How “Aryan” Are South Asians?

A follow-up to the India post, testing its qpAdm design and a Sarazm alternative in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Haryana

My previous post asked how much ancestry related to Bronze Age Steppe pastoralists is present among modern Indian groups. It focused on the 140-group Indian-cline analysis published by Narasimhan and colleagues, then reconstructed their three-source West model in current AADR data.

That left an obvious regional question. What happens when the same three-source design is applied to the Dhaka Bengali panel, eleven Pakistan panels, including two Punjabi cohorts, and Ror from Haryana? These groups were outside the previous post’s primary India comparison or were raised by readers afterward.

This follow-up runs two linked tests. First, I transfer the India post’s three-source model—an Onge-based proxy for deep South Asian ancestry, the Indus-Periphery-West genome and 35 Bronze Age Steppe individuals—to 13 regional panels on one common SNP set, using the same comparison populations as before. For four panels with substantial East Asian-related ancestry, I also test a prespecified four-source extension. Second, I repeat the regional experiment after replacing Indus-Periphery-West with the Sarazm farmer-related source proposed by Kerdoncuff and colleagues.

The transferred three-source model rejects for all 13 regional panels, although an East-Asian-aware version fits the Bengali panel from Dhaka. The Sarazm alternative produces accepted models for Bengali, Kalash, two Punjabi panels and Ror, while most other Pakistani panels still reject. Below I report every pass and failure, and show how much the inferred Steppe-related proportions depend on the western source used.