, Darjeeling, India.
⁶ Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bioresources, Yunnan University, Kunming, China; State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China.

Abstract

Recent analyses of ancient Mesopotamian mitochondrial genomes have suggested a genetic link between the Indian subcontinent and Mesopotamian civilization. There is no consensus on the origin of the ancient Mesopotamians. They may be descendants of migrants, who founded regional Mesopotamian groups like that of Terqa or they may be merchants who were involved in trans Mesopotamia trade. To identify the Indian source population showing linkage to the ancient Mesopotamians, we screened a total of 15,751 mitochondrial DNAs (11,432 from the literature and 4,319 from this study) representing all major populations of India. Our results although suggest that south India (Tamil Nadu) and northeast India served as the source of the ancient Mesopotamian mtDNA gene pool, mtDNA of these ancient Mesopotamians probably contributed by Tamil merchants who were involved in the Indo-Roman trade.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Asian People / genetics*
Civilization
DNA, Mitochondrial / genetics*
Gene Pool
Genetic Variation / genetics*
Genetics, Population / methods
Geography
Haplotypes / genetics*
Humans
India
Mesopotamia
Phylogeny

Substances

DNA, Mitochondrial

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Yunnan University and the Yunnan provincial Science and Technology Department, as well as from grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (31060156 and 31240018). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.