Why do North Indians Look Different from South Indians? The Genetics of South Asia

before we begin let's just make one thing clear Indian is not an ethnicity not a race and definitely not a religion India is currently the second most populous country in the world behind China but it's not going to be that way for long it's predicted than a current population growth rates India will become the world's most populous country for the first time in only five years in 2022 for babies born on the earth today they probably won't ever remember a time in history when India wasn't the world's most populous country as opposed to our generation and before who always remember China as being the world's most populous country India's population currently sits at around 1.3 billion people and for perspective on how astronomically large that numbers the US currently only has about 25 percent of that number at around 300 million so for every u.s. American citizen there are over 4 Indians astonishingly when the rest of both North and South America are included India still beats them out population wise seeing how the combined population of the Americas is only around 1 billion people clearly there's a lot of people living there and it's very easy for us living in the Western world to forget just how much their population Dwarfs our own now the reason for me saying all of this is that there's an immense amount of diversity in India let alone the Indian subcontinent imagine all of the ethnic linguistic and religious diversity of the population of all of Africa stuffed into a country the size of Argentina India is obviously not a homogenous country but most people don't know just how truly diverse it is and when you include the rest of South Asia the situation gets even more complicated South Asia which is frequently referred to as the Indian subcontinent is usually defined as the countries of Bangladesh Bhutan India the Maldives Nepal Pakistan and Sri Lanka the western half of Pakistan is occasionally thought of as more Middle Eastern because their population has more in common with the Iranian speaking peoples of Afghanistan and Iran but we're going to include them with the rest of South Asia for this video India has around 11 main ethnic groups the largest of which being the Hindi speaking peoples of northern India that are very difficult to classify by ethnicity there are however hundreds maybe even thousands of smaller and much smaller ethnic groups and the entire region of South Asia but for the most part people of South Asia can be put into a few very large racial groups the first peoples to have inhabited South Asia are believed to be the Dravidians Davidians are a racial group that live in the southern portion of India and also have ethnic groups scattered in the neighboring countries they're believed to be related to the Melanesian people of the Pacific such as people from Papa New Guinea Fiji and the Australian Aborigines because of this they have features that are quite distinct from any other group of people in India the majority of the rest of the region is inhabited by speakers of indo-european languages - known as indo-aryans being unrelated to the Nazi concept of the Aryan race of course the indo-aryan people migrated into northern India around three to four thousand years ago most likely traveling through Iran and Afghanistan into the subcontinent they mixed with the native Dravidians of India but retained their distinct languages and culture which is why the indo-aryan languages of India are actually more closely related to the European languages than to the much closer geographically Dravidian languages believe it or not indo-aryan people inhabit the northern north of India all of Bangladesh the southern part of Nepal eastern Pakistan the island chain of the Maldives and the southern part of Sri Lanka there's also a small indo-aryan ethnic group called the Rohingya people that are related to the Bengal ease and bleed over into neighboring Burma but that's a topic for another day overall various Dravidian groups make up around 16% of India's population and around 13% for South Asia as a whole although this proportion is falling fast with birth rates in northern India far outpacing those in the South Dravidian people generally are much darker in skin tone and hair color than the indo-aryans to the north and have different facial features of wider noses larger lips and a more prominent brow Ridge indo-aryans mostly have lighter skin less coarse hair and more Middle Eastern sort of features now it's very important to realize that skin color and facial features are on a spectrum in South Asia meaning that anyone from any part of the region can have any of these traits and some indo-aryan people from northern India could actually be darker than some four billion people from southern India this is because of the extreme mixing that has gone on in the Indian subcontinent in the past few thousand years with pretty much all indo-aryans having at least some Dravidian ancestry and vice versa it's important to note that judging what South Asian people look like by looking at celebrities from the region will definitely not give you an accurate picture as to what the average South Asian person looks like it's actually very advantageous in the entertainment industries of India Pakistan and Bangladesh to have very fair-skinned and more European looking features so it's not uncommon to not find a single Indian actor or actress in Bollywood that has dark skin despite large portions of their people having such skin color even Nina davuluri who is famously the first person of Indian descent to win Miss America in 2014 acknowledged that she would probably not have gotten very far in Indian modelling because her skin is too dark the indo-aryan groups that are on the fringes of the subcontinent such as the Assamese in the Far Northeast of India or Nepal ease in the far north of the region generally have anywhere from 15 to 20 percent admixture from the neighboring East and Southeast Asian people since Tibet lies directly to the north of Nepal and India and Bangladesh and Assam are very close to the border of Southeast Asia there are even states in northeast India that are inhabited by tibeto-burman people or Thai speaking peoples who appear to be more related to Southeast Asians than other South Asians also western Pakistan is inhabited by the Baylock and Pashtun people two ethnic groups that are of Iranian descent being more closely related to the Persians of Iran there is also a relatively small group called the brow Hui people who are the last remaining Dravidian speaking population in all of Pakistan the rest of the country is almost entirely inhabited by indo-aryans such as the Sinti people and punjabi people the largest group in the region by far would be the Hindi speaking peoples of northern India and around 600 million people although as mentioned earlier they can be divided into many smaller sub ethnicities such as the Biharis rajasthan ease and Chattisgarh ii people and they probably wouldn't really appreciate me all that much calling them all the same ethnicity but really I'm no expert on the subject other distinct indo-aryan groups in India include the Marathas the next largest people who inhabit the state of Maharashtra which contains Mumbai Bombay the largest city in all of South Asia the Gujarati are most famous for being the main merchants and traders of India in the Bengali people who are divided between the Indian state of West Bengal and the independent country of Bangladesh with most Indian Bengalis being Hindu and most Bangladeshis being Muslim the Punjabis are tricky because nearly all of the Punjabis of Pakistan are Muslim and they far outnumber the Punjabis of India who are mostly of the Sikh faith which know is a part of Islam or Hinduism but a distinct religion of its own the main Dravidian groups are the Tamils of southern India and northern Sri Lanka the malayali people of Kerala the Telugu people of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and the Canada people that's right Canada of Khanna Tarka the two mill people in Sri Lanka have had a long and bloody conflict for independence from the Sinhalese dominated government who are actually the only indo-aryan group that is almost entirely Buddhist there's also a large minority of mixed-race people in South Asia known as the anglo-indians getting their namesake from their paternal English ancestors when the British troops were first stationed in India the late 1800s they didn't bring their families and wives since they had a life expectancy of only around 8 months and as such often had affairs and even sometimes married the native Indian women from many different parts of the country mixed-race marriages were later deemed illegal by the British government in India but by that time the damage had been done over the past couple of centuries they created their own communities intermarrying within their own group creating their own ethnic identity today they number up to 1 million people which may sound like a lot but this is only 0.1% of India's population and are scattered throughout the country with many more having moved abroad to other areas of significant South Asian Diaspora such as the UK Australia Canada the US and Southeast Asia other much smaller groups of foreign extraction in India are the zoroastrian or Parsi people who are of Persian Zoroastrian origin and de c.v people who are of South East African bantu origin and were brought to various regions of India as slaves by the Arabs and Portuguese although discrimination based on skin color has historically been quite high in the Indian subcontinent in modern India the main distinction is generally not between race or ethnicity but religion with many families actually being quite tolerant of marriages between indo-aryans and your billions yet the stigma between interfaith marriages remains at around the same since the partition of India in 1947 because of migration intermixing and assimilation the people of India and South Asia are one of the most fascinating and unique populations of the planet and one that everyone should learn about even though I probably horribly mispronounced every name in this video thanks for watching everyone there's been Mason and I'll see you next time

Channel: Masaman

Views: 4,623,414

Keywords: masaman, India, Pakistan, Genetics, DNA, Ancestry, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladesh, north india, south india, south indians, dravidians, indo-aryan, Anglo-Indian, mixed race, mixed race indians, hindi, marathi, gujarati, race, ethnicity, 23andme, 23 and me, genetics of india, indian genetics, tamil, telugu, malayali, mullu, sri lanka, nepal, south asia, north india vs south india, why do south indians look different than north indians, races of india, bollywood, indian americans, desi, NRI, british indian

Id: fc2Qcca8xkE

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2017