Tajik.HO 23andme format 12 samples

The Tajiks are an Iranian-speaking people of Central Asia, mainly found in Tajikistan, eastern Uzbekistan, and northern Afghanistan. They are among the region’s most ancient populations, descending from the Eastern Iranian peoples of antiquity—particularly the Sogdians and Bactrians. Their language, Tajik, is a Persian dialect, linking them culturally and linguistically to the wider Persian world.

The ancestral Tajik lands once hosted two great civilizations: Bactria and Sogdiana. Bactria, centered on modern Balkh in northern Afghanistan, flourished as a wealthy kingdom and trading hub from the 2nd millennium BCE, later becoming part of the Achaemenid and Greco-Bactrian realms. Sogdiana, with its famed cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, thrived as a crossroads of the Silk Road, shaping the commerce and culture of Central Asia.

In the medieval era, these regions became bastions of Persian learning and art. Under the Samanid dynasty (from 9th to 10th centuries AD), with its capital at Bukhara, Persian culture experienced a golden age that cemented the Tajik identity. This period of Persianization explains why modern Tajiks speak a Western Iranian tongue, unlike their Eastern Iranian ancestors, the Sogdians and Bactrians.

For this video, I’ve prepared the raw genomes of 12 ethnic Tajiks from the Human Origins Dataset. I used my tools, such as trait predictor and mageplot, and academic tools, such as admixtools 1 and 2, to analyze their genomes.