Ancestry-Specific Analyses Reveal Differential Demographic Histories and Opposite Selective Pressures in Modern South Asian Populations

Abstract

Genetic variation in contemporary South Asian populations follows a northwest to southeast decreasing cline of shared West Eurasian ancestry. A growing body of ancient DNA evidence is being used to build increasingly more realistic models of demographic changes in the last few thousand years. Through high-quality modern genomes, these models can be tested for gene and genome level deviations. Using local ancestry deconvolution and masking, we reconstructed population-specific surrogates of the two main ancestral components for more than 500 samples from 25 South Asian populations and showed our approach to be robust via coalescent simulations. Our f3 and f4 statistics-based estimates reveal ..