Therefore, to gain a more comprehensive view on ancient ancestry and genetic affinities of the Gond with the neighbouring populations speaking Indo-European, Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages, we have studied four geographically distinct groups of Gond using high-resolution data. All the Gond groups share a common ancestry with a certain degree of isolation and differentiation. Our allele frequency and haplotype-based analyses reveal that the Gond share substantial genetic ancestry with the Indian Austroasiatic (ie, Munda) groups, rather than with the other Dravidian groups to whom they are most closely related linguistically.

Unlike the caste populations in India, there are very few tribes with total population sizes ranging in millions. Among all the central Indian tribes, Gond is the most populous tribe and has a well-defined clan structure.8 With a population size of over 12 million, they are mainly found in eastern central India. The time of the existence of Gond in the subcontinent is not known with certainty. However, they are mentioned in the epic Ramayana, and four of their kingdoms are dated to between 1300 and 1600 AD.17 By the medieval period, these kingdoms had assimilated so much religious and cultural influence from neighbouring Hindu culture that the Gond societies had become a socially more hierarchically structured tribal population.

Different groups of the extended Gond population speak Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo and Manda, all languages of the South Central branch of the Dravidian language family.8^, 17 Linguistically, the Gondi–Manda subgroup shares its most recent common ancestry with Telugu that is mainly spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, including Telangana.

Ethnographical studies by Robert von Heine-Geldern20^, 21 had suggested that a subset of Dravidian populations represented by the various Gond linguistic communities as well as the local ancestral component of the Munda populations collectively represent an older layer of peopling of the Indian subcontinent. This theory was adopted by Grigson,22 who proposed that the Gonds were an originally ‘pre-Dravidian’ or what he called ‘proto-Australoid’ population that had been modified by considerable Dravidian element. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf conducted studies on the Gond and their closely allied Dravidian linguistic communities, which led him to view these peoples as remnants of an earlier primordial population that had been linguistically assimilated.

Work on the mitochondrial DNA of Gond population groups has shown that the majority of their maternal gene pool falls into South Asian specific clades with a few haplotypes belonging to the haplogroups M2, R7, M40 and M45 shared with the Austroasiatic populations. The Y chromosomal and autosomal studies have suggested their deeply rooted South Asian ancestry.

However, previous genetic studies relied on either low-resolution data or studied only a single Gond group. Therefore, in the present study, we extracted genome-wide SNP data (>95 K), of 18 Gond samples from two recent publications. These 18 samples represent four distinct geographical locations, spanning three Indian states: three samples each of Gond1 and Gond3 from Madhya Pradesh and five samples each of Gond2 from Chhattisgarh and Gond4 from Uttar Pradesh . The data first explored the relation of the different Gond groups in respect to a wider Eurasian context and then evaluated their genomic diversity at the intra and inter-population level. Furthermore, evaluation of the population interaction and gene flow across the overlapping linguistic phyla in this region.