Re: DNA, genetics and population dynamics: debunking the aryan invasion propagan

There is another issue: asymmetry of an explanation. For instance, the
length of the shadow of pole can be explained by the length of the
pole and inclination; however, the length of the pole cant be
explained by the length of the shadow of the pole. Of course, in
mathematical terms, both equations are related; so are propositions.
The same fallacy is commited when people try to give genetic
explanations of caste, or of religion, etc.

Re: DNA, genetics and population dynamics: debunking the aryan invasion propagan

I am not in particular addressing Chandrakant's. There is a general
issue of using genetics in these invasion or migration or indigenous
explanations.

Lets look at the scenario of 'speculative' invasionist hypothesis; in
which way genetics has any bearing on this invasionist hypothesis.

The questions like "Why P?" presupposes that P is a fact or a
theoritical claim of a theory. In other words, that facts that the
genetic explanation use is not evidence. It merely presupposes another
background theory, which in this case is invasionist speculation.
Given this, how to prove the credence of a theory: find some facts
that the background theories of invasionist theories don't explain or
predict, and that the invasionist speculation predicts.

Look at the genetic explantion of caste: This theory presupposes that
there exists a caste, and try to give an explanation that there is
some genetic peculiarity or essense among this group of caste. This
explanation is not evidence of the existence of caste; at most, what
it does is this: there is a continuity. Do a lil thought experiment:
pick up 100 couples, and make sure their offspring don't marry folks
out of this group for 2000 years. Assume one can find some pecularity,
either genetic or not, among this group. This at most shows that they
and their offspring haven't copulated with other group. But it does
not tell why this group (100 couples) came into being. Here one finds
verses in book to explain. One assumes many unacceptable theories in
interpretating these books. Thus far, nobody questioned the logical
structure of the these background theories in interpreting. And these
background theories are not part of grammar, phonetics, morphology, etc.

Underhill 2009 proves Afpak origin of R1a1 (M17)

Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a

The great arc of dispersal of modern humans: Africa to Australia

References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.

Stephen Oppenheimer

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE, UK

Available online 26 July 2008.

Abstract

During the Late Pleistocene, anatomically modern humans (AMH) dispersed out of Africa across the continents. Their routes obeyed the limitations placed on any large terrestrial mammal dependent on daily drinking water, following certain climate-permissive corridors. AMH first spread north, with game, across the Sahara to the Levant during the Eemian interglacial (c.125 ka), but failed to continue to Europe, then occupied by Neanderthals. The savannah ecosystem in North Africa and the Middle East then dried up, and AMH vanished from the Levantine fossil record, being replaced there by Neanderthals. Later, AMH successfully left Africa as a single group by the southern route to India. The added ability to make short but deliberate open water crossings allowed them first to cross the mouth of the Red Sea from Eritrea, and subsequently Wallace's Line to reach the isolated Sahul continent at least by 48,000 years ago and possibly by 60–50,000 years ago. They only finally arrived in Europe from South Asia around 45–50,000 years ago, probably linked to climatic amelioration during OIS-3.

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Regional setting

3. Materials and methods used in review of genetic phylogeography

3.1. Phylogeography

3.2. Complete sequence data: sources, phylogeny and dating

4. Review of out of Africa models

4.1. How many AMH exits from Africa? The genetic evidence

4.1.1. Single exit models

4.1.2. Models with multiple exits: the Cambridge model

4.2. Quo vadis?

4.2.1. Southern rather than northern exit: genetic evidence

4.2.2. Climatic considerations: constraints and imperatives for an exit route

4.3. Dating migrations

4.3.1. Possible dates of exit

4.3.2. Delayed migration to West Eurasia

4.3.3. Dating arrival of AMH in India and Southeast Asia

4.3.4. Dating Pleistocene arrivals of humans in Sahul and near Oceania

5. Conclusions

Acknowledgements

References

DNA confirms coastal trek to Australia

ABC

DNA evidence linking Indian tribes to Australian Aboriginal people supports the theory humans arrived in Australia from Africa via a southern coastal route through India, say researchers.

The research, lead by Dr Raghavendra Rao from the Anthropological Survey of India, is published in the current edition of BMC Evolutionary Biology.

One theory is that modern humans arrived in Australia via an inland route through central Asia but Rao says most scientists believe modern humans arrived via the coast of South Asia.

But he says there has never been any evidence to confirm a stop-off in India until now.

Rao and colleagues sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of 966 people from traditional tribes in India.

They report that several of the Indians studied had two regions of their mitochondrial DNA that were identical to those found in modern day Australian Aboriginal people.

The team compared Indian sequences with those from Aboriginal Australians collected in past studies.

Rao and colleagues used computer programs to predict that a common ancestor existed, between the Indian population and Aboriginal Australians, up to 50,000 years ago.

Skeletal remains, dating back between 40-60,000 years from Lake Mungo in New South Wales, also support the theory that modern human arrived in Australia at least as far back as this, he says.

Link through mothers

Rao says he and colleagues sequenced mitochondrial DNA because it is the best type of DNA to use for ancestral studies.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed on by mothers only and does not change much over time.

Evolutionary biologist Dr Jeremy Austin, of the University of Adelaide, says the new data "definitely supports the coastal route hypothesis".

He says that before this research was published, genetic markers from Aboriginal Australians were known to be closely related to markers from traditional Indian and South East Asian peoples.

"But this is the first time people have been able to find these exact same mitochondrial DNA types inside and outside Australia," says Austin.

He says now that a mitochondrial DNA link has been found between tribal Indian populations and Aboriginal Australians it would be interesting to see if a connection exists through the Y chromosome, where DNA is passed only from fathers to sons.

mtDNA Variation Predicts Population Size in Humans and Reveals a Major Southern Asian Chapter in Human Prehistory

Quentin D. Atkinson, Russell D. Gray and Alexei J. Drummond

Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer on M17 (R1a1)

"For me and for Toomas Kivsild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a 'male Aryan invasion' of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe". (p. 152)

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ (Graphical presentation of Oppenheimer's research)

The cradle that is India

Subhash Kak

Ideas about early Indian history continue to play an important role in political ideology of contemporary India. On the one side are the Left and Dravidian parties, which believe that invading Aryans from the northwest pushed the Dravidians to south India and India's caste divisions are a consequence of that encounter. Even the development of Hinduism is seen through this anthropological lens. This view is essentially that of colonial historians which was developed over a hundred years ago.

On the other side are the nationalist parties, which believe that the Aryan languages are native to India. These groups cite the early astronomical dates in the Vedas, noting these texts are rooted firmly in the Indian geographical region. But Leftist scholars consider such evidence suspect, politically motivated, and chauvinistic.

In recent years, the work of archaeologists and historians of science concluded that there is no material evidence for any large scale migrations into India over the period of 4500 to 800 BC, implicitly supporting the traditional view of Indian history. The Left has responded by conceding that there were probably no invasions; rather, there were many small scale migrations by Aryans who, through a process of cultural dominance, imposed their language on north Indians.

The drama of text-book revisions, both during the NDA and the current UPA governments, is essentially a struggle to impose one or the other of these viewpoints. In any other country, such a fight would have fought in the pages of academic journals; but in India, where the government decides what history is, it is a political matter.

Now, in an important book titled The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey out of Africa (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003), the prominent Oxford University scholar Stephen Oppenheimer has synthesised the available genetic evidence together with climatology and archaeology with conclusions which have bearing on the debate about the early population of India. This work has received great attention in the West, and it will also interest Indians tremendously.

Much of Oppenheimer's theory is based on recent advances in studies of mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the mother, and Y chromosomes, inherited by males from the father. Oppenheimer makes the case that whereas Africa is the cradle of all mankind; India is the cradle of all non-African peoples. Man left Africa approximately 90,000 years ago, heading east along the Indian Ocean, and established settlements in India. It was only during a break in glacial activity 50,000 years ago, when deserts turned into grasslands, that people left India and headed northwest into the Russian steppes and on into Eastern Europe, as well as northeast through China and over the now submerged Bering Strait into the Americas.

In their migration to India, African people carried the mitochondrial DNA strain L3 and Y chromosome line M168 across south Red Sea across the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. On the maternal side the mtDNA strain L3 split into two daughters which Oppenheimer labels Nasreen and Manju. While Manju was definitely born in India the birthplace of Nasreen is tentatively placed by him in southern Iran or Baluchistan. One Indian Manju subclan in India is as old as 73,000 years, whereas European man goes back to less than 50,000 years.

Considering the paternal side, Oppenheimer sees M168 as having three sons, of whom Seth was the most important one. Seth, in turn, had five sons which are named by him as Jahangir, H, I, G and Krishna. Krishna, born in India, is the ancestor of the peoples of East Asia, Central Asia, Oceania and West Eurasia (through the M17 mutation). This is what Oppenheimer says about M17:

South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a 'male Aryan Invasion of India.'

Study of the geographical distribution and the diversity of genetic branches and stems again suggests that Ruslan, along with his son M17, arose early in South Asia, somewhere near India, and subsequently spread not only south-east to Australia but also north, directly to Central Asia, before splitting east and west into Europe and East Asia.

Oppenheimer argues that the Eurocentric view of ancient history is also incorrect. For example, Europeans didn't invent art, because the Australian aborigines developed their own unique artistic culture in complete isolation. Indian rock art is also extremely ancient, going back to over 40,000 BC, so perhaps art as a part of culture had arisen in Africa itself. Similarly, agriculture didn't arise in the Fertile Crescent; Southeast Asia had already domesticated many plants by that time.

Oppenheimer concludes with two extraordinary conclusions: 'First, that the Europeans' genetic homeland was originally in South Asia in the Pakistan/Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, that the Europeans' ancestors followed at least two widely separated routes to arrive, ultimately, in the same cold but rich garden. The earliest of these routes was the Fertile Crescent. The second early route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first started bringing down game as large as mammoths.'

This synthesis of genetic evidence makes it possible to understand the divide between the north and the south Indian languages. It appears that the Dravidian languages are more ancient, and the Aryan languages evolved in India over thousands of years before migrations took them to central Asia and westward to Europe. The proto-Dravidian languages had also, through the ocean route, reached northeast Asia, explaining the connections between the Dravidian family and the Korean and the Japanese.

Perhaps this new understanding will encourage Indian politicians to get away from the polemics of who the original inhabitants of India are, since that should not matter one way or the other in the governance of the country. Indian politics has long been plagued by the Aryan invasion narrative, which was created by English scholars of the 19^th century; it is fitting that another Englishman, Stephen Oppenheimer, should announce its demise.

North by Southeast

Dr. Shubhash Kak

Advances in genetics have made it possible to trace ancient migrations. It is now generally accepted that modern man arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago and from there spread first into India and Southeast Asia by coastal migration that probably included some boat crossings. There are several estimates of the time when this spread into India took place. According to the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, settlements in India appear about 90,000 years ago. From India there were later northeastern and northwestern migrations into Eurasia and the Far East.

The “Out of Africa” theory has superseded the earlier multiregional model according to which the Europeans, the Asians, and Indonesians arose independently in different parts of the world. There is overwhelming evidence that archaic lines --- such as Neanderthals in Europe --- simply died out, and the specific characteristics of the different races is not a consequence of a mixing of the regional and modern populations but rather of adaptation to unique climatic conditions.

Microevolution, as in the mutations of the mitochondrial DNA (inherited from the mother) and the Y chromosome (inherited from the father), helps us trace and connect populations across time and region. When the random mutations are calibrated one has a genetic clock. The clock can be validated in a variety of ways; for example, by using the knowledge of when the potato plant spread around the world from its Andean origin. Even without historical evidence related to the spread of the potato plant, a scientist can deduce the Andean origin of the plant from the fact that there exist many varieties of it in Peru and just a few lines in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Given the genetic clock and the distance between the DNA of the European and the current Peruvian varieties, one can estimate the period the plant was taken to Europe.

The new findings turn on its head the previous view of the origin of Indians. The earlier view, popular in Indian history books, was that the Indian population came in two waves from the northwest around four or five thousand years ago, displacing the earlier aboriginals, descendents of regional archaic groups.

The new view is that subsequent to the rise of modern mankind in Africa, it found a second home in India, which is the point of migration for the populations of Europe, North Africa, China and Japan. The migrants in India slowly adapted to the wide climatic conditions in the sub-continent (from the tropical to the extreme cold of the Himalayan region) leading to the rise of the Caucasoid and the Mongoloid races.

A recent paper in the journal Science reporting on the analysis of the DNA of the Orang Asli, the original inhabitants of Malaysia, confirms this view. According to it a single migration out of Africa took the southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australasia. At this time Europe was too cold for human habitation. About 50,000 years ago, when deserts turned into grasslands, an “Out of India” migration populated the Near East and Europe, another migration went northeast through China and over the now submerged Bering Strait into the Americas. This agrees with the earliest known modern human sites of the Near East (45,000 years ago) and Europe (40,000 years ago).

It is likely that the earliest sites on the coastline that were occupied by the first migrants are now under water, since sea level has risen more than 60 metres since the last Ice Age. This widespread inundation is likely to be the basis of the flood myths that are common to all ancient cultures.

This view not only changes our understanding of the peopling of India, but also of Southeast Asia. For some time the academic view was that the Polynesians and the Indonesians were latecomers into their lands from China. The new view is that the habitation of Southeast Asia is almost as old as that of India and Australia, and the Chinese, as also the Japanese, are relative latecomers into northeast Asia.

Dental anthropology provides important clues in the retracing of ancient migrations. The Indian type of teeth is called Sundadont, and it is also found amongst Southeast Asians, Micronesians, and Polynesians. Contrasted from Sundadonty is Sinodonty (dental features that include shovel-shaped incisors, single-rooted upper first premolars, triple rooted lower first molars and other attributes), the degree of which is seen to increase as one travels north through the Mongoloid populations of mainland East Asia, and it is seen in extreme in the Americas. The South Asian origin of the pure-blood Ainu inhabitants of Japan is confirmed from their Sundadonty.

The Kennewick Man

The Kennewick Man, a 9,300 year old skeleton was discovered in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River near the Washington town of Kennewick. The skeleton was caught in a controversy because the Native American groups did not wish the body of an ancestor to be dishonored. On the other hand, there was much interest to study the skeleton further because its features were very different from that of the typical north Asian type from which the Native Americans are descended.

Scientific study has shown that the Kennewick Man represents the Indian (South Asian) type. The skull is long and narrow and the teeth are of the Sundadont type. This should not be extrapolated to mean that the Kennewick Man actually came from the Indian subcontinent. But it confirms the spread of the Indian type all over the ancient world, from which it was displaced by later adaptations to different climates.

Language families

When the theory of the Aryan invasions into India is replaced by an “Out of India” viewpoint, one can readily explain regularities in languages that are spread widely. Linguists see connections between India and languages that extend to distant lands. Thus the Indo-Pacific family covers the languages of the Australian aborigines and the Papuans, the Austro-Asiatic cuts across from India to the Pacific (the Munda in India, the Thai, and the Vietnamese), and the Dravidian has connections with the Altaic (Japanese, Korean, and the Turkic).

Within India, the connections between the structure and vocabulary of the north and the south Indian languages indicate much internal migration of people. The genetic evidence indicates that the Dravidian languages are the more ancient, and the Aryan languages evolved in India over thousands of years before migrants carried them westward to Europe. The proto-Dravidian languages reached northeast Asia through the sea route. If Aryan evolved out of proto-Dravidian, the attempt of the linguists to construct a pure proto-Dravidian vocabulary is in all probability wrong.

The idea that the development of the Aryan languages took place in India explains how a variety of such languages are to be found in the sub-continent. Both the so-called kentum and satem language families are represented: Bangani is kentum, it is found in the Himalayan region; and languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, and Assamese are satem.

The disgraced "Indologist" Michael Witzel admits that R1a1 originated in S. Asia; ignore the polemical portions

P. UNDERHILL Is a geneticist at Stanford U., and participant in our yearly Round Tables. He gave an overview of the genetic data presently known for India. ... Of special interest is R1a1-M17 (which he discovered in 1995) and that has often been attributed to the spread of Indo-European (while Hindutvavadins let it originate in India). That is a gross simplification. According to him, it probably arose in the area around the Hindukush around 10,000 BC (+/- 3000 years), and spread eastwards and westwards. It has the largest impact on S. Asia (some 25%), but is found from E. Europe to India.

Private Communication on M17 origin in South Asia (India)

> On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 16:29:20 +0000, fauxdk@comcast .net
> wrote:
> > List:
> >
> > Since I came under considerable heat in relation to my statements about the
> origins in place and time of R1a1 (M17), I thought a quote from Oppenheimer from
> his book, "The Real Eve" would be in order especially since it appears to have
> gained considerable respect in the academic community. If you recall I argued
> for an origin of M17 in Northern Pakistan or India and was basically "shouted
> down". You can now duke it out with Oppenheimer.
> >
> > "For me and for Toomas Kivsild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of
> M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest
> diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in
> the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia,
> but diversity characterizes hits presence in isolated tribal groups in the
> south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a 'male Aryan
> invasion' of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India
> is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way
> initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and
> Russia, before finally coming into Europe". (p. 152)
> >
> > This statement, with which I entirely agree, is in direct competition with the
> views of Wells in his book, "The Journey of Man" where he has M17 as emerging in
> Europe and migrating to the east into Central Asia and ultimately bringing the
> Indo - European langugage into India. He also maintains that the highest
> diversity of M17 is in the Ukraine, thus bolstering his argument. This latter
> argument simply cannot be supported based on the databases to which I have
> access. There is extremely low diversity in the Ukraine and adjacent areas, as
> well as eastern Central Asia. However the R1a1 (M17) diversity in Pakistan is
> immense - precisely as Oppenheimer has said.
> >
> > For those who chose to criticize my statements, you will have to realize that
> you are stuck in the late 1990s where it was simply a given that M17 emerged in
> the Ukraine. This pillar is crumbling under the weight of solid evidence to the
> contrary.
> >
> > David F.
> >

Michel Danino in Pragati

http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2009/06/the-peopling-of-india/

GENETICS AND THE ARYAN DEBATE

By Michel Danino


Background

Along with the birth of anthropology, the nineteenth century saw the development of semi-scientific to wholly unscientific disciplines, such as anthropometry, craniometry or phrenology. Unquestioningly accepting the prevalent concept of race, some scientists constructed facial and nasal indexes or claimed to measure the skull’s volume for every race, of course with the result that the white race’s cranium was the most capacious and its owner, therefore, the most intelligent; others went further, insisting that amidst the white race, only the Germans were the “pure” descendants of the “Aryan race” which was destined the rule the earth.

In India, from 1891 onward, Herbert H. Risley, an official with the colonial government, set about defining in all seriousness 2,378 castes belonging to 43 “races,” all of it on the basis of a “nasal index.” The main racial groups were Indo-Aryan, Turko- Iranian, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongoloid and Mongolo-Dravidian.

Unfortunately, this imaginative but wholly unscientific work weighed heavily on the first developments of Indian anthropology; in the 1930s, for instance, B. S. Guha studied skeletons from Mohenjo-daro and submitted a detailed report on the proto- Australoid, Mediterranean, Mongoloid and Alpine races peopling the city, all of them “non-Aryan” of course. Long lists of such fictitious races filled academic publications, and continue to be found in Indian textbooks today.

In the wake of World War II, the concept of race collapsed in the West. Rather late in the day, anthropologists realized that race cannot be scientifically defined, much less measured, thus setting at naught a whole century of scholarly divagations on “superior” and “inferior” races. Following in the footsteps of pioneers like Franz Boas,1 leading scientists, such as Ashley Montagu,2 now argued strongly against the “fallacy of race.” It is only with the emergence of more reliable techniques in biological anthropology that anthropometry got a fresh chance; it concentrated not on trying to categorize noses or spot “races,” but on tracing the evolution of a population, on signs of continuity or disruption, and on possible kinships between neighbouring populations.

In the Indian context, we are now familiar with the work of U.S anthropologists Kenneth Kennedy, John Lukacs and Brian Hemphill.3 Their chief conclusion, as far as the Aryan debate is concerned, is that there is no trace of “demographic disruption” in the North-West of the subcontinent between 4500 and 800 BCE; this negates the possibility of any massive intrusion, by so-called Indo-Aryans or other populations, during that period.

Die-hard proponents of such an invasion / migration have therefore been compelled to downscale it to a “trickle-in” infiltration,4 limited enough to have left no physical trace, although they are at pains to explain how a “trickle” was able to radically alter India’s linguistic and cultural landscape when much more massive invasions of the historical period failed to do so.5 Other proponents still insist that “the Indo-Aryan immigrants seem to have been numerous and strong enough to continue and disseminate much of their culture,”6 but do not explain how the “immigrants” failed to leave any trace in the anthropological record.

A powerful new tool

In the 1980s, another powerful tool of inquiry came on the scene: genetics, with its growing ability to read the history contained in a human body’s three billion bits of information. In particular, techniques used in the identification of genetic markers have been fast improving, leading to a wide array of applications, from therapeutics to crime detection to genealogy. Let us first summarize the basic definitions relevant to our field.

In trying to reconstruct ancestry, biologists use two types of DNA, the complex molecule that carries genetic information. The first, Y-DNA, is contained in the Y- chromosome, one of the two sex chromosomes; it is found in the cell’s nucleus and is transmitted from father to son. The second, mtDNA or mitochondrial DNA, is found in mitochondria, kinds of power generators found in a cell, but outside its nucleus; this mtDNA is independent of the Y-DNA, simpler in structure, and transmitted by the mother alone. For various reasons, all this genetic material undergoes slight alterations or “mutations” in the course of time; those mutations then become characteristic of the line of descendants: if, for instance, the mtDNAs of two humans, however distant geographically, exhibit the same mutation, they necessarily share a common ancestor in the maternal line.

Much of the difficulty lies in organizing those mutations, or genetic markers, in consistent categories called “haplotypes” (from a Greek word meaning “single”), which constitute an individual’s genetic fingerprint. Similar haplotypes are then brought together in “haplogroups,” each of which genetically identifies a particular ethnic group. Such genetic markers can then be used to establish a “genetic distance” between two populations.

Identifying and making sense of the right genetic markers is not the only difficulty; dating their mutations remains a major challenge: on average, a marker of Y- DNA may undergo one mutation every 500 generations, but sudden changes caused by special circumstances can never be ruled out. Genetics, therefore, needs the inputs from palaeontology and archaeology, among other disciplines, to confirm its historical conclusions.

India’s case

Since the 1990s, there have been numerous genetic studies of Indian populations, often reaching apparently divergent conclusions. There are three reasons for this: (1) the Indian region happens to be one of the most diverse and complex in the world, which makes it difficult to interpret the data; (2) early studies relied on too limited samples, of the order of a few dozens, when hundreds or ideally thousands of samples are required for some statistical reliability; (3) some of the early studies fell into the old trap of trying to equate linguistic groups with distinct ethnic entities — a relic of the nineteenth-century erroneous identification between language and race; as a result, a genetic connection between North Indians and Central Asians was automatically taken to confirm an Aryan invasion in the second millennium BCE, disregarding a number of alternative explanations.7

More recent studies, using larger samples and much refined methods of analysis, both at the conceptual level and in the laboratory, have reached very different conclusions (interestingly, some of their authors had earlier gone along with the old Aryan paradigm8). We will summarize here the chief results of nine studies from various Western and Indian Universities, most of them conducted by international teams of biologists, and more than half of them in the last three years; since their papers are complex and technical, what follows is, necessarily, highly simplified and represents only a small part of their content.

The first such study dates back to 1999 and was conducted by the Estonian biologist Toomas Kivisild, a pioneer in the field, with fourteen co-authors from various nationalities (including M. J. Bamshad).9 It relied on 550 samples of mtDNA and identified a haplogroup called “U” as indicating a deep connection between Indian and Western-Eurasian populations. However, the authors opted for a very remote separation of the two branches, rather than a recent population movement towards India; in fact, “the subcontinent served as a pathway for eastward migration of modern humans” from Africa, some 40,000 years ago:

“We found an extensive deep late Pleistocene genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians, provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both populations. Our estimate for this split [between Europeans and Indians] is close to the suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe.”

In other words, the timescale posited by the Aryan invasion / migration framework is inadequate, and the genetic affinity between the Indian subcontinent and Europe “should not be interpreted in terms of a recent admixture of western Caucasoids10 with Indians caused by a putative Indo-Aryan invasion 3,000–4,000 years BP.”

The second study was published just a month later. Authored by U.S. biological anthropologist Todd R. Disotell,11 it dealt with the first migration of modern man from Africa towards Asia, and found that migrations into India “did occur, but rarely from western Eurasian populations.” Disotell made observations very similar to those of the preceding paper:

“The supposed Aryan invasion of India 3,000–4,000 years before present therefore did not make a major splash in the Indian gene pool. This is especially counter-indicated by the presence of equal, though very low, frequencies of the western Eurasian mtDNA types in both southern and northern India. Thus, the ‘caucasoid’ features of south Asians may best be considered ‘pre-caucasoid’ — that is, part of a diverse north or north-east African gene pool that yielded separate origins for western Eurasian and southern Asian populations over 50,000 years ago.”

Here again, the Eurasian connection is therefore traced to the original migration out of Africa. On the genetic level, “the supposed Aryan invasion of India 3000-4000 years ago was much less significant than is generally believed.”

A year later, thirteen Indian scientists led by Susanta Roychoudhury studied 644 samples of mtDNA from some ten Indian ethnic groups, especially from the East and South.12 They found “a fundamental unity of mtDNA lineages in India, in spite of the extensive cultural and linguistic diversity,” pointing to “a relatively small founding group of females in India.” Significantly, “most of the mtDNA diversity observed in Indian populations is between individuals within populations; there is no significant structuring of haplotype diversity by socio-religious affiliation, geographical location of habitat or linguistic affiliation.” That is a crucial observation, which later studies will endorse: on the maternal side at least, there is no such thing as a “Hindu” or “Muslim” genetic identity, nor even a high- or low-caste one, a North- or South-Indian one — hence the expressive title of the study: “Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA.”

The authors also noted that haplogroup “U,” already noted by Kivisild et al. as being common to North Indian and “Caucasoid” populations, was found in tribes of eastern India such as the Lodhas and Santals, which would not be the case if it had been introduced through Indo-Aryans. Such is also the case of the haplogroup “M,” another marker frequently mentioned in the early literature as evidence of the invasion: in reality, “we have now shown that indeed haplogroup M occurs with a high frequency, averaging about 60%, across most Indian population groups, irrespective of geographical location of habitat. We have also shown that the tribal populations have higher frequencies of haplogroup M than caste populations.”

Also in 2000, twenty authors headed by Kivisild contributed a chapter to a book on the “archaeogenetics” of Europe.13 They first stressed the importance of the mtDNA haplogroup “M” common to India (with a frequency of 60%), Central and Eastern Asia (40% on average), and even to American Indians; however, this frequency drops to 0.6% in Europe, which is “inconsistent with the ‘general Caucasoidness’ of Indians.”

This shows, once again, that “the Indian maternal gene pool has come largely through an autochthonous history since the Late Pleistocene.” The authors then studied the “U” haplogroup, finding its frequency to be 13% in India, almost 14% in North-West Africa, and 24% from Europe to Anatolia; but, in their opinion, “Indian and western Eurasian haplogroup U varieties differ profoundly; the split has occurred about as early as the split between the Indian and eastern Asian haplogroup M varieties. The data show that both M and U exhibited an expansion phase some 50,000 years ago, which should have happened after the corresponding splits.” In other words, there is a genetic connection between India and Europe, but a far more ancient one than was thought.

Another important point is that looking at mtDNA as a whole, “even the high castes share more than 80 per cent of their maternal lineages with the lower castes and tribals”; this obviously runs counter to the invasionist thesis. Taking all aspects into consideration, the authors conclude: “We believe that there are now enough reasons not only to question a ‘recent Indo-Aryan invasion’ into India some 4000 BP, but alternatively to consider India as a part of the common gene pool ancestral to the diversity of human maternal lineages in Europe.” Mark the word “ancestral.”

After a gap of three years, Kivisild directed two fresh studies. The first, with nine
colleagues, dealt with the origin of languages and agriculture in India.14 Those biologists stressed India’s genetic complexity and antiquity, since “present-day Indians [possess] at least 90 per cent of what we think of as autochthonous Upper Palaeolithic maternal lineages.” They also observed that “the Indian mtDNA tree in general [is] not subdivided according to linguistic (Indo-European, Dravidian) or caste affiliations,” which again demonstrates the old error of conflating language and race or ethnic group.

Then, in a new development, they punched holes in the methodology followed by studies basing themselves on the Y-DNA (the paternal line) to establish the Aryan invasion, and point out that if one were to extend their logic to populations of Eastern and Southern India, one would be led to an exactly opposite result: “the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.” The authors do not defend this thesis, but simply guard against “misleading interpretations” based on limited samples and faulty methodology.

The second study of 2003, a particularly detailed one dealing with the genetic heritage of India’s earliest settlers, had seventeen co-authors with Kivisild (including L. Cavalli-Sforza and P. A. Underhill), and relied on nearly a thousand samples from the subcontinent, including two Dravidian-speaking tribes from Andhra Pradesh.15 Among other important findings, it stressed that the Y-DNA haplogroup “M17,” regarded till recently as a marker of the Aryan invasion, and indeed frequent in Central Asia, is equally found in the two tribes under consideration, which is inconsistent with the invasionist framework. Moreover, one of the two tribes, the Chenchus, is genetically close to several castes, so that there is a “lack of clear distinction between Indian castes and tribes,” a fact that can hardly be overemphasized.



This also emerges from a diagram of genetic distances between eight Indian and seven Eurasian populations, distances calculate on the basis of 16 Y-DNA haplogroups (Fig. 1). The diagram challenges many common assumptions: as just mentioned, five castes are grouped with the Chenchus; another tribe, the Lambadis (probably of Rajasthani origin), is stuck between Western Europe and the Middle East; Bengalis of various castes are close to Mumbai Brahmins, and Punjabis (whom one would have thought to be closest to the mythical “Aryans”) are as far away as possible from Central Asia! It is clear that no simple framework can account for such complexity, least of all the Aryan invasion / migration framework.

The next year, Mait Metspalu and fifteen co-authors analyzed 796 Indian (including both tribal and caste populations from different parts of India) and 436 Iranian mtDNAs.16 Of relevance here is the following observation, which once again highlights the pitfalls of any facile ethnic-linguistic equation:

“Language families present today in India, such as Indo-European, Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic, are all much younger than the majority of indigenous mtDNA lineages found among their present-day speakers at high frequencies. It would make it highly speculative to infer, from the extant mtDNA pools of their speakers, whether one of the listed above linguistically defined group in India should be considered more ‘autochthonous’ than any other in respect of its presence in the subcontinent.”

We finally jump to 2006 and end with two studies. The first was headed by Indian biologist Sanghamitra Sengupta and involved fourteen other co-authors, including L. Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, and P. A. Underhill.17 Based on 728 samples covering 36 Indian populations, it announced in its very title how its findings revealed a “Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” i.e. of the mythical Indo- Aryans, and stated its general agreement with the previous study. For instance, the authors rejected the identification of some Y-DNA genetic markers with an “Indo- European expansion,” an identification they called “convenient but incorrect ... overly simplistic.” To them, the subcontinent’s genetic landscape was formed much earlier than the dates proposed for an Indo-Aryan immigration: “The influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. ... There is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages.” This is also highly suggestive (the R1a lineages being a different way to denote the haplogroup M17).

Finally, and significantly, this study indirectly rejected a “Dravidian” authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, since it noted, “Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus....” They found, in conclusion, “overwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers.”

Another Indian biologist, Sanghamitra Sahoo, headed eleven colleagues, including T. Kivisild and V. K. Kashyap, for a study of the Y-DNA of 936 samples covering 77 Indian populations, 32 of them tribes.18 The authors left no room for doubt:

“The sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry between the two regions, with diffusion of some Indian- specific lineages northward.”

So the southward gene flow that had been imprinted on our minds for two centuries was wrong, after all: the flow was out of, not into, India. The authors continue:

“The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.”

The last of the two rejected associations is that of the Indo-Aryan expansion; the first, that of the spread of agriculture, is the well-known thesis of Colin Renfrew,19 which traces Indo-European origins to the beginnings of agriculture in Anatolia, and sees Indo-Europeans entering India around 9000 BP, along with agriculture: Sanghamitra Sahoo et al. see no evidence of this in the genetic record.

The same data allow the authors to construct an eloquent table of genetic distances between several populations, based on Y-haplogroups (Fig. 2). We learn from it, for instance, that “the caste populations of ‘north’ and ‘south’ India are not particularly more closely related to each other (average Fst value = 0.07) than they are to the tribal groups (average Fst value = 0.06),” an important confirmation of earlier studies. In particular, “Southern castes and tribals are very similar to each other in their Y-chromosomal haplogroup compositions.” As a result, “it was not possible to confirm any of the purported differentiations between the caste and tribal pools,” a momentous conclusion that directly clashes with the Aryan paradigm, which imagined Indian tribes as adivasis and the caste Hindus as descendants of Indo-Aryans invaders or immigrants.

In reality, we have no way, today, to determine who in India is an “adi”-vasi, but enough data to reject this label as misleading and unnecessarily divisive.

Conclusions

It is, of course, still possible to find genetic studies trying to interpret differences between North and South Indians or higher and lower castes within the invasionist framework, but that is simply because they take it for granted in the first place. None of the nine major studies quoted above lends any support to it, and none proposes to define a demarcation line between tribe and caste. The overall picture emerging from these studies is, first, an unequivocal rejection of a 3500-BP arrival of a “Caucasoid” or Central Asian gene pool. Just as the imaginary Aryan invasion / migration left no trace in Indian literature, in the archaeological and the anthropological record, it is invisible at the genetic level. The agreement between these different fields is remarkable by any standard, and offers hope for a grand synthesis in the near future, which will also integrate agriculture and linguistics.

Secondly, they account for India’s considerable genetic diversity by using a time- scale not of a few millennia, but of 40,000 or 50,000 years. In fact, several experts, such as Lluís Quintana-Murci,20 Vincent Macaulay,21 Stephen Oppenheimer,22 Michael Petraglia,23 and their associates, have in the last few years proposed that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, he first reached South-West Asia around 75,000 BP, and from here, went on to other parts of the world. In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western Europe:

“indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South Asia.” 24

Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words:

“For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”25

We will not call it, of course, an “Indian invasion” of Europe; in simple terms, India acted “as an incubator of early genetic differentiation of modern humans moving out of Africa.”26

Genetics is a fast-evolving discipline, and the studies quoted above are certainly not the last word; but they have laid the basis for a wholly different perspective of Indian populations, and it is most unlikely that we will have to abandon it to return to the crude racial nineteenth-century fallacies of Aryan invaders and Dravidian autochthons. Neither have any reality in genetic terms, just as they have no reality in archaeological or cultural terms. In this sense, genetics is joining other disciplines in helping to clean the cobwebs of colonial historiography. If some have a vested interest in patching together the said cobwebs so they may keep cluttering our history textbooks, they are only delaying the inevitable.
*

References & Notes


1
Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
2
Ashley Montagu, Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1942).
3
Let us mention three important papers: (1) B. E. Hemphill, J. R. Lukacs & K. A. R. Kennedy,
“Biological adaptations and affinities of the Bronze Age Harappans,” in Harappa
Excavations 1986-1990: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Third Millennium Urbanism, ed.
R. H. Meadow (Madison: Prehistory Press, 1991), pp. 137-182. (2) Kenneth A. R. Kennedy,
“Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia?” in The
Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin & New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1995), pp. 32-66. (3) Brian E. Hemphill, Alexander F. Christensen & S. I.
Mustafakulov, “Trade or Travel: An Assessment of Interpopulational Dynamics among
Bronze Age Indo-Iranian Populations,” South Asian Archaeology, 1995, ed. Raymond
Allchin & Bridget Allchin (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 855-
871.
4
See for instance Michael Witzel, “Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian
and Iranian Texts,” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, vol. 7 (2001), No. 3 (25 May), § 8.
5
For a fuller discussion of this and other paradoxes of the Aryan invasion theory, see Michel
Danino, L’Inde et l’invasion de nulle part: le dernier repaire du mythe aryen (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 2006), forthcoming in English as The Invasion That Never Was, 3rd ed.
6
Ram Sharan Sharma, Advent of the Aryans in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), p. 52.
7
See a few examples in The Indian Human Heritage, ed. D. Balasubramanian & N. Appaji
Genetics and the Aryan Debate / p. 12


Rao (Hyderabad: Universities Press, 1998).
8
This is the case of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, co-author of a “classic” work
which, as regards India, did not dare to question the invasionist framework: L. L. Cavalli-
Sforza, P. Menozzi & A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); twelve years later, Cavalli-Sforza co-authored two papers
that rejected this framework, see notes 15 & 17 below. Another case is that of the Indian
biologist Partha P. Majumder (see notes 12 & 17 below).
9
T. Kivisild, M. J. Bamshad, K. Kaldma, M. Metspalu, E. Metspalu, M. Reidla, S. Laos, J.
Parik, W. S. Watkins, M. E. Dixon, S. S. Papiha, S. S. Mastana, M. R. Mir, V. Ferak, R.
Villems, “Deep common ancestry of Indian and western-Eurasian mitochondrial DNA
lineages” in Current Biology, 18 November 1999, 9(22):1331-4. (Most of the articles quoted
in this paper are available on the Internet; to locate them, enter their full title in a good search
engine.)
10
“Caucasoid” is a nineteenth-century term for a member of the white race, coined at a time
when the Caucasus was thought to be the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The term has no
scientific meaning but has stuck, and is still used occasionally by biologists, although, as
further quotations will show, often within quotation marks, as a reminder of its inadequacy.
11
T. R. Disotell, “Human evolution: the southern route to Asia” in Current Biology, vol. 9, No.
24, 16 December 1999, pp. R925-928(4).
12
Susanta Roychoudhury, Sangita Roy, Badal Dey, Madan Chakraborty, Monami Roy, Bidyut
Roy, A. Ramesh, N. Prabhakaran, M. V. Usha Rani, H. Vishwanathan, Mitashree Mitra,
Samir K. Sil & Partha P. Majumder, “Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed
by analysis of mitochondrial DNA,” Current Science, vol. 79, No. 9, 10 November 2000, pp.
1182-1192.
13
Toomas Kivisild, Surinder S. Papiha, Siiri Rootsi, Jüri Parik, Katrin Kaldma, Maere Reidla,
Sirle Laos, Mait Metspalu, Gerli Pielberg, Maarja Adojaan, Ene Metspalu, Sarabjit S.
Mastana, Yiming Wang, Mukaddes Golge, Halil Demirtas, Eckart Schnakenberg, Gian
Franco de Stefano, Tarekegn Geberhiwot, Mireille Claustres & Richard Villems, “An Indian
Ancestry: a Key for Understanding Human Diversity in Europe and Beyond”, ch. 31 of
Archaeogenetics: DNA and the population prehistory of Europe, ed. Colin Renfrew & Katie
Boyle (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000), pp. 267-275.
14
Toomas Kivisild, Siiri Rootsi, Mait Metspalu, Ene Metspalu, Juri Parik, Katrin Kaldma,
Esien Usanga, Sarabjit Mastana, Surinder S. Papiha & Richard Villems, “The Genetics of
Language and Farming Spread in India,” ch. 17 in Examining the farming/language
dispersal hypothesis, eds. Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute
for Archaeological Research, 2003), pp. 215–222. Italics in one of the quotations are in the
original.
15
T. Kivisild, S. Rootsi, M. Metspalu, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E. Metspalu, M.
Adojaan, H.-V. Tolk, V. Stepanov, M. Gölge, E. Usanga, S. S. Papiha, C. Cinnioglu, R. King,
L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. A. Underhill & R. Villems, “The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest
Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations,” American Journal of Human
Genetics and the Aryan Debate / p. 13


Genetics 72(2):313-32, 2003.
16
Mait Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Ene Metspalu, Jüri Parik, Georgi Hudjashov, Katrin
Kaldma, Piia Serk, Monika Karmin, Doron M Behar, M Thomas P Gilbert, Phillip Endicott,
Sarabjit Mastana, Surinder S. Papiha, Karl Skorecki, Antonio Torroni & Richard Villem,
“Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped
during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans,” BMC Genetics
2004, 5:26.
17
Sanghamitra Sengupta, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Roy King, S. Q. Mehdi, Christopher A.
Edmonds, Cheryl-Emiliane T. Chow, Alice A. Lin, Mitashree Mitra, Samir K. Sil, A.
Ramesh, M. V. Usha Rani, Chitra M. Thakur, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, &
Peter A. Underhill, “Polarity and Temporality of High-Resolution Y-Chromosome
Distributions in India Identify Both Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal
Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” American Journal of Human
Genetics, February 2006; 78(2):202-21. (Italics in one of the quotations are mine.)
18
Sanghamitra Sahoo, Anamika Singh, G. Himabindu, Jheelam Banerjee, T. Sitalaximi, Sonali
Gaikwad, R. Trivedi, Phillip Endicott, Toomas Kivisild, Mait Metspalu, Richard Villems, &
V. K. Kashyap, “A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion
scenarios,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 January 2006, vol. 103,
No. 4, pp. 843–848. (Italics in one of the quotations are mine.)
19
Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London:
Penguin Books, 1989).
20
Lluís Quintana-Murci, Raphaëlle Chaix, R. Spencer Wells, Doron M. Behar, Hamid Sayar,
Rosaria Scozzari, Chiara Rengo, Nadia Al-Zahery, Ornella Semino, A. Silvana Santachiara-
Benerecetti, Alfredo Coppa, Qasim Ayub, Aisha Mohyuddin, Chris Tyler-Smith, S. Qasim
Mehdi, Antonio Torroni, & Ken McElreavey, “Where West Meets East: The Complex
mtDNA Landscape of the Southwest and Central Asian Corridor,” American Journal of
Human Genetics 74(5):827-45, May 2004.
21
Vincent Macaulay, Catherine Hill, Alessandro Achilli, Chiara Rengo, Douglas Clarke,
William Meehan, James Blackburn, Ornella Semino, Rosaria Scozzari, Fulvio Cruciani, Adi
Taha, Norazila Kassim Shaari,6 Joseph Maripa Raja, Patimah Ismail, Zafarina Zainuddin,
William Goodwin, David Bulbeck, Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, Stephen Oppenheimer, Antonio
Torroni, Martin Richards, “Single, Rapid Coastal Settlement of Asia Revealed by Analysis of
Complete Mitochondrial Genomes,” Science 13 May 2005, vol. 308, No. 5724, pp. 1034-36.
22
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey out of Africa (New York:
Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003). See an introduction to Oppenheimer’s theory on the
website:
www.bradshawfoundation.com.
23
Hannah V. A. James & Michael D. Petraglia, “Modern Human Origins and the Evolution of
Behavior in the Later Pleistocene Record of South Asia,” Current Anthropology vol. 46,
Supplement, December 2005, pp. S3-S27.
Genetics and the Aryan Debate / p. 14

24
William F. Allman, “Eve Explained: How Ancient Humans Spread Across the Earth” (on the
website of Discovery Channel, 21 August 2004).
25
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve, op. cit., p. 152.
26
See note 15 above.

Myth of Aryan Invasion Update 2005

by David Frawley

2005 Edition Preface


The Myth of the Aryan Invasion was first written in 1994 in order to summarize important new information on the ancient history of India that refutes commonly held views on the subject inherited from the nineteenth century. It was a condensation of longer material from books of mine like Gods, Sages and Kings, Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization (with N.S. Rajaram) and In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (with Georg Feuerstein and Subhash Kak). The 2001 update reflected my recent book Rigveda and the History of India that pushed the Vedic horizon further into the South India.

The 2005 edition reflects information from a new book that N.S. Rajaram and I have completed for the Swaminarayan movement and their new Delhi temple Akshardham, the largest to come up in the city in perhaps centuries, and its cultural displays. That book (Hidden Horizons: Unearthing 10,000 Years of Indian Culture) takes the origins of the Vedic age further back in time and in the direction of Southeast Asia.

The amount of information available relative to ancient India is now much more extensive than that considered in old textbooks still used in India’s schools and in most schools in the West. Numerous new archaeological finds, including several larger than Harappa, the geology of the Sarasvati River, the natural history of the region, Southeast Asia as the homeland for most human populations prior to the end of the last Ice Age, new views of genetics, new theories of linguistics, archaeo-astronomy, and a greater sensitivity to Vedic texts and their vast spiritual and cultural implications, are only part of the new fabric to be woven in order to really understand ancient India.

Whether one may agree with the details, it is clear that the ancient history of India needs to be totally recast. The history and cultural heritage of India is largely an indigenous development of the same basic peoples that have inhabited the region for over ten thousand years, as they have adapted to their environment and also discovered its spiritual essence in its great mountains, rivers and oceans. It is time to look at the history and culture of India as a whole, organically, and in an integral manner according to its own internal impetus as the primary factor.

Older views of India based on outside migrations, external cultural influences and foreign borrowings as the primary forces are the products of a failure to understand the real soul and spirit of India. In the twenty first century in which the antiquity of cultures all over the world is being extended back centuries, if not thousands of years, there is no need to keep the history of India frozen around speculative events of 1500 BCE that have so far failed to prove themselves. It is time to open the door on India’s great ancient heritage that takes us back to the very dawn of time. This primary message of the book remains the same.

2005 Update
More on the Southern Connection: The Findings of Natural History

Southeast Asia and the End of the Ice Age Migrations

Probably the most important development in the study of ancient India over the last five or ten years has been new evidence relative to genetics and natural history. This shows the antiquity of Indian populations in India and a strong connection with Southeast Asia going back to the Ice Age period.

Such information supports the southern connection to the Vedic culture based that I have proposed, starting with the maritime symbolism of the Rig Veda highlighted in my first book on the subject Gods, Sages and Kings (1991). It was an important theme in my Rig Veda and the History of India (2001) and in previous editions of this current volume. These connections have also been addressed in books and articles by Subhash Kak, S. Kalyanaraman, N.S. Rajaram and many others. The more specific scientific data on the importance of Southeast Asia as a possible source of most ancient post-Ice Age cultures can be found in the work of Stephen Oppenheimer as in his books like Eden in the East.

The southern basis for the Vedic culture is based upon two important points of natural history. The first is the geology of the Sarasvati River in the post-Ice Age period. The second is the dominance of South India and Southeast Asia as a major site of human habitation during the Ice Age period, and migration from it in the post-Ice Age era – when the region was flooded – as probably the main impetus for the development of cultures to the north and west extending perhaps as far as Europe.

We have already discussed the first major point of natural history relative to ancient India in the earlier sections of the book. The development of agriculture and urban civilization in ancient India was based upon the geology of the Sarasvati River, which arose as a mighty river towards the later period of the last Ice Age over 10,000 years ago, and lost its perennial flow, owing to the later climate changes and the melting of the main glaciers in the 2200-1500 BCE era. This Vedic-Sarasvati culture, relative to its geology, lasted from around 10,000-2000 BCE, when the Sarasvati was the dominant river in North India. This perennial great Sarasvati defines the main period of the development of Vedic culture, Vedic kingdoms and the late Vedic era, when the Sarasvati began to decline. This is roughly the period from the older Rigvedic Hymns to the later four Vedas, Brahmanas and early Upanishads, though it is likely that the existent texts which we have were not entirely finalized until the end of this period.

The second and related point, which is now assuming more significance, is that this Vedic civilization was based upon an older proto-Vedic culture in the south of India and Southeast Asia prior to the end of the last Ice Age. Prior to the end of the last Ice Age, when sea levels were much lower, the most favorable part of the globe for human habitation was Southeast Asia, which included the region from South India to Indonesia. Indonesia was not a series of islands but was connected to Malaysia as part of a large subcontinent called Sunda Land. This region had the warmest and wettest climate of the Ice Age period and was the main center of human habitation and probably human culture as well. Regions to the north were not only colder but drier, including north India, with little monsoon developing in the summer and little melting of glacial ice from the winter to support much by way of great rivers.

This idea of Sunda Land has points in common with the idea of Kumari Kanda, of South India connecting to a larger continent to the south at a remote ancient period. It is also reflected in the maritime symbolism which pervades the Rig Veda and in the idea of pre-flood or pre-Manu kings and dynasties like that of Prithi Vainya, who is credited with first introducing agriculture to humanity, as well as in the idea of earlier kalpas or world-ages and earlier Manus that we find in the Puranas.

The end of the Ice Age released the waters to flow through the Sarasvati River and inundate the plains of North India, turning the area into an ideal region for habitation and agriculture. We can easily see this geological event in Vedic stories of the great Indra, slaying the dragon Vritra, who lay at the foot of the mountains holding back the waters, releasing the seven rivers to flow into the sea.

The end of the Ice Age caused a migration of peoples from Southeast Asia to the north and west, fleeing the rising waters that put much of the Indonesian area under sea and separated Sri Lanka from India. North India would have been one of the first and most accessible places of migration for those seeking to flee the end of the Ice Age floods, either by sea or by land routes. We see this in Hindu myths of Manu as a flood figure coming from Kerala in South India, as in the Matsya Purana, as well as in the underlying maritime symbolism and ocean worship in the Rig Veda itself.

Older Patterns: India and Southeast Asia and Human Populations

A third important point of natural history is that this movement of populations out of Southeast Asia at the end of the last Ice Age reflects an even older pattern of movements. According to recent science and genetics, modern man arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago and from there spread first into India and Southeast Asia by a coastal migration. According to the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, settlements in India appear about 90,000 years ago. From India there were later northeastern and northwestern migrations into Eurasia and the Far East. India has long been a focal point of this movement from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe.

A recent paper in the journal Science reporting on the analysis of the DNA of the Orang Asli, the original inhabitants of Malaysia, confirms this view. According to it a single migration out of Africa took the southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australasia. At this time Europe was too cold for human habitation. About 50,000 years ago, when deserts turned into grasslands, an "Out of India" migration populated the Near East and Europe, another migration went northeast through China and over the now submerged Bering Strait into the Americas. This agrees with the earliest known modern human sites of the Near East (45,000 years ago) and Europe (40,000 years ago). It is likely that the earliest sites on the coastline that were occupied by the first migrants are now under water, since sea level has risen more than sixty metres since the last Ice Age.

So a movement out of India and Southeast Asia has been occurring for tens of thousands of years. But the movement after the end of the last Ice Age was the most crucial for current human populations. Geneticists like C. Cavalli-Sforza and S. Oppenheimer have noted that settlers in the coastal regions of India were the source (‘inocula’) for the population of India. Some of them later migrated northwards and westward to populate Europe. This is the exact reverse of the various migration-invasion theories (like the Aryan invasion) advanced by linguists and anthropologists who sought to derive Indians and their civilization from Central Asia, Eurasia or even Europe. See for example, Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer (2003), London: Constable. This is discussed in more detail in later chapters.

Hindu View of Time and History

The Hindu idea of earlier Manus (humanities) and earlier kalpas or world-ages, such as we find in Puranic literature, may reflect memories of these earlier phases of mankind prior to what our current culture recognizes as history. This Hindu connection to prehistoric phases of the human species may be responsible for the Hindu idea of an eternal tradition of truth (Sanatana Dharma), and its recognition of cyclic movements of human civilization over many tens of thousands of years, such as we find in Puranic Yuga cycles.

From the standpoint of modern science, this ‘Hindu view of time’ better reflects the movement of natural history that is marked by cycles and cataclysms over long time periods. This is in contrast to western historical models that follow a linear and progressive model of history, culture and religion towards some sort of heaven or utopia, based upon a limited time horizon of about five thousand years that stands apart from nature’s cycles and often tries to oppose them. As we move into a more ecological age and gain a greater respect for natural history, we must reformulate our cultural history accordingly, which will take us more in the direction of this Hindu view of time, humanity and the universe.

Languages and Natural History

Ancient languages, like the populations and cultures, mainly arose as efforts to adapt to the natural environment. Languages were not simply affairs of the last five thousand years but have existed for tens of thousands of years, as long as the species, and have also been strongly impacted by natural history.

We can trace the movement of languages along with this movement of peoples, who would not have been mute. Such early ancient peoples would have kept their languages in tact as best they could because they relied on the spoken language as the main repository of their culture. This would require making ancient language groups, including the Indo-European family, much older, arising eight to ten thousand years ago along with flood changes and migrations. It is even possible that currently recognized language groups reflect languages formed and spoken even longer back in the Ice Age Period.

This movement of peoples out of India and Southeast Asia at the end of the Ice Age can provide the impetus for the spread of Indo-European languages north and west into Europe and Central Asia, regions that in the Ice Age era could only hold very small if any populations, having a climate that resembles Tibet (as a cold dry desert). Or perhaps it began even earlier, in some of the warm interludes that did occur during the latter portions of the Ice Age.

The end of the Ice Age afforded the natural events to create widespread migrations from populated to unpopulated regions. The much later proposed migrations, like those speculated for the Aryans into India around 1500 BCE – which still has yet to be proved to have occurred at all – do not have this natural justification. They are proposed migrations from unpopulated to populated and from uncultured to cultured regions that could not count for so much in terms of cultural changes.

Yet even such shifts of people in the late ancient period appear to be related to climate changes and droughts that began around 2200 BCE, which also led to the drying up of the Sarasvati River in India, but this was another movement out of India or a relocation inside of India from the Sarasvati to the Ganga.

Language Families

India is not only the eastern focus of Indo-European languages; it is also the western focus of Indo-Pacific languages. The Indo-Pacific family covers the languages of the Australian aborigines and the Papuans. The Austro-Asiatic cuts across from India to the Pacific (the Munda in India, the Thai, and the Vietnamese), extending to Madagascar.

Indian languages of both the Sanskritic and Dravidian groups have considerable affinities and connections with Pacific languages. These have not been adequately explored owing to the obsession with PIE (Proto-Indo-European) relative to Europe and Central Asia that has kept scholars from taking Indian languages further south and east. Both Sanskritic and Dravidian languages of India have considerable connections with the Munda and Southeast Asian languages that they have been in physical proximity to, which has been throughout the historical period. These Pacific languages similarly have their connections with Dravidian and Sanskritic languages.

Within India, the connections between the structure and vocabulary of the north and the south Indian languages indicate much internal migration of people and diffusion of culture, linking not only India to the Central Asia, but more importantly, India to the Pacific region and to Southeast Asia.

In addition, it is not only the Indo-European languages that connect India with Central Asia. The Dravidian languages also have connections with the Altaic family of languages that includes the Japanese, Korean, and the Turkic. That is why western scholars have proposed similar Dravidian migrations into India in late ancient times – a kind of Dravidian invasion theory much like the Aryan Invasion idea, sometimes dated even after it, making the Dravidians into post-Aryan migrants into the region – to explain the connection of Dravidian languages in India with those in Central Asia. This was the view of Bishop Caldwell who first brought up the idea of a Dravidian family of languages.

These Aryan and Dravidian invasion models would make the dominant language families of India intruders from the northwest at a late period. Such an idea is contrary to the natural history and the fact that India had stable populations and a cultural continuity throughout the ancient period. A much more likely scenario is that both Dravidian and Sanskritic languages developed in India and their influence spread to the northwest along with the movement of peoples in the Post-Ice Age era. This makes India an important central focus for not only populations, but for many of the languages of the world.

The Indo-European languages and the Dravidian are probably offshoots of such an older Indo-Pacific group of languages. Ancient South India at the time of the end of the Ice Age was probably the home of a proto-Vedic culture and of languages that later gave rise to both Dravidian and Sanskritic groups.

Languages like peoples developed regionally, were occasionally displaced by powerful natural events, and spread also by communication. Languages like populations cannot be defined by the lesser migrations of the late ancient period, by which time most population bases were already defined. They should be related to earlier and more powerful events.

Religion and Culture of Southeast Asia

The Vedic religion of India has much in common with other Indo-European religions from Persia to Ireland in terms of practices, rituals and traditions. These include fire worship, ritual chanting, sacred plants and many other factors, such as has been the subject of many studies East and West.

However, similar connections exist between the Vedic and Southeast Asian religious and cultural traditions. While India and Southeast Asia shared Buddhist and Hindu traditions during the historical period, it is now becoming more likely they did so in the prehistoric era as well. We also need to examine the similarities between Vedic rituals, customs and yoga practices and older traditions of Southeast Asia, which, incidentally, also had fire worship and a cult of sacred plants (Soma).

One of the main mistakes of modern scholarship, relying uncritically on its own preconceptions about culture, is to not even bother to look for such connections. The artificial barriers put up by old theories that Indian civilization came from the West have to be eliminated. Southeast Asia has been regarded by western historians as an even more a cultural backwater than India because they regard it as having borrowed from India what India itself borrowed from the West! These ideas also need to be set aside. Southeast Asia may prove more important as a cradle for human populations and culture than the Middle East.

Many of the earliest agricultural sites have been found in Southeast Asia in the late Ice Age period more than ten thousand years ago. It is also likely that other cultural innovations usually credited to the Middle East may have arisen in this region. These were less likely to survive the course of time owing to sea level changes and the effects of a wet tropical climate, as well as probably building more with wood than stone.

The Hindu view that cycles of time are reflected in cycles of consciousness and civilization also deserves serious consideration. We cannot impose our current historical mindset on previous eras, particularly for eras thousands of years ago, and expect to understand them. Their mentality, culture and usage of language would have been according to the influences of their time and environment.

One of the great limitations of modern linguistics is that it tries to reconstruct ancient languages as if the ancients formed words and thought the way we did. In tracing ancient languages and their movement, we should also strive to be more sensitive as to their nature and symbolism. Similarly, when we use modern theories like Marxism, Freudian psychology or even monotheistic religions to understand the early ancient world, we are imposing alien ideas upon them that cannot reveal their true character.

An Integrated Approach

The tendency of modern scholarship of ancient India has been to make the culture, languages and peoples of the region into outsiders, coming fairly late in the ancient historical period. Such new and more scientific evidence shows that the peoples of India can no longer be made into recent immigrants. This makes it very difficult to superimpose their languages or cultures upon them at a late period as well. All these factors are intimately connected to the natural environment and natural history of the region.

In other words, in order to understand ancient India we must look at the natural history, languages, culture and peoples together. We cannot attribute the languages, peoples or culture of India to groups from outside of India, which India absorbed like a vacuum. Languages, peoples and cultures were already there and in abundance, as India has always been a very fertile ground for human development. Nor can we have these cultures like the Harappan mysteriously disappear or become replaced in the late ancient period, particularly when there is no evidence to support it. There is nothing mysterious about Harappan civilization or it’s arise or it’s fall. It is very Indian much like the later classical cultures of the region in arts, crafts, town planning, agriculture, tools or religious symbolism. We cannot divide it off into another stream which left no trace.

It is better to look at India as it truly is, as a natural geographical, cultural, linguistic, and population zone. We must recognize an indigenous development of civilization in India relative to the factors of natural history and shared environment defined by the geography of the Himalayas to the sea that we find even in ancient texts. This connects India geographically more with Southeast Asia, and in terms of time frame, with movements of people and climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age, not in the 1500 BCE era.

What is most remarkable is that India preserves an ancient literature that with its knowledge of the ocean and the Sarasvati River accurately reflects the natural history. Putting all these factors together is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Instead of a puzzle with most pieces missing, as has been the recent western view of ancient India, it restores the picture to its whole.

The idea of India as a cultural patchwork is the result of poor or preliminary scholarship that has been unable to reconstruct the whole, like the blind man who cannot see the elephant as a whole. Once we add in the complete picture as revealed both by the natural history and the literature of the region, what we see instead is India as one of the most important centers not only for human spirituality through its great religions, but also of populations, languages and culture back to the period of prehistory. This is new view of India that will replace the current old worn distortions that are held up more by politics and by inertia than by anything else.

In other words, in order to understand ancient India we must look at the natural history, languages, culture and peoples together. We cannot attribute the languages, peoples or culture of India to groups from outside of India, which India absorbed like a vacuum. Languages, peoples and cultures were already there and in abundance, as India has always been a very fertile ground for human development. Nor can we have these cultures like the Harappan mysteriously disappear or become replaced in the late ancient period, particularly when there is no evidence to support it. There is nothing mysterious about Harappan civilization or it’s arise or it’s fall. It is very Indian much like the later classical cultures of the region in arts, crafts, town planning, agriculture, tools or religious symbolism. We cannot divide it off into another stream which left no trace.

It is better to look at India as it truly is, as a natural geographical, cultural, linguistic, and population zone. We must recognize an indigenous development of civilization in India relative to the factors of natural history and shared environment defined by the geography of the Himalayas to the sea that we find even in ancient texts. This connects India geographically more with Southeast Asia, and in terms of time frame, with movements of people and climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age, not in the 1500 BCE era.

What is most remarkable is that India preserves an ancient literature that with its knowledge of the ocean and the Sarasvati River accurately reflects the natural history. Putting all these factors together is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Instead of a puzzle with most pieces missing, as has been the recent western view of ancient India, it restores the picture to its whole.

The idea of India as a cultural patchwork is the result of poor or preliminary scholarship that has been unable to reconstruct the whole, like the blind man who cannot see the elephant as a whole. Once we add in the complete picture as revealed both by the natural history and the literature of the region, what we see instead is India as one of the most important centers not only for human spirituality through its great religions, but also of populations, languages and culture back to the period of prehistory. This is new view of India that will replace the current old worn distortions that are held up more by politics and by inertia than by anything else.

In other words, in order to understand ancient India we must look at the natural history, languages, culture and peoples together. We cannot attribute the languages, peoples or culture of India to groups from outside of India, which India absorbed like a vacuum. Languages, peoples and cultures were already there and in abundance, as India has always been a very fertile ground for human development. Nor can we have these cultures like the Harappan mysteriously disappear or become replaced in the late ancient period, particularly when there is no evidence to support it. There is nothing mysterious about Harappan civilization or it’s arise or it’s fall. It is very Indian much like the later classical cultures of the region in arts, crafts, town planning, agriculture, tools or religious symbolism. We cannot divide it off into another stream which left no trace.

It is better to look at India as it truly is, as a natural geographical, cultural, linguistic, and population zone. We must recognize an indigenous development of civilization in India relative to the factors of natural history and shared environment defined by the geography of the Himalayas to the sea that we find even in ancient texts. This connects India geographically more with Southeast Asia, and in terms of time frame, with movements of people and climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age, not in the 1500 BCE era.

What is most remarkable is that India preserves an ancient literature that with its knowledge of the ocean and the Sarasvati River accurately reflects the natural history. Putting all these factors together is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Instead of a puzzle with most pieces missing, as has been the recent western view of ancient India, it restores the picture to its whole.

The idea of India as a cultural patchwork is the result of poor or preliminary scholarship that has been unable to reconstruct the whole, like the blind man who cannot see the elephant as a whole. Once we add in the complete picture as revealed both by the natural history and the literature of the region, what we see instead is India as one of the most important centers not only for human spirituality through its great religions, but also of populations, languages and culture back to the period of prehistory. This is new view of India that will replace the current old worn distortions that are held up more by politics and by inertia than by anything else.