A cave 4,000 meters up in the Himalayas preserves an unexpected ancestry story: a community with a roughly 50–50 blend related to North Indians and ancient Tibetans.

Researchers recovered DNA from 10 people at Old Lady Spider Cave in Ladakh, northern India. Seven had enough data for the main ancestry analyses. They lived about 1,500 years ago and shared a remarkably similar ancestry profile.

Roughly half their ancestry is related to populations represented today by North Indian groups, including Dogra and several Brahmin reference samples. Those are genetic comparisons—not evidence that the ancient migrants belonged to those modern communities or castes.

The other half is related to ancient Tibetans. The exact source remains unsampled: no available Tibetan reference perfectly matches it. Small extra components in the models do not prove a separate migration from the Bronze Age Tarim Basin.

Their ancestors had mixed much earlier. DNA segment patterns date the event to about 1,343 ± 140 years before these people lived—roughly 2,800 years ago. Contact clearly predates the Tibetan Empire. But the mixing need not have happened in Ladakh; people could have arrived after mixing elsewhere in the Himalayas.

A near-equal blend like this is uncommon in South Asia today, yet the population left a genetic legacy. One model for the Minero of Ladakh estimates 56 ± 1% ancestry represented by Old Ladakh and 44 ± 1% represented by Dogra. That is a model using reference populations, not proof that 56% of their family tree comes from the people in this cave.

The study reveals an ancient connection across the Himalayas—not one ancestry formula for everyone living there today.

📚 Source: Patterson et al. (2026), Science Advances
Ancient genomes from Ladakh reveal 2800-year-old admixture between Tibetans and South Asians

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