This Padma Shri scientist proved India carries world's oldest DNA outside Africa

Padma Shri awardee Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj helped prove that Andaman tribes carry one of the world's oldest human genetic lineages outside Africa. His work changed how scientists understand Indian DNA, medicine, migration and ancestry. Two decades later, GenomeIndia is revealing just how much of India's genetic story the world had overlooked.

Padma Shri awardee Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj helped prove that Andaman tribes carry one of the world’s oldest human genetic lineages outside Africa. (AI-generated image)

For decades, modern medicine studied humanity through a genetic mirror that barely reflected India.

Most global DNA databases were built largely using European populations. Drug research, disease studies, risk prediction models and even ideas about ancient migration were shaped around genomes that looked nothing like most Indians.

But one scientist working from a government laboratory in Hyderabad spent much of his career challenging that picture.

This year, India awarded the Padma Shri to Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj, one of the country's leading geneticists, a CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow and former Director of Hyderabad's Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD).

What makes his story especially striking is that he built almost his entire scientific career in India. Educated at the University of Madras and trained in Indian institutions, he became living proof that world-class science does not necessarily require an Ivy League degree or a foreign laboratory.

Over the past two decades, his research has helped reshape how scientists understand both humanity's ancient migrations and India's extraordinary genetic diversity. In 2005, his team produced evidence that Indigenous communities in the Andaman Islands carried genetic lineages linked to one of humanity's earliest journeys out of Africa around 65,000 years ago.

Today, as the GenomeIndia project uncovers millions of genetic variants previously missing from global databases, many of the questions Thangaraj spent years asking are finding fresh answers.

And the implications go far beyond history textbooks.

Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj being honoured with the Padma Shri by President Draupadi Murmu (Photo: Facebook/@thangsccmb) (AI-edited image)

THE DISCOVERY THAT CHANGED A GLOBAL DEBATE

Back in 2005, Dr Thangaraj and his team at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology published a landmark paper in the journal Science.

The study focused on Indigenous Andaman tribes such as the Onge and Jarawa communities. By analysing mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the maternal line, researchers found that these groups carried an extraordinarily ancient genetic signature.

At a time when scientists were debating how modern humans spread across the world after leaving Africa, Dr Thangaraj’s conclusion stunned the scientific world.

The ancestors of the Andaman tribes likely belonged to one of the earliest groups of modern humans to leave Africa around 65,000 years ago.

This does not mean these communities are "primitive" or frozen in time. It means their genetic lineage split from other human populations extremely early and remained relatively isolated for thousands of years.

Old photo of Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj administering medical care to a tribal person in Andaman (Photo: Facebook/@thangsccmb) (AI-edited image)

In simple terms, while most of the world’s populations mixed repeatedly through migrations, invasions and intermarriages over millennia, these Andaman island communities preserved some of humanity’s oldest surviving genetic lineages found outside Africa.

That discovery became one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting the "southern coastal migration" theory. According to this idea, some of the earliest humans leaving Africa travelled along coastlines through Arabia and South Asia before spreading further across Asia and beyond.

And India sat right at the centre of that journey with an extraordinary genetic diversity found across the subcontinent.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are not just preserving tribal history; they are preserving a chapter of humanity's history.

A group of Jarawas gather on the beach in Andaman (Photo: Getty Images)

THE GENOMEINDIA PROJECT IS PROVING THE POINT

If the Andaman research changed how scientists looked at the past, the GenomeIndia project is changing how they look at the future.

In 2020, India launched the GenomeIndia Project, one of the country's biggest scientific efforts to map its genetic diversity. By sequencing genomes from people across different regions and communities, researchers aimed to build a genetic reference that finally reflects India's population rather than relying on data collected elsewhere.

The project sequenced the genomes of 9,768 individuals from 83 populations across India.

The results were staggering.

Researchers identified nearly 130 million genetic variants in total. More than 44 million of those were absent from major global databases.

Millions of those variants are lin…