Southern recensions mention groups like kerala/cherapada, choLa & pANDya. However, northern ones do not. andhra seems more universal – the fighter chANUra or his aid killed by devakIputra was an andhra. Location of andhra was probably south of kali~Nga but a bit unclear to me.
Not central to the map but more related to below discussion. If we for a moment just include everything, i.e., don’t make an attempt a priori to distinguish interpolations from the core Mbh (leave aside the “critical”= Pune edition) we have following counts for “distant” peoples
niShAda 175
mlechCha 114
kirAta 72
yavana 60
shaka 40
darada 23
pulinda 19
barbara 18
china 14
pa [hl]lava 10
tu[ks]hAra 9
(hAra)hUNa 7
pArada 6
khasha 6
dra[vm]iDa 21
chola 13
kerala 9
andhra 8
kuntala 5
Of these the word mlechCha is probably of Harappan provenance & was transferred to Old IA in the late Vedic age. It is first attested in the shatapatha brAhmaNa of shuklayajurveda 3.2.1.24. There it is stated that the language of the mlechCha is unintelligible & a v1 is asked not to speak it as it is the tongue of the asura-s. It could have been originally a group of people in the Harappan domain that more generally acquired the sense of a foreign people by the Mbh.
The niShAda ruler nala nAishAda is a historical hero in the Mbh. He is already mentioned under an archaic variant of his name in the shatapatha brAhmaNa of the SYV. Another Mbh age nishAda lord was ekalavya. They were likely a proto-Indian hunter-gatherer group enriched in an ancestry that Reich et al have called AASI.
The kirAta were another HG group like with a more Himalayan center. We suspect they were probably in the general sense “Tibeto-Burman” though the monophyly of the entire language family may be questioned. One cannot rule out that it was also applied to recently intrusive eastern groups with Austro-Asiatic ancestry.
Thus, in core national epic age, we see the Indo-Aryans as interacting with westerly groups with Harappan links (the original mlechCha-s); the old HG-s (niShAda-s); Himalayan+Eastern HG (kirAta).
The pulinda was another HG group (core “AASI (what ridiculous term!) type ancestry) likely originally living south of the Gangetic belt in vindhyA region.
The later invasive groups yavana-s, shaka-s, & more distant people hUNa & chIna-s, typically mentioned together appear to be a later layer of reference after the core was composed.
The dominance of northern groups - yavana-s, shaka-s, darada-s, pahlava, tukhara-s as a totality as opposed to southern groups, like drAviDa-s, andhra-s etc favors a northern locale for even this late layer.