Descent from Royals, Sages, Saints [ South Asia ]

[thejkhan]

I was having this conversation with agent_lime in the "misconceptions" thread -- don't want to destroy that thread, so moving it here.

Other is some Indian muslim families I have known claim that their ancestor came to spread Islam to South Asia. Even when that is true it is a few people out of hundreds.

Most people are generally very skeptic when they hear a South Asian, Muslim or Hindu, claiming descent from some royal lineage, some popular Hindu sage or Muslim saint. The reasoning goes "how can so many people claim descent from same guy? Most must be fake, except a few."

It's totally possible.

Let's do some math.

Assuming each generation is 30 years, a person in his prime in 1400 AD, having 3 children (surviving to adulthood) each generation onward (constant rate) will have 3,486,784,401 descendants today. That's 3.48 billion.

... at a rate of 4 surviving adult children per generation, the number will be 1.0995116 Trillion.

Obviously, population bottlenecks (disease, famine, drought, invasions) ensure it's far less than that.

--

It's OK to be skeptic for the right reason, like lack of evidence of ancestry. But cannot assume a person living centuries ago will have only a handful of living descendents. It's going to be either 0 or more than hundreds of thousands.

[MonkeyDLuffy]

I was having this conversation with agent_lime in the "misconceptions" thread -- don't want to destroy that thread, so moving it here.



Most people are generally very skeptic when they hear a South Asian, Muslim or Hindu, claiming descent from some royal lineage, some popular Hindu sage or Muslim saint. The reasoning goes "how can so many people claim descent from same guy? Most must be fake, except a few."

It's totally possible.

Let's do some math.

Assuming each generation is 30 years, a person in his prime in 1400 AD, having 3 children (surviving to adulthood) each generation onward (constant rate) will have 3,486,784,401 descendants today. That's 3.48 billion.

... at a rate of 4 surviving adult children per generation, the number will be 1.0995116 Trillion.

Obviously, population bottlenecks (disease, famine, drought, invasions) ensure it's far less than that.

--

It's OK to be skeptic for the right reason, like lack of evidence of ancestry. But cannot assume a person living centuries ago will have only a handful of living descendents. It's going to be either 0 or more than hundreds of thousands.

If it was there, they all would get each other as matches, as well as those west asian pops the said muslim ancestor came from. Even nmonte is able to pick up if there's something exotic.

Let's not rule out they'd have the Ydna of said muslim ancestor foriegn to the subcontinent which we have rarely seen in majority of Muslim users who posted here. Their Paternal halogroups were local.

I agree with agentlime, the people with actual ancestor are way less in number. I swear every second mohajjir person I meet from karachi is syed. My family is Sikh, we converted from whatever we followed before, for a reason. A lot of families converted to Islam or Christianity for same reason. Either it was forced, or their position in society made them accept other religion.

The elite muslim families seem to have more actual foreign ancestry than normal folks like us.

[thejkhan]

Even nmonte is able to pick up if there's something exotic.

Would it pick up genetic signature of a foreign ancestor living 600 years ago? If that's someone's only foreign ancestor, they are still going to be 100% South Asian autosomally.

Let's not rule out they'd have the Ydna of said muslim ancestor foriegn to the subcontinent which we have rarely seen in majority of Muslim users who posted here. Their Paternal halogroups were local.

I'm not talking about paternal ancestry only. That's just a single line of your ancestors, out of many.

Also, paternal haplogroups existing in small amounts can easily go extinct due to drift.

E.g. - All Koraga tribals can probably claim ancestry to some Steppe guy (other than their mostly AASI ancestors). R1a among them is extremely rare, still present. They are highly homogenous and endogamous, meaning everyone share the same ancient ancestors. Their Steppe ancestor claim cannot be disregarded based on y-dna haplo frequency.

[thejkhan]

I agree with agentlime, the people with actual ancestor are way less in number. I swear every second mohajjir person I meet from karachi is syed.

"Syed" is an entirely different topic. They are claiming ancestry from people who have never been in South Asia. Most Syeds are high caste Hindu converts.

[MonkeyDLuffy]

Would it pick up genetic signature of a foreign ancestor living 600 years ago? If that's someone's only foreign ancestor, they are still going to be 100% South Asian autosomally.



I'm not talking about paternal ancestry only. That's just a single line of your ancestors, out of many.

Also, paternal haplogroups existing in small amounts can easily go extinct due to drift.

E.g. - All Koraga tribals can probably claim ancestry to some Steppe guy (other than their mostly AASI ancestors). R1a among them is extremely rare, still present. They are highly homogenous and endogamous, meaning everyone share the same ancient ancestors. Their Steppe ancestor claim cannot be disregarded based on y-dna haplo frequency.

Yes the genetic signature can be picked even as far as that. I get matches from east Europe which is based on shared steppe from thousands of years ago. 600 years is not far fetched. It's actually pretty recent in genetic terms. People are welcome to try nmonte, we can compare them with ancients, anything foreign will stand out.

ANE folks were R, and ANE is found even in tribals in the subcontinent. Steppe came to the subcontinent 2-3k years ago. That's more than enough for steppe to get diluted in tribals, but yet tribals do show steppe signals on nmonte. So yes 600 years ago ancestry can be easily checked

[tipirneni]

You are not accounting for Male & Female, & child bearing ones percent. It will be not more than in lakhs if there are no natural calamities & war

[thejkhan]

Yes the genetic signature can be picked even as far as that. I get matches from east Europe which is based on shared steppe from thousands of years ago. 600 years is not far fetched. It's actually pretty recent in genetic terms. People are welcome to try nmonte, we can compare them with ancients, anything foreign will stand out.

1000 (or 1500 or 2000) years ago most of your ancestors had Steppe ancestry. That's why you can still detect Steppe in nMonte.

If one of your ancestor had exotic ancestry, East Asian or SSA, that long ago, it will not show up in nMonte. Drift.

Forget thousand years.

Do we have anyone here with a single European or ME ancestor in the 1700s, still having detectable traces of foreign ancestry showing up in any calculator?

[agent_lime]

1000 (or 1500 or 2000) years ago most of your ancestors had Steppe ancestry. That's why you can still detect Steppe in nMonte.

If one of your ancestor had exotic ancestry, East Asian or SSA, that long ago, it will not show up in nMonte. Drift.

Forget thousand years.

Do we have anyone here with a single European or ME ancestor in the 1700s, still having detectable traces of foreign ancestry showing up in any calculator?

Direct male lineage should keep the haplotypes. Most folks that come here do not show up with Iranian/ Turkik or ME groups. The elite groups marry within families and usually keep the genetic markers well. There aren't just a lot of them. Majority of families lie, or at best had 1 foreign ancestor generations ago. A lot of the foreign ancestors were actually Pashtuns and not Turks. Pashtuns would commonly come down to trade and spread religion. Old Delhi has folks with Pashtun bloodlines, and I mostly believe those folks. Big no on the Syeds, Sheikhs along with the I am Iranian, Turk, ME. Those people are probably only a few million(and I am being generous with this number) out of the 500 million muslims in South Asia.

[misanthropy]

My maternal cousins with the Jilani bloodline actually have an artifact or two that is said to belong to Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani I believe. I won't give any specifics about said artifacts due to privacy, so every year they would hold this Sufi ceremony called Giyarwee Shareef (I had to google the spelling) and people would be blessed by touching their head forehead against and kissing said items. They are carefully wrapped in layers and layers of cloth and we read certain Salawaat while unwrapping them. A lot of people on that side, usually if they are Jilani on both sides, do have the rough phenotype that would give credence to such descent (he was born in the Gilan province of Iran, but was descended from Syeds who lived in Baghdad).

Edit: Other than getting my mom tested (seems unlikey) who is half Jilani, would anyone be able to help me see on G25 if I have legit Iraqi/Persian type descent that isn't mistaken for my paternal Yemeni descent?

[agent_lime]

My maternal cousins with the Jilani bloodline actually have an artifact or two that is said to belong to Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani I believe. I won't give any specifics about said artifacts due to privacy, so every year they would hold this Sufi ceremony called Giyarwee Shareef (I had to google the spelling) and people would be blessed by touching their head forehead against and kissing said items. They are carefully wrapped in layers and layers of cloth and we read certain Salawaat while unwrapping them. A lot of people on that side, usually if they are Jilani on both sides, do have the rough phenotype that would give credence to such descent (he was born in the Gilan province of Iran, but was descended from Syeds who lived in Baghdad).

Edit: Other than getting my mom tested (seems unlikey) who is half Jilani, would anyone be able to help me see on G25 if I have legit Iraqi/Persian type descent that isn't mistaken for my paternal Yemeni descent?

Do you have g25 coords?