What DNA Says About Aryan Invasion Theory -2

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Chromosomes carrying the M9-G mutation are widely distributed across
Asia; however, chromosomes carrying the ancestral state at seven of the eight
downstream SNPs that mark immediate descendant lineages from M9 (K-M9*)
on the most recent Y-chromosome tree (Jobling and Tyler-Smith 2003) are found
at relatively high frequencies only in the Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia,
Papua New Guinea, and Micronesia<b>. Capelli et al. (2001) hypothesized that all
Y chromosomes carrying the M9-G marker initially expanded out of Melanesia.</b>
If this is the case, the small proportion of K-M9* chromosomes (1.1%) in Bali
may be a signature of pre-Neolithic settlements. In contrast to M-P34 and
K-M230, the distribution of K-M9* chromosomes is not restricted to Oceania.
They are also present in Malaysia and the Near East, albeit at low frequencies.

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lansing/docs/Y%...i%20article.pdf<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[shamu]

How do our experts view this? This appeared in today's San Jose Mercury News.

Mapping our genes

<img src='http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2007/1104/20071104_084040_geneart_GALLERY.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

[dhu]

It's Spencer Wells' familiar (NatGeo) scheme of a Northern route exodus from Africa. The blue arrow making the U-turn from Europe to India is M17. Of course, we know that the southern route is proven and that M17 exited India for Europe. These points will never be conceded since they do not fit AIT dogma.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Nov 5 2007, 11:26 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Nov 5 2007, 11:26 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->It's Spencer Wells' familiar (NatGeo) scheme of a Northern route exodus from Africa.  The blue arrow making the U-turn from Europe to India is M17.  Of course, we know that the southern route is proven and that M17 exited India for Europe.  These points will never be conceded since they do not fit AIT dogma.
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The blue arrow you're talking about is the one that makes the U-turn somewhere near Afghanistan right?

[dhu]

THe one making the turn under the letter "E" in Europe.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Nov 4 2007, 05:56 PM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Nov 4 2007, 05:56 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->It's Spencer Wells' familiar (NatGeo) scheme of a Northern route exodus from Africa.  The blue arrow making the U-turn from Europe to India is M17.  Of course, we know that the southern route is proven and that M17 exited India for Europe.  These points will never be conceded since they do not fit AIT dogma.
[right][snapback]74927[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Spencer wells is a Christian supremacy person.
His thesis is to make sure that Christian time line and white supremacy is maintained.

The false genetic heritage and history has to be protected

[shamu]

Not sure where to post this.

Many Mammals Came from India, Discovery Suggests

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Thu Nov 8, 2:45 PM ET

As if hidden from the paleo tooth fairy, a lone molar belonging to a hoofed mammal stayed tucked beneath a pillow of volcanic rock in central India for more than 65 million years. Recently uncovered, the tooth predates similar fossils found across the globe.

The dental discovery sheds light on the evolution of adaptations that allowed a group of mammals called ungulates to thrive as expert grazers. It also suggests, according to newly published research on the tooth, that the Indian subcontinent could be the point of origin of many groups of mammals.

The lower right molar, about half the size of an ant (2.5 millimeters long), was found embedded in central India's Deccan volcanic flows. The researchers estimate the tooth dates back to the late Cretaceous period (144 million to 65 million years ago), a time when India was not connected with other continents and dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

The fossil belonged to a new species of ungulate dubbed Kharmerungulatum vanvaleni, a hoofed animal related to modern horses, cows, pigs, sheep and deer. And it represents the oldest known evidence for the so-called archaic ungulates (small, primitive hoofed mammals), predating by millions of years the explosion of mammalian life that occurred during Paleocene Epoch, from 65 million to nearly 55 million years ago.

"Until now, the known fossil record of [the] oldest archaic ungulates or supposed ancestors of living ungulates comes from the Early Paleocene of North America," Guntupalli Prasad of the University of Jammu in India told LiveScience. He is the lead author of the tooth study, detailed in the Nov. 9 issue of the journal Science.

The teeth of mammals living during the late Cretaceous, Prasad noted, generally sported sharp and pointy cusps and, over evolutionary time, dental modifications led to expert grinders. However, the tooth of the new mammal was flat and broad, suggesting it was already adapted for munching grass rather than for tearing through meaty meals.

"We consider Kharmerungulatum to represent an early stage in the evolution of ungulates," Prasad and his colleagues write.

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>"The Autochthonous Origin and a Tribal Link of Indian Brahmins: Evaluation Through Molecular Genetic Markers," </b>

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF HUMAN GENETICS 57th Annual Meeting Abstract Book
<http://www.ashg.org/genetics/ashg/annmeet/2007/call/abstractbook.pdf>, 2007

S. Sharma, E. Rai, S. Singh, P.R. Sharma, A.K. Bhat, K. Darvishi, A.J.S. Bhanwer, P.K. Tiwari, R.N.K. Bamezai.
1) NCAHG, SLS, JNU, New delhi; 2) Department of Human Genetics, GNDU, Amritsar; 3) Centre for Genomics, SOS zoology, JU,Gwalior.

The co-existence and associated genetic evidences for the major rival models: i) recent Central Asian introduction of Indian caste system, ii) rank related west Eurasian admixture, iii) South Asian origin for Indian caste communities, and iv) late Pleistocene heritage of tribal and caste populations, leave the question of the origin of caste system in India hazy and obscure. To resolve the issue, we screened 621 Y-chromosomes (of Brahmins, occupying upper most caste position and Dalits and Tribals with the lower most positions in the Indian caste hierarchical system) with fifty-five Y-chromosomal binary markers and Y-microsatellite markers and compiled a data set of 2809 Y-chromosomes (681 Brahmins, 2128 Tribals and Dalits) for conclusions. Overall, no consistent difference was observed in Y-haplogroups distribution between Brahmins, Dalits and Tribals, except for some differences confined to a given geographical region. A peculiar observation of highest frequency (upto 72.22%) of Yhaplogroups R1a1* in Brahmins, hinted at its presence as a founder lineage for this caste group. The widespread distribution and high frequency across Eurasia and Central Asia of R1a1* as well as scanty representation of its ancestral (R*, R1* and R1a*) and derived lineages across the region has kept the origin of this haplogroup unresolved. The analyses of a pooled dataset of 530 Indians, 224 Pakistanis and 276 Central Asians and Eurasians, bearing R1a1* haplogroup resolved the controversy of origin of R1a1*. The conclusion was drawn on the basis of: i) presence of this haplogroup in many of the tribal populations such as, Saharia (present study) and Chenchu tribe in high frequency, ii) the highest ever reported presence of R1a* (ancestral haplogroup of R1a1*) in Kashmiri Pandits (Brahmins) and Saharia tribe, and iii) <b>associated averaged phylogenetic ages of R1a* (~18,478 years) </b>and <b>R1a1* (~13,768 years) in India.</b> The study supported the autochthonous origin of R1a1 lineage and a tribal link to Indian Brahmins.
<span style='font-family:Times'>
<i>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If it can shown that R1A1* originated in India or South Asia only during or just before the Holocene period, it would strongly support some kind of Out of India theory of one sort or another.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Quests of the Dragon and Bird Clan</i></span><!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Sailing the Black Current: New book explores the hidden legacy of ancient argonauts</b>

<img src='http://www.pr-inside.com/images/pics/89302-sailing-the-black-current-new.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

Sailing the Black Current: Secret History of Ancient Philippine Argonauts in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Beyond
by Paul Kekai Manansala.

Long ago, beginning in the New Stone Age, a people that included the ancestors of the Malayo-Polynesian people, known as the Nusantao, spread news of the world's center to the far reaches of the globe.

A great churning of the ocean, a major volcanic eruption had left clues convincing these ancient navigators that they had discovered the axis mundi, the link between
the three worlds of old mythology.

Author Paul Kekai Manansala searched deep into arcane archives, museums and other repositories to uncover the mysteries of these ancient argonauts.

From page 7 of "Sailing the Black Current: Secret History of Ancient Philippine Argonauts in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Beyond":


"For the Nusantao, though, the sea was part of their second nature. Their entire region had been subject to sea flooding for thousands of years before they set up their trade networks across the region.<b> During that time, islands and nearly the entire continent known as Sundaland became submerged under rising sea levels.</b>

"Migration by sea became a forced habit, and many of the people including the Nusantao often took to living on their boats permanently. They lived largely off the sea through fishing, shellfish collecting and sea mammal hunting.

"Among the modern cultural descendants of the Nusantao, the so-called 'Sea Gypsies,- it is often customary to cast a newly born baby into the sea. The salty baptism not only teaches the baby to swim but also accustoms the skin and eyes to the brine at the earliest age.

"Rending of lands into islands by rising seas certainly caused the separation of families and clans. <b>The evidence suggests that these clans stayed in touch despite the distances and obstacles that separated them."</b>


The new book can be found at the following URL on amazon.com:

"Sailing the Black Current: Secret History of Ancient Philippine Argonauts in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Beyond"
http://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Black-Curren...s/dp/1419676970<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Origins of Europeans: The Teeth tell the tale</b>

By: RANDOLPH E. SCHMID - AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON -- <b>Early human-like residents of Europe may have arrived out of Asia, rather than just Africa.</b>

An international team of researchers reports in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that<b> Asians appear to have played a larger part in the settlement of Europe than did Africans.</b>

The team led by Maria Martinon-Torres of the National Center for the Investigation of Human Evolution, in Burgos, Spain, reached that conclusion after analyzing more than 5,000 fossil teeth from early hominins, an early form of human predecessors.
<b>
After studying ancient teeth from Africa, Asia and Europe, the researchers report that early European populations had more Asian features than African ones.</b>

That conclusion also supports the theory that the development of the genus Homo -- modern humans are Homo sapiens -- occurred both in Africa and Asia.

The teeth studied were from the genera Homo and the earlier Australopithecus.

"The history of human populations in Eurasia may not have been the result of a few high-impact replacement waves of dispersals from Africa, but a much more complex puzzle of dispersals," Martinon-Torres' team wrote.

The differences in tooth formation, dimensions and shapes in Europe and Asia and that of Africa suggest separate evolutionary courses for a long period, they said.

That doesn't mean there was no genetic flow between Africa and Eurasia, but rather that the Eurasians were probably descendants of an ancient out-of-Africa exodus, they said.

Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, noted that dental evidence is always difficult to work with and said this research team did "a very good job."

The idea that human evolution involved small and relatively isolated populations for much of its history, with a migration out of Africa and other migrations between continents, "is in concordance with the interpretations of paleoanthropologists," he said.

"It may be in different languages, but we are singing the same song," said Wolpoff, who was not part of the research team.

The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, Fundacion Caja Madrid, Fundacion Atapuerca, Fundacion Duques de Soria and the Georgian National Museum.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

Fossil skull offers clue to origins of Chinese people

Jonathan Watts

Archaeologists hail the biggest discovery in 80 years

Beijing: Chinese archaeologists are hailing their biggest discovery in almost 80 years after unearthing a skull that could provide a clue to the origins of a fifth of the world’s population. The fossilised skull, named Xuchang Man after the city where it was found, is thought to date back 80,000 to 100,000 years, to a period that has long been a mystery to scientists.

It contains a rare fossilised membrane that archaeologists hope will reveal important details about the nervous system of the ancients and settle a contentious academic debate about whether most of China’s 1.3 billion people are mainly indigenous, descended from African migrants or intermixed.

The almost complete skull, which comprises 16 fragments, was found in the central province of Henan last month. It has protruding eyebrows and a small forehead.

Government officials said the importance of the find was second only to that of Peking Man in 1929, when archaeologists discovered five almost complete skulls and other bones believed to date back 250,000 to 500,000 years. “It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils that were found in Beijing early last century and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution,” Shan Jixiang, director of China’s cultural heritage administration, was quoted as saying by the China Daily.

The site had been of interest since the mid-1960s, when villagers found ancient tools while they were digging a well. But it was only two years ago, after the spring dried up, that the Henan cultural relics and archaeology research institute began excavating the area. The 17-member team has also found thousands of animal fossils and other artefacts.

The skull was unearthed at a depth of five metres just as the last two archaeologists on the site were preparing to head home for the lunar new year holiday.

The skull could fill a huge gap in the knowledge of human evolution, he said. Most palaeoanthropologists believe all modern humans are descended from people who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. Another view is that there was significant interbreeding in Europe and elsewhere with Neanderthals. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Pig study sheds new light on the colonization of Europe by early farmers</b>

The earliest domesticated pigs in Europe, which many archaeologists believed to be descended from European wild boar, were actually introduced from the Middle East by Stone Age farmers, new research suggests.

The research by an international team led by archaeologists at Durham University, which is published today in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences USA, analysed mitochondrial DNA from ancient and modern pig remains. Its findings also suggest that the migration of an expanding Middle Eastern population, who brought their ‘farming package’ of domesticated plants, animals and distinctive pottery styles with them, actually ‘kickstarted’ the local domestication of the European wild boar.

While archaeologists already know that agriculture began about 12,000 years ago in the central and western parts of the Middle East, spreading rapidly across Europe between 6,800 – 4000BC, many outstanding questions remain about the mechanisms of just how it spread. This research sheds new and important light on the actual process of the establishment of farming in Europe.

Durham University’s Dr Keith Dobney explained: “Many archaeologists believe that farming spread through the diffusion of ideas and cultural exchange, not with the direct migration of people. However, the discovery and analysis of ancient Middle Eastern pig remains across Europe reveals that although cultural exchange did happen, Europe was definitely colonised by Middle Eastern farmers.

“A combination of rising population and possible climate change in the ‘fertile crescent’, which put pressure on land and resources, made them look for new places to settle, plant their crops and breed their animals and so they rapidly spread west into Europe.”

The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Smithsonian Institution also showed that within 500 years after the local domestication of the European wild boar, the new domestics completely replaced the Middle Eastern pigs that had arrived in Europe as part of the ‘farming package’.

Dr Greger Larson, who performed the genetic analysis said: “The domestic pigs that were derived from the European wild boar must have been considered vastly superior to those originally from Middle East, though at this point we have no idea why. In fact, the European domestic pigs were so successful that over the next several thousand years they spread across the continent and even back into the Middle East where they overtook the indigenous domestic pigs. For whatever reason, European pigs were the must have farm animal.”

The research is part of an ongoing research project based at Durham University which explores the role of animals in reconstructing early farming, ancient human migration and past trade and exchange networks around the world.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Europeans Rooted in Asia, Not Africa
- Asia, a more likely source for the early human populations</b>
By: Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

Africa may have been the cradle of the human evolution, but it scarcely shared its human populations with the chilly Europe. The first species of Homo entering Europe appears to have come rather from Asia, than Africa. An international research team has found that Asians played a more important role in the settlement of Europe than Africans did.

The team was led by Maria Martinon-Torres of the
National Center for the Investigation of Human Evolution, in Burgos, Spain and reached this result after investigating over 5,000 fossil teeth from early hominid species, Homo erectus, H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthaliensis.

The ancient teeth from Africa, Asia and Europe revealed that early European populations displayed more Asian features than African ones. This also enhances the hypothesis that the development of the genus Homo, to which we, Homo sapiens, belong, took place both in Africa and Asia.

"The history of human populations in Eurasia may not have been the result of a few high-impact replacement waves of dispersals from Africa, but a much more complex puzzle of dispersals," wrote the team.

"The differences in tooth formation, dimensions and shapes in Europe and Asia and that of Africa suggest separate evolutionary courses for a long period. That doesn’t mean there was no genetic flow between Africa and Eurasia, but rather that the Eurasians were probably descendants of an ancient out-of-Africa exodus," they said.

"The idea that human evolution involved small and relatively isolated populations for much of its history, with a migration out of Africa and other migrations between continents is in concordance with the interpretations of paleoanthropologists," said Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, who praised the researchers as dental evidence is very difficult to work with.

"It may be in different languages, but we are singing the same song," said Wolpoff, not involved in this research.

Even the modern Homo sapiens racial types in Europe came from Asia. The blond Indo-Europeans arrived 5,000 years ago from Central Asia while the pre-Indo-European dark haired Ibero-Caucasians had come from Caucasus area or southwestern Asia about 10,000 years ago, following the separation of the continent from ice at the end of the Ice Age. Later invasions of Mongoloid race tribes (Huns, Hungarians, Finns, Cumans, Tartars, Mongols, Turks, Lapps and others) also came from Asia. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->GENETICS AND THE ARYAN DEBATE
By Michel Danino
http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts...yan-debate.html

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.

genetic map

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.

genetic-distance


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

..... [see link]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

I don't believe in AIT, but there's something bothering me just the same, and I hope someone can clear it up.

I am South Indian, Tamil to be precise, and in my experience, I've found North Indians to be light-skinned, how? Why is it most SIs, especially tamils, are dark, whereas most NIs are light-skinned? And if at all there are light-skinned SIs, they happen to be Brahmin.

This is the question AIT sympathizers repeatedly ask me, and to be honest, I am beginning to find it puzzling too. Climate cannot be the reason, it may effect minor changes, but it can't alter skin color as such. So what could be the reason?

I cannot believe in AIT fairy tales, so there must be some other reason as to why most NIs and SI brahmins are light-skinned. The reason I am asking this q related to color is because this happens to be AIT's strong point, they always harp on the color diff. between N and S to prove their point.

[dhu]

Take a look at an asia map. Kashmir is the same latitude as Korea. Punjab as Shanghai.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east...ef802643_99.jpg

[Pandyan]

<!--QuoteBegin-sureshmoorthy+Jan 27 2008, 12:33 PM-->QUOTE(sureshmoorthy @ Jan 27 2008, 12:33 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->I don't believe in AIT, but there's something bothering me just the same, and I hope someone can clear it up.

I am South Indian, Tamil to be precise, and in my experience, I've found North Indians to be light-skinned, how? Why is it  most SIs, especially tamils, are dark, whereas most NIs are light-skinned? And if at all there are light-skinned SIs, they happen to be Brahmin.

This is the question AIT sympathizers repeatedly ask me, and to be honest, I am beginning to find it puzzling too. Climate cannot be the reason, it may effect minor changes, but it can't alter skin color as such. So what could be the reason?

I cannot believe in AIT fairy tales, so there must be some other reason as to why most NIs and SI brahmins are light-skinned. The reason I am asking this q related to color is because this happens to be AIT's strong point, they always harp on the color diff. between N and S to prove their point.
[right][snapback]77694[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I am a non-brahmin Tamil myself, but one could place me anywhere in the subcontinent and I wouldn't look out of place there. The fact is that Indians are almost universally on the darker side of the scale and contain only a few populations that are relatively light skinned (by Indian standards). Most of these states are in the north-west, an area which has been subject to so many invasions by fairer-skinned people (not referring to AIT). From my own observations, most Indians are morphologically very similar (in terms of facial structure etc) and only differ (that too slightly) in skin color and height.

Thats my view. Climate differences aren't relevant in this case because Punjab/Delhi summers are hotter and drier than in Chennai and it barely even touches 0 in the winter.

[acharya]

<img src='http://www.archaeologyonline.net/indology/2007/horse/map-genetic.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />



This is a very interesting scientific finding which debunks the Aryan Invasion Theory(AIT) and the aryan v/s dravidian divide.

The scientific study also shows "even the high castes share more than 80 per cent of their maternal lineages with the lower castes and tribals." And
“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.


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. <b>Long lists of such fictitious races filled academic publications, and continue to be found in Indian textbooks today.
</b>

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.”
<b>
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.”</b>

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.” <span style='color:orange'><b>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: “<span style='font-size:21pt;line-height:100%'>Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA.”</b></span>
</span>
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.”
<b>
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.”</b>

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.

genetic-distance


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.

http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts...yan-debate.html

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I am South Indian, Tamil to be precise, and in my experience, I've found North Indians to be light-skinned, how? Why is it  most SIs, especially tamils, are dark, whereas most NIs are light-skinned? And if at all there are light-skinned SIs, they happen to be Brahmin.

This is the question AIT sympathizers repeatedly ask me, and to be honest, I am beginning to find it puzzling too. Climate cannot be the reason, it may effect minor changes, but it can't alter skin color as such. So what could be the reason?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That is generally true, NI tend to be lighter but it is not a hard and fast rule.

But if climate has no bearing then why are many Sinhalese (supposed to be from around Bengal-Orissa, not the south by any means) just as dark as many Tamils, as a sample look at their cricket team.

Also what AIT proponents cant seem to answer is why the Vedic Arya's have no memory of a homeland outside Bharat?

Now let us assume that they were trying to cover up this supposed "invasion", then we come to the Tamuzh Sangam literature, in there not one word is said about this alleged "invasion", infact there is no notion of invader vs native in the entire corpus, far from it the picture we glean from it is that of a society steeped in Puranic lore and varnashrama based on birth (i am not saying it was good, it may sound bad to our modern "egalitarian" ears but we have to keep in mind that no society was absolutely equal 2000 years ago).

Wouldn't we expect someone to remember this invasion, afterall we do remember the invasions of Ghori and Ghazni after nearly 1000 years don't we.

Here is something interesting I found:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Indian Self-Image in the Fourth Century B.C.

Greek and Latin sources provide indications of how the Greeks perceived the Indians, and how the Indians perceived themselves, in or around the fourth century B.C. Some of these accounts are pre-Alexandrian, but most of them were written in the wake of, and after, Alexander’s invasion of India.

The point which stands out clearly from these accounts is that the Indians are considered a diverse and polyglot people. It goes as far back as Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) who states that there “are many tribes of Indians who speak many different languages.”[1] This diversity is further recognized in the statement about the Indians “situated very far from the Persians, towards the south,” who, “never subject to Darius, have a complexion closely resembling the Ethiopians.”[2]

The next point worth noting is that Indians considered themselves to be indigenous to India. Diodorus Siculus (first century B.C.) has this to say on the point:

It is said that India, being of enormous size when taken as a whole, is peopled by races both numerous and diverse, of which not even one was originally of foreign descent, but all were evidently indigenous; and moreover that India neither received a colony from abroad, nor sent out a colony to any other nation. The legends further inform us that in primitive times the inhabitants subsisted on such fruits as the earth yielded spontaneously, and were clothed with the skins of the beasts found in the country, as was the case with the Greeks; and that, in like manner as with them, the arts and other appliances which improve human life were gradually invented, Necessity herself teaching them to an animal at once docile and furnished not only with hands ready to second all his efforts, but also with reason and a keen intelligence.[3]

As a third point, we might consider the belief the Indians had in their historical antiquity. Thus, according to Arrian:

From the time of Dionysus to Sandracottus the Indians counted 153 Kings and a period of 6042 years, but among these a republic was thrice established * * * * and another 300 years, and another 120 years. The Indians also tell us that Dionysus was earlier than Heracles by fifteen generations, and that except him no one made a hostile invasion of India – not even Cyrus the son of Cambyses, although he undertook an expedition against the Scythians, and otherwise showed himself the most enterprising monarch in all Asia; but that Alexander indeed came and overthrew in war all whom he attacked, and would even have conquered the whole world had his army been willing to follow him. On the other hand, a sense of justice, they say, prevented any Indian king from attempting conquest beyond the limits of India.[4]

It is clear then that already in the fourth century B.C. the Indian self-perception of being a diverse, indigenous and ancient people must have been firmly in place, and was reported as such by the Greeks. One might add that India then was also perceived as “the most populous of all the nations of the world”[5] – a status it seems headed towards regaining.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] R.C. Majumdar, The Classical Accounts of India (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private LTD, 1981) p. 1.

[2] Ibid., p. 2.

[3] Ibid., p. 235.

[4] Ibid., p. 223.

[5] Ibid., p. 1.

http://arvindsharma.wordpress.com/2008/01/...rth-century-bc/<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I do not believe in AIT either (you know the one with barbaric "aryans" storming down in their chariots to destroy the peaceful "dravidians") simply because of lack of evidence, but if its proven at a later date that the Vedic people migrated into Bharat at a certain date, so what all of human race migrated at one point or another.

Nowadays they are postulating an earlier DIT (Dravidian Invasion Theory) of the South which supposedly displaced the languages of the "indigenous" people already there, i wonder what Karunanidhi has to say to that.

[shamu]

<!--QuoteBegin-Pandyan+Jan 28 2008, 12:01 AM-->QUOTE(Pandyan @ Jan 28 2008, 12:01 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->most Indians are morphologically very similar (in terms of facial structure etc) and only differ (that too slightly) in skin color and <b>height</b>.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't think there is real height difference between people in north and south. Currently we see a major difference in height between people from Punjab and rest of India because, Punjabis countinue to take more healthy food and maintained their martial practices in their rural area. Most of the Indians suffered malnutrition after first world war and that resulted in many of them becoming shorter. I can see this in my own family that both my grandfathers (in Kerala) were more than 6 feet, whereas most of their children and grand children are shorter. I even notice many of the children born after green revolution are infact taller. The reason - better food intake.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Thats my view. Climate differences aren't relevant in this case because Punjab/Delhi summers are hotter and drier than in Chennai and it barely even touches 0 in the winter.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There is another difference in the way people dress in south and north of India. When it is hot or cold, people in north cover their body properly (may be it is too dry there) and avoid exposure to direct sun light. People in south will wear a loin clothe and work under the sun. What do you expect their skin color to be, that too after several centuries?