---
title: "HarappaWorld explained: the South Asian admixture calculator and its 16 components"
description: "What HarappaWorld's S-Indian, Baloch and NE-Euro components are anchored to, why it remains the reference calculator for South Asian ancestry, and how its 2012 categories map onto what ancient DNA later proved."
canonical: https://www.ancestrify.io/blog/harappaworld-calculator-explained
date: 2026-08-31T08:12:00+00:00
author: "Andi Thomaj"
---

# HarappaWorld explained: the South Asian admixture calculator and its 16 components

HarappaWorld is the one GEDmatch admixture project with a single calculator, and the focus shows.
Zack Ajmal started the Harappa Ancestry Project in 2011 to do for South Asian ancestry what
[Dodecad](/blog/dodecad-k12b-explained) was doing for West Eurasia — collect volunteer kits,
build reference panels, and fit genomes against them with
[ADMIXTURE-based tooling](/blog/admixture-software-explained). The calculator that resulted,
usually just called HarappaWorld, has sixteen components and is still the default recommendation
for anyone with South or Central Asian ancestry on GEDmatch.

The family-wide rules apply — an optimiser over fixed profiles,
[no test and no error bars](/blog/what-is-an-admixture-calculator) — so this post is about what
the components mean and what has been learned since 2012.

## The sixteen components

S-Indian · Baloch · Caucasian · NE-Euro · SE-Asian · Siberian · NE-Asian · Papuan · American ·
Beringian · Mediterranean · SW-Asian · San · E-African · Pygmy · W-African.

For South Asian readers, the first two carry most of the story:

**S-Indian** peaks in southern Indian references and tracks the ancestry the literature now calls
AASI-related (Ancient Ancestral South Indian) — the deep indigenous lineage of the subcontinent.
No ancient AASI genome had been sequenced in 2012; the component is the calculator's modern-sample
shadow of it.

**Baloch** peaks in the Baloch and Brahui of Balochistan and is nearly the same statistical object
as Dodecad's Gedrosia. It tracks Iranian-plateau-related ancestry — the western Eurasian stream
that entered South Asia with (and before) food production. The pairing of S-Indian with Baloch is
HarappaWorld's rendering of the cline later formalised as ASI–ANI, and the 2019 ancient-DNA work
on the Indus periphery gave that cline its historical anchors: Iranian-plateau-related plus AASI
ancestry, with steppe-related ancestry layered on later —
carried disproportionately on the [NE-Euro side](/blog/how-to-measure-steppe-ancestry-percentage).

**NE-Euro** peaks in northeast European references and, in South Asian profiles, is the visible
edge of that steppe-related layer. **Caucasian**, as in every calculator of this generation,
blends what ancient DNA later split into Caucasus and Iranian-related components. The remaining
twelve components give the calculator its global reach — East and Southeast Asian, Siberian,
African and American profiles that mostly serve as sinks for ancestry the West-Eurasian-plus-South-Asian
core cannot absorb.

## Reading a HarappaWorld result

A typical Punjabi profile might read S-Indian ~35, Baloch ~35, Caucasian ~10, NE-Euro ~10, with
small change; a typical Tamil profile shifts weight toward S-Indian; a Pashtun profile toward
Baloch and Caucasian with more NE-Euro. Three rules keep the reading honest:

- **Ratios, not absolutes.** The S-Indian : Baloch ratio is the calculator's most informative
  output, and it is a *relative affinity* along a real cline — not a census of two ancestral
  tribes. Every South Asian genome carries both; the mix varies by region, caste history and
  community.
- **Cross-calculator numbers do not transfer.** The same kit scores differently in K12b's
  Gedrosia and HarappaWorld's Baloch, and a British reference runs ~44% North European in
  Dodecad but ~51% NE-Euro here. Anchoring differs;
  [that is expected](/blog/why-admixture-calculators-disagree), not an error to chase.
- **Traces are noise until proven otherwise.** Sub-percent Papuan, San or American entries in a
  South Asian profile are the optimiser distributing noise across sixteen bins. Nothing in the
  output flags which small numbers are real —
  [no calculator can](/blog/how-accurate-are-admixture-calculators).

The [Oracle utilities](/blog/gedmatch-oracle-explained) — HarappaWorld ships both Oracle and
Oracle-4 — turn the profile into ranked nearest-reference lists, which is the most interpretable
view of a run, especially for parents-from-different-regions cases where Oracle-4's mixed-fit
mode was designed to help.

## After HarappaWorld

The project froze years ago; the ancient-DNA record of South and Central Asia did not. If you
want the same exploration against dated ancient panels — Indus-periphery-adjacent sources, steppe
pastoralists, era by era — the free
[Global25 admixture calculators](/lab/admixture) and
[closest-populations rankings](/lab/g25-distance) run in the browser, and
[how to get Global25 coordinates](/blog/how-to-get-global25-coordinates) covers the one
prerequisite. For a claim that needs defending — whether a steppe-related source is *required*
for your genome, whether a trace component survives testing — the step up is a
[formal qpAdm model](/qpadm) with p-values, standard errors and the ability to reject.

Terms used here are defined in the [glossary](/glossary).

## References

- Narasimhan, V. M. et al. (2019). The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia.
  *Science*, 365(6457), eaat7487.
- Shinde, V. et al. (2019). An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or
  Iranian farmers. *Cell*, 179(3), 729–735.
- Alexander, D. H., Novembre, J. & Lange, K. (2009). Fast model-based estimation of ancestry in
  unrelated individuals. *Genome Research*, 19(9), 1655–1664.