Genetic Kinship Among an Isolated Adi Tribe of Arunachal Pradesh: Isonymy in the Adi Panggi

Abstract

Isolated tribes in remote areas are important for genetic studies, and one such little known subtribe of the Adi tribe, namely, the Adi Panggi (Pangi) of the Upper Siang District of Arunachal Pradesh, India, was studied for surname distribution to deduce the deviation from random mating and genetic kinship between villages. The estimates of homonymy (homozygosity) vary between villages; husbands show wider variation (0.009 to 0.23) than wives (0.005 to 0.054). The remote villages of Sumsing and Sibum and Geku Town show lower entropy among husbands' surnames than among Panggi wives. The highest equivalent surname number was found among Sibum husbands (9.9), Panggi wives (12.6), and Panggi and non-Panggi wives (13.5). The estimates of unbiased random isonymy among husbands and wives together show the smallest values in Sibum (0.05) and the highest values in Sumsing and Ramku (0.16). The random and nonrandom components of the inbreeding coefficient show avoidance of inbreeding among the Panggi villages (-0.012 to -0.27) except in Sibum (0.012). Genetic kinship between villages based on the Mij distance shows different clusters of villages among husbands and wives. Both the Panggi wives and the Panggi and non-Panggi wives show a similar pattern of clustering between villages. The wide homonymy variation between villages among the patrilocal Adi Panggi indicates differential genetic kinetics among husbands and wives, avoidance of inbreeding, and female-oriented differential gene flow with little effect on the overall intervillage genetic kinship.

A Microsatellite Guided Insight into the Genetic Status of Adi, an Isolated Hunting-Gathering Tribe of Northeast India

“…They exhibit socio-cultural as well as linguistic diversity coupled with wide variation in subsistence pattern (ranging from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture). There were very few sporadic biological studies among some sub-tribes of Adi [18]–[19], [21]–[24], [32]–[36] and several of the isolated sub-tribes are yet to be investigated. This is perhaps the first ever comprehensive molecular genetic study attempted to investigate the genetic affinity and diversity among the sub-tribes of Adi and their relationship with other Tibeto-Burman tribes of India and the populations of East and Southeast Asia.…”

“…The studies were however sporadic and restricted to only few regional populations [9]–[20]. In this regard, the Tibeto-Burman speaking populations inhabiting the easternmost tip of northeast India, Arunachal Pradesh, (sharing the international border between India and Bhutan, Tibet, Myanmar) were hardly dealt with and hence there exist a dearth of population genetic studies in this region [21]–[24]. However, Arunachal Pradesh is of importance from a population genetic perspective, as this region has experienced cultural contacts and population interactions due to multitude waves of migration, during different periods, from the adjoining regions [25].…”

Lost In The Sands Of Time Somewhere North Of The Bay Of Bengal

“…Recently, population geneticists working in association with Mrs. Krithika have begun to study Tibeto-Burman populations in northeastern India, but these studies have only begun to scrape the surface. Yet these pioneering studies have already shed light on female exogamy amongst the Panggi and adjacent Tani language communities of Upper Siang such as the Pasi and Minyong (Krithika et al 2005, 2007a, Maji et al 2007, shown the relative isolation of the Panggi vis-à-vis the Galo, Mishing and Padam (Krithika et al 2007b(Krithika et al , 2008, and held promise for ultimately reconstructing distinct migration routes notwithstanding the effects of geographical contiguity, as perhaps seen in the genetic affinity for twelve microsatellites between Tibeto-Burman populations of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, setting them apart from Manipur, the Garo Hills and Sikkim (Krithika et al 2006). Recent microsatellite studies have also begun to focus on the population groups in Tibet, whereby all the Tibetan place names have invariably been rendered incorrectly into English (Kang and Li 2005, Kang et al 2007a, 2007b, Yan et al 2007.…”