Tibeto-Burman populations of Bangladesh had Indian ancestry

A new study has found that the Tibeto-Burman populations of Bangladesh carry substantially higher mainland Indian ancestry component than either northeast Indian or southeast Asian Tibeto-Burman speaking people.
"We carried out a detailed genetic analysis of three major tribal populations (Chakma, Marma and Tripura) from Bangladesh, who speak a branch of Tibeto-Burman language and compared them with our large data-set from India and Southeast Asia," Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) said here.
"We observed that the Bangladesh Tibeto-Burman populations carry substantially higher mainland Indian ancestry component than either northeast Indian or southeast Asian Tibeto-Burmans speaking people," he said.

A team of scientists led by Thangaraj, in collaboration with Nurun Nahar Gazi Sultana and her team from University of Dhaka, have studied the origin and affinity of Bangladeshi tribal populations for the first time using all genetic systems (mtDNA, Y chromosome and autosomes) that are used for population-based studies.
Bangladesh is bordered by eastern India in west, northeastern India in north and east and it also shares a narrow boundary with Myanmar on the southeastern rim.
Its geographical placement epitomised it as an important linguistic contact zone, Thangaraj said.
Although the Indian populations inhabited around Bangladesh have been fairly studied, the tribal populations living in the coastal as well as Chittagong hill tract regions have not been studied to understand their origin and relationship, he said.