The Siddis' Relationship to Africa through Genetic Lens

 As we dig deeper and understand more about the Siddis, a common confusion that seems to cloud often, is the precision as to where they originated from. This part of the blog aims to shed light on their diverse ancestry and help understand their story better from an ethnohistorical and biological perspective.

Over time the Siddis have experienced quite a few cultural changes because of their constant moving and mixing with different populations. These admixtures within populations complicate the process of tracing the ancestry of the Siddi population.
Through the genetic use of autosomal markers, researchers having conducted various experiments on the genome of various Siddi populations, have come to a gathered conclusion that the majority Siddi population of the subcontinent have inherited ancestry from the Africans, Indians, and Europeans (Portuguese).

The Siddis are genetically most close to the African race, the Bantu tribes of the south, in specific. The Indian part of the ancestry however is a little more complicated than that. It has been shown through studies that the Indian population has ancestry from two highly divergent groups. Namely, the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI). The ANI population is closely related to the West Eurasians, whereas the ASI population on the other hand shows no trace of influences or admixtures from other populations, genetically.

In addition to that, the researchers also proposed two models which were likely to fit the Siddi ancestry. One, was the African+European+ANI model, whereas, the other, was the African+European+ASI model. However, they found that the ANI model fit the Siddi ancestry better than the ASI model, thus proving that the Siddi population has ancestry from the Western-Eurasian (Portuguese) side, in addition to their African and ASI ancestry.

Sources
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929711002230
2. https://bioone.org/journals/Human-Biology/volume-80/issue-3/1534-6617-80.3.251/Gene

tic-Affinities-of-the-Siddis-of-South-India--An/10.3378/1534-6617-80.3.251.short

3. http://www.focusongeography.org/publications/articles/siddi/index.html 

- Aranya