The Kho people: archaic Indo-Aryans

I’ve manged to get my hands on two Kho samples from Chitral, northern Pakistan, courtesy of Khana from the comments at this blog and someone named Sam Sloan. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Kho, who are Dardic-speakers and thus close linguistic relatives of the Kalasha people:

The Kho people are likely descendants of those who arrived in the region during the Indo-Aryan migration.[5] The Kho people formerly observed a form of ancient Hinduism;[6] during the Mongol invasion of India during the 1200s, many of the northern Kho converted to Islam.[7]
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The Kho people speak the Khowar language, a member of the Dardic subgroup of the Indo-Aryan language family. The ethnologists Karl Jettmar and Lennart Edelberg noted, with respect to the Khowar language, that: “Khowar, in many respects [is] the most archaic of all modern Indian languages, retaining a great part of Sanskrit case inflexion, and retaining many words in a nearly Sanskritic form.”[9]

Moreover, Chitral is near Swat, which is the location of a Bronze Age cemetery that is generally presumed to be the oldest Indo-Iranian archaeological site in South Asia. It’ll be interesting to compare the two Kho individuals to samples from this ancient burial ground if and when they’re finally published (see here and here). Meantime, this is how they compare to the Kalasha from the HGDP dataset in several of my staple genome-wide analyses:

Overall, the qpGraph trees produce almost identical results for both the Kho and Kalasha. However, on the Kho tree, the drift path leading from C to Han is zero (i.e. no genetic drift), while on the Kalasha tree it’s 18. That’s a subtle, but perhaps important difference, because it suggests that the Kho and Kalasha have somewhat different types of East Eurasian admixture.
Indeed, in the West Eurasian and world Principal Component Analyses (PCA) the Kho pull more strongly towards the Bronze Age steppe and East Asia, respectively, compared to the Kalasha. This might mean that they’ve been less isolated genetically than the Kalasha since the initial Indo-Aryan settlement of what is now northern Pakistan.
I’ve also added the Kho to the Global 10 and Basal-rich K7 datasheets (see here and here, respectively). It might be possible to investigate in more detail the differences between the Kho and Kalasha by using this output to model their ancestry with nMonte (for instance, like here).
See also…
Ancient herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe crashed into India: no ifs or buts
Descendants of ancient European (fair?) maidens in Central Asia’s highlands
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but…

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