The tooth of the matter

Tracing the roots of one's family interests many here in my adopted land.  The technology of the day provides valuable support in this effort--from software that helps organize and visualize family trees, to DNA databases, which makes connections that otherwise might not have been possible.

I do not have any questions about my family roots; we tell each other enough and more stories that easily go back three or four generations.  Perhaps the interest to go back only three generations comes from an internalized Vedic idea of three generations past being up somewhere in a waiting area before the oldest generation is promoted to heaven after the death.

I was, and am, far more interested in the grand narrative of how we ended up where were are from the origins in Africa.  And that is why a decade ago, I submitted my DNA to the National Geographic's Genographic Project. 

This was a project with grand ambitions.  It was "a multiyear, global initiative by National Geographic that used genetics as a tool to address anthropological questions on a global scale."  The data volunteered by people like me "helped to map world migratory patterns dating back some 150,000 years and to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of humankind’s migratory history."

I was curious how my male chromosome ended up in Pattamadai.

The report said that my ancestors "arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan."

Despite going back 30,000 years, this DNA was only a part of the second wave that reached the Subcontinent.

Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.

Of course, there are plenty of other questions that haunt my imaginations.  Did my ancestral male chromosome stay in the Indus Valley area for centuries?  When exactly did this chromosome begin to migrate towards the peninsular south?  How did my people interact with the descendants of the original settlers?

One researcher threads a needle in this piece of multi-generational cloth by focusing on the Dravidian word for tooth--like the word pallu (பல்) in Tamil--and argues that "a significant population of Indus valley civilization must have used that Proto-Dravidian tooth-word in their daily communication."

How do the Indus Civilization and the Tamil language that I grew up with fit within the 30,000 year story of my male chromosome?

There is no family tree database that can help me in this!  At least, not yet.