{"id":39151,"date":"2011-03-28T12:17:25","date_gmt":"2011-03-28T20:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10576"},"modified":"2011-03-28T12:17:25","modified_gmt":"2011-03-28T20:17:25","slug":"genetics-as-the-myth-buster-indian-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/03\/28\/genetics-as-the-myth-buster-indian-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Genetics as the myth buster: Indian edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harappadna.org\/\">Zack Ajmal<\/a> posts a new update to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harappadna.org\/\">Harappa Ancestry Project<\/a> he appends some data to his <a href=\"https:\/\/spreadsheets0.google.com\/ccc?hl=en&amp;key=ta8x8zzkuuK6SjWNEcKIlWQ&amp;hl=en#gid=0\">ethnic database<\/a>. This sends me to Wikipedia, because <strong>how many people are supposed to know what a &#8220;Muslim Rawther&#8221; means?<\/strong> Well, if you are a Muslim Rawther, and perhaps from Southern India, you would. But South Asian ethno-linguistic categories and hierarchies are notoriously Byzantine, and I have difficulty making sense of them. This isn&#8217;t too surprising in my case, as my family&#8217;s background is relatively mixed in the very recent past (e.g., Hindus and Muslims, and people of various caste backgrounds), so we&#8217;re not the sort who can go at length about our pure ancestry and all that stuff. Unfortunately, Wikipedia isn&#8217;t always useful, because the people editing the entries on particular South Asian ethnic groups are often people from those ethnic groups, so you get a lot of extraneous information, and a particular slant on how awesome and high achieving the group (also, sometimes there&#8217;s funny stuff about how notoriously good looking that particular caste!). On occasion there are other sources which are informative. For example, Zack has several individuals from the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nadar_(caste)\">Tamil Nadar caste<\/a>. I know &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever Zack Ajmal posts a new update to the Harappa Ancestry Project he appends some data to his ethnic database. This sends me to Wikipedia, because how many people are supposed to know what a &#8220;Muslim Rawther&#8221; means? Well, if you are a M&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,82,786,1215,1216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-genomics","category-india-genetics","category-india-genomics","category-vishwakarma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39151"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39287,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39151\/revisions\/39287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}