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Re:Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry by ImaCake on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @06:59PM (#34990120)
> the original population was partly / mostly replaced

Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.

Re:Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry by Jedd on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @07:46PM (#34990479)
You're right. I should have chosen better phrasing - perhaps gene pool instead of population, and diluted (but that still seems awkward) rather than replaced.

Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations? I don't know, TFA doesn't hint, and I suspect we don't have an abundance of natural experiments to compare with.

Re:Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry by ImaCake on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @08:22PM (#34990736)
> Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations?

I am not sure either. However, we do have a lot of natural experiments (and lab experiments) to explore this.

The 11% number comes from a clustering analysis. The user supplies k = number of ancestry groups, and the algorithm estimates proportion of genetics specific to each of k ancestry groups. So basically fancy k-means clustering. I don't know how robust it is and I would suspect a biased estimate.

As for over time... also complex. But I would imagine the best models would use exponetial distributions or similar as their basis (i.e. initially fast decrease in percentage followed by a slower rate of loss until equilibrium is reached).