Molecular genetic perspectives on the Indian social structure

For historical reasons, the Indian subcontinent is endowed with enormous ethnic, cultural, and genetic heterogeneity of its people. In the process of understanding the dynamics and sociocultural complexity of Indian society, anthropologists have come up with a number of hypotheses involving certain social/cultural processes that may modulate evolutionary processes. In this article, we outline some of those hypotheses and present molecular genetic evidences, both published and unpublished, to demonstrate the effects of those social/cultural processes. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.