October 14th, 2018 2:37 AM
—–The history of Southeast Asia, or perhaps more accurately the quasi-history of Southeast Asia since so many of the records are from China and elsewhere, indicates strong Indian influence in the period before 1000 AD. The standard model is that this is cultural diffusion. And by and large Southeast Asian peoples are are mostly indigenous. But, a non-trivial minority of their ancestry is recent, but pre-colonial, gene flow from the Indian subcontinent. Additionally, the imprint is easier to see in the Y chromosome than the mtDNA. The legends of marriages between Indian Brahmins and native princesses in places like Cambodia probably do reflect something real in the dynamics of the early Indianization.—