Aryan Invasion/migration Theories & Debates -2

[dhu]

http://www.youtube.com/user/IndiaNationa...3B22F2535C

9 part series with Dr. N. S. Rajaram

[sumishi]

X-posting from Sarasvati Civilization

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[size="3"]I found this 2002 article -- The Enigma of India's Origins -- written by a Westerner.

Makes for a very interesting read, tying up a few things discussed in this thread.

I submit it to you gurus for perusal.



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[size="4"]The Enigma of India’s Origins[/size]



The Dating of New Discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay Upsets the Orthodox Scenario for the Dawn of Civilization

David Lewis



With three quarters of the planet covered by water, it’s been said we know more about the surface of Venus than about that which lies beneath the sea. Yet this may be changing. The discovery of what may be a lost city off the coast of western Cuba startled the archeological world in the spring of 2001. Reports from Havana spoke of massive stone blocks stacked at a depth of 2,100 feet in perpendicular and circular formations, some resembling pyramids. Researchers in a miniature submarine described the area as an urban development, with structures that may once have been roads and bridges.



Because a prediluvian “lost city” does not fit into the accepted paradigm of prehistory, the halls of orthodoxy remain silent on the matter—at least for now. And while those halls still stand, other recent discoveries have begun to seriously erode their foundations. Finding the ruins of an ancient, submerged civilization raises more questions than it answers and causes more problems than it solves. How did the land and its structures sink? What could have prompted such a large-scale cataclysm? When did civilization on Earth actually begin? What do we really know about the ancient past and human origins? And how does the establishment of science, so fixed in its doctrines, grapple with the potential demise of its most cherished presumptions?



If the lost city of the Caribbean wasn’t enough, about the same time an equally startling discovery occurred twenty-five miles off the coast of Gujurat, India. The discovery took place in that part of the Arabian Sea known as the [color="#8b0000"]Gulf of Cambay[/color]. India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) turned up some amazing sonar images from the gulf’s depths while scanning for pollution levels. Using equipment that penetrates the sea floor, marine experts discovered a pattern of distinct, [color="#8b0000"]man-made formations across a five-mile stretch of seabed[/color].



According to reports published worldwide, NIOT’s sonar-imaging technology detected what appeared to be the stone pillars and collapsed walls of at least two cities. The site was described as part of an ancient river valley civilization not unlike the [color="#8b0000"]River Saraswati[/color] of the Rig Veda, thought to be mythical but—according to recent independent findings by Indian scientists—has been proved to have flowed to Gujurat. Divers at the Gulf of Cambay site later retrieved from depths of 120 feet two thousand man-made artifacts, including pottery, jewelry, sculpture, human bones, and evidence of writing, according to The Times of London.



“Underwater structures that have been found along the Gulf of Cambay, Gujarat, indicate an ancient township that could date back anywhere before or during the Harappan civilization,” Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi told the world at a press conference in May 2001.



Joshi’s initial guess was that the five-mile-long site was four thousand to six thousand years old and had been submerged by an extremely powerful earthquake. But in January 2002, carbon dating revealed that an artifact from the site was astonishingly ancient, between 8,500 and 9,500 years old (the oldest known civilization in the world by thousands of years). This was a time when, according to orthodox archeological standards, India should have been peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and a few settlements, not the inhabitants of a lost civilization.



The author and underwater researcher Graham Hancock described buildings at the site as being hundreds of feet in length, with drains running along the streets. “If the case is made [for the age of the underwater cities], then it means that the foundations are out of the bottom of archeology,” Hancock said.



The scope and sophistication of the site dismantles the specific belief that civilization began five thousand years ago in Sumeria, according to Hancock, even as the alternative scholarship movement, of which he is a central figure, in general challenges orthodox views about human origins. In the orthodox (Darwinist) view, life, and then human beings, emerged extremely slowly from highly improbable accidental causes over a period of time necessitated by laws of probability.



The theoretical four-billion-year age of the planet was determined not by scientific or geologic evidence, according to the science writer Richard Milton (author of Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism), but by estimating how long it should have taken for accidental life to have occurred, given the extreme improbability of life having occurred at all through random, material causes.



Civilization followed, according to the scenario, after the theoretical “out-of-Africa” migration (about 100,000 years ago), fairly recently in prehistory. Evidence of extremely ancient civilizations, or of severe cataclysmic disruptions (those resembling mythical events that may have shaped the ancient world), throws a wrench into the conventional machinery. Discoveries that reveal civilizations having existed several thousand years earlier than previously thought are greeted with disbelief, consternation, silence. Evidence, then, of modern man having lived, say, 250,000 years ago in South America is considered preposterous and heretical, although the evidence for it exists.



Other views, modern and ancient, portray life as having emerged by more mysterious means, not by a series of astronomically improbable accidents, not through a biblical creationist scenario, but by virtue of some other unknown agency. This other, unknown agency, an all-pervasive life force more in keeping with The Tao of Physics than Origin of Species, is such as that evidenced in Eastern healing disciplines and codified impressionistically in the world’s mythologies.



In this latter view, the idea that prehistoric civilizations existed needs not be rejected due to a presumption that life evolved from material causes alone over an arbitrary time line necessitated by improbability. Tradition in India has always held, in fact, that Indian culture predates all understanding, being virtually timeless, stretching into the mists of antiquity from whence sprang the gods and myth—the non-space/non-time reality of modern theoretical physics.



As we shall see, certain mythical traditions maintain that the landmass of ancient India greatly exceeded its present size, and even that it stretched from Australia to Madagascar, perhaps as an archipelago. As with the archeological discovery of Troy, once thought to be a myth, it must be recognized that at least some of India’s supposedly mythical traditions are rooted in historical fact. This leads to the idea of an “Asian Atlantis,” which may seem fantastic, but early geologists believed such a continent existed. The notion may again be gaining credence after the discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay and given NIOT’s intention to investigate other submerged archeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu.



Current conceptions of Western scholars conflict with traditional Indian beliefs about such things, but that wasn’t always the case. In the mid to late nineteenth century, when scientific ideas about human origins had begun to take shape in Europe, early geologists and archeologists accepted the idea of a biblical flood, lost continents (for which they found much evidence), and a landmass in the Indian Ocean—the great Southern Continent of the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.



Even today, mainstream science believes such landmasses as Gondwanaland and Pangaea existed, although they are relegated to the extremely ancient epochs of 180 to 200 million years ago, in keeping with beliefs about the age of the planet necessitated by an admittedly improbable evolutionary process. And consider the South Asian traditions that mimic the findings of the early geologists, those who say an inhabited continent existed across what are now the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal. These traditions live to this day in the lore of southern India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of the Andaman Sea.



“In a former age,” an ancient Sri Lankan text states, “the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea.”



The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticoreen on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Sri Lanka. This submerged landmass was not a landmass of the size envisioned by the early geologists, but—if it actually existed—a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.



Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., that of the Selungs of the Mergui Archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “. . . formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land. . . . Everything alive perished, except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters.”



One of the Tamil epics of southern India, the Silappadhikaram, frequently mentions a vast tract of land called [color="#8b0000"]Kumara Nadu[/color], also known as Kumari Kandam, stretching far beyond India’s present-day coasts. Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric “Tamil Sangham,” a spiritual academy situated in that ancient land. They wrote also of the submersion of two rivers, the Kumari and the Pahroli, in the middle of the continent, and of a country dotted with mountain ranges, animals, vegetation, and forty-nine provinces. This Pandya kingdom, according to tradition, reigned from 30,000 B.C.E. to 16,500 B.C.E. At least one branch of modern-day south Indian mystics claims a direct lineage from those extraordinarily ancient times, when their spiritual progenitors were said to have achieved extremely long lives through yogic techniques.



And India’s epic poem the Mahabharata, dated by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ, contains references to its hero, Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by the recent underwater discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s elite and wage war.



The writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only with nuclear war. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient civilization in India, but an advanced ancient civilization?



Flying machines . . . lost continents . . . are these mythical tales of mythical lands or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as fantasy?



To answer that question, we must look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India. Since the nineteenth century, Western scholars have dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the experts reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient [color="#8b0000"]Sanskrit [/color]turn up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an [color="#8b0000"]ethnocentric scheme[/color] to explain the phenomenon—one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to accept.



A previous European people must have once existed, the scholars imagined—an [color="#8b0000"]Indo-European race[/color] upon which the world, including India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock. The scholars also expropriated the [color="#8b0000"]Aryans [/color]of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This Aryan race, they told us, derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley in the north of India—making Sanskrit and Vedic culture relatively young and a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western civilization.



The “Aryan invasion” theory has since fallen into disrepute. James Schaffer, of Case Western University, a noted archeologist specializing in ancient India, had this to say on the matter. “The archeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging.”



In other words, India’s mythology is being proved historically accurate. Schaffer then wrote. “A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the ‘literature’ firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of south Asia, and now the archeological record is confirming this. . . . We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations [of Western scholars], which date back to the eighteenth century. . . . These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism . . .”



Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south—and some say of Sanskrit itself—entered India from the northwest, the Western scholars insist. Both invasion theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the [color="#8b0000"]Darwinists[/color], beliefs about the widely held out-of-Africa theory.



But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between the supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harrapan civilization of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying up of the mythical Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. The demise of the Aryan invasion theory, though, and the recently discovered underwater ruins open a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the past—not just India’s past, but that of the human race. If Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, and if ancient civilizations existed where there are now seas, how can prehistory be explained in modern Western terms?



And how much of the actual history of India is still obscured by ethnocentricism, colonialism, or scientific materialism? The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions about the age and nature of ancient India, her culture, her people, and her accomplishments.



It has long been claimed that Mother India was born in a time before all myth began, when rishis, men of great wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked on Earth. This ancient India dates to the times out of which the epic poems the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.



A great deluge inundated Kumari Kandam, obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say. This is a notion echoed in the writings of Colonel James Churchward and W. S. Cervé, both of whom claim knowledge of texts, Indian and Tibetan, respectively, that speak of a long-lost continent situated in the East.



While continental drift theory presumes the extremely slow and uniform movement of landmasses over many hundreds of millions of years, a great deal of evidence exists that Earth’s surface changed rapidly and violently in recent prehistory. A great sudden extinction of mammals and plants took place on the planet around the end of the last ice age, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. Hundreds of mammal and plant species disappeared from the face of the earth, many of the carcasses having been driven by flooding into deep caverns and charred piles the world over. Modern science has been unable to adequately explain this event, and unwilling to consider what seems obvious, based on the evidence.



D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, in Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C., amass a formidable quantity of known evidence corroborating the flood/conflagration legends stored in the world’s mythological record. If we suspend belief in the textbook accounts of prehistory, Allan and Delair fill the void in a convincing way, replacing gradualist doctrines that involve extremely slow glacial movements (which are supposed to have accounted for the great extinction) with what seems to have been, upon a review of the evidence, a worldwide, phenomenal disaster that submerged landmasses and ruptured Earth’s crust.



Much of the evidence centers on southern Asia. Records gathered by the Swedish survey ship Albatross in 1947 reveal a vast plateau of hardened lava for at least several hundred miles southeast of Sri Lanka. The lava, evidence of a severe rupture in Earth’s crust, fills most of the now submerged valleys that once existed there. The immense eruption that gave off the lava may have coincided with the downfall of Wallace’s Southern Continent (aka Kumari Kandam), for which much zoological and botanical evidence exists that would give such a landmass a recent date, according to Allan and Delair, not the 180 million years that orthodoxy ascribes to such a continent. The lost cities of the Gulf of Cambay may have suffered a similar fate, at the same time or as a result of unstable tectonic conditions resulting from the initial disturbance—an asteroid, perhaps, or a displacement of Earth’s crust—that caused the recent extinction and destruction of the ancient cities.



Among the troves of evidence compiled by early geologists and resurrected by Allan and Delair are Asian bone caves filled with diverse species of recent prehistoric animals from around the world. These carcasses could have been driven to their final resting places only by vast amounts of water moving across the globe. In light of Allan and Delair’s work, other evidence such as India’s Deccan trap, a vast triangular plain of lava several thousand feet thick covering 250,000 square miles, and the Indo-Gangetic trough, a gigantic crack in Earth’s surface stretching from Sumatra through India to the Persian Gulf, can be interpreted as evidence of a cataclysm that ruptured Earth’s crust, submerged various landmasses, and caused the great extinction.



Other titillating fragments of anomalous evidence suggest a pervasive if not advanced seafaring or even airborne culture having once existed in ancient India—for example, the identical nature of the Indus Valley script to that found at Easter Island on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Initial reports suggest, it should be noted, that the script found recently in the Gulf of Cambay resembles the Indus Valley script. According to certain south Indian researchers, the indecipherable scripts are written in a proto-Tamil language, which would link the culture of distant Easter Island and its famous megalithic statues with ancient southern India, Kumari Kandam—an idea echoed in the lore of Easter Islanders about a lost continent to the West from which their people originated.



With the recent advent of underwater archeology, records of the past are being rewritten. More research is needed, as well as more expeditions into treacherous waters and the depths of the world’s oceans; but more than ever, textbook scenarios of prehistory are drowning of their own weight while scenes of a more glorious past rise to the surface via acoustic imaging. Past being prologue, those images are of interest not to academics alone, but to all who would solve the mystery of human origins.

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[sumishi]

Deleted duplicated post. (Why does this happen when editing large posts??)<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angry.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':angry:' />

[sumishi]

X-posting from topic Sarasvati Civilization

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[size="3"] Here's a followup 2002 article to the one by David Lewis I posted a few posts above: The Enigma of India's Origins.



Written by Michael Cremo, who identifies himself as a "Vedic" creationist. Needless to say, the mainstream/propagandastream "scholars" are generally hammer and tongs after him.



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[size="4"]Will India’s Sunken City Sink the Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?[/size]

-- Michael Cremo



In January, I attended a conference in Hyderabad, India, at which Dr. Murli Manohara Joshi, the Indian government’s minister for science and technology, was present. He confirmed that oceanographic researchers of the National Institute of Ocean Technology, part of his ministry, had found remnants of a sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay, 30 kilometers off the shore of northwestern India. Sonar photographs of the ocean bottom revealed large, rectangular, walled structures extending 9 kilometers along the banks of an ancient riverbed, now 40 meters underwater. To confirm that the sonar images did represent a human habitation site, the researchers dredged up over 2,000 artifacts, including semiprecious stones, stone tools, and human bones. A piece of wood from the underwater site yielded a radiocarbon date of about 9,500 years.



If this age holds up, the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay represents the oldest city in the world, at 7,500 B.C. Jericho, in Palestine, previously thought to be the oldest urban settlement, goes back to only 7,000 BC and is much smaller in size.



Just as important as the age of the city is the cultural identity of its inhabitants. If it turns out that the inhabitants were part of the Vedic culture of India, this could revolutionize Indian history.



The historical writings of ancient India, the Puranas, tell of Vedic civilization existing in India not only 9.500 years ago, but much further back in time. Indeed, the Puranas record the existence of Vedic civilization in India going back hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.



When European powers like Great Britain came to dominate India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European scholars were reluctant to accept the great antiquity of Indian civilization. They were also troubled by the apparent connection between the ancient Sanskrit language of India and the European languages. If the historical and linguistic evidence were to be taken at face value, it would appear that the Indian civilization was more ancient that the European civilization, and that the European civilization was in fact descended from the Indian civilization. To avoid this conclusion, European colonial scholars concocted the idea Europe was the source of the Indian civilization. They proposed that a branch of the Aryan European people migrated from southern Russia (or some other nearby place) into India around 1,500 B.C. This Aryan migration concept remains in force today, among most European and many Indian historians and archaeologists. They insist that cities in the Indian subcontinent older than 3,500 years, such as Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro, were not Vedic, even though many lines of evidence suggest they were.



One thing is certain. The ancient Sanskrit historical writings make no mention of a migration from a homeland outside India. Furthermore, all of the place names in northern India are of Sanskrit origin. If the Sanskrit-speaking people were invaders, we would expect that many names of mountains, rivers, and places should reflect an earlier language, just as many thousands of geographical names in North America (Mississippi, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.) reflect the language of the pre-European inhabitants.



The time scale of the Indian civilization was particularly troubling to the early European colonial scholars. In the eighteenth century, most European scholars and scientists, relying on Biblical accounts, believed that the earth itself was less than ten thousand years old. So the vast expanses of time recorded in the ancient Sanskrit historical writings seemed impossible, although some few European scholars did take the long chronologies of Indian history seriously, much to the dismay of their colleagues. In 1802, in his book A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy, John Bentley said about one of these European intellectual traitors: “By his attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books . . . . he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundations of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.” Of course that is not really true, because then as well as now, some theologians have interpreted the “days” in the Biblical creation accounts as being cosmologically long days. Still, the short Biblical chronology was dominant at that time.



Bentley regarded the vast time periods of Indian history to be a recent invention by the brahmanas of India, who desired “to arrogate to themselves that they were the most ancient people on the face of the earth.” Unable to tolerate this, Bentley suggested that the Puranic histories should be compressed to fit within the few thousand years of the Biblical short chronology. And that is what happened.



So, on one hand, we have the ancient Sanskrit historical writings, which tell us that the Vedic culture has been present in India for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. And on the other hand, we have archaeologists and historians who tell us that these accounts are fictional, and that Vedic culture entered India only about 3,500 years ago. Any cities in the Indian subcontinent that are older than this are attributed to the Harrapan culture, which is not considered Vedic by most mainstream researchers.



If it turns out that the 9,500-year-old sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay was inhabited by people of Vedic culture, this would, of course, completely destroy the fiction that Vedic culture came into India by an Aryan migration from Europe or Central Asia some 3,500 years ago. It would instead lend support to the ancient Sanskrit histories, and open the way for research showing that the history of Vedic culture in India goes even further back in time.



Perhaps this is why Harvard University archaeologist Richard Meadow says, “The discovery is important enough to launch an international collaborative study as was done to uncover the sunken ruins of the Titanic.” (India Today, Feb. 11, 2002, pp. 45-46) On the surface, that sounds like an attractive offer. But Meadows, who has done extensive research at Harrapa, is one of the archaeologists, who is strongly upholding the current Aryan migration hypothesis, and he has already complained about “wild guesses” about the implications of the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. It may be that an international project, with people like Meadows exercising control, could be used to channel the direction of the research and conclusions in such a way as to not threaten the reigning Aryan migration hypothesis.



[color="#8b0000"]My advice to the Indian scientists in charge of the research: if there is any international involvement, make sure that you do not lose control of the direction and results of the research.[/color]



The sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay is not the first to be found in the region. In the 1970s, not far to the north, the Indian marine archaeologist S. Rao announced the discovery of ruins of a sunken city in the ocean waters offshore from the present-day town of Dvaraka. Could these be the remains of the fabled city of Dvaraka described in an ancient Sanskrit work called the Shrimad- Bhagavatam? According to this work, Dvaraka, with its palatial buildings and wide avenues, was the capital of the godking Krishna, who is identified in the Shrimad- Bhagavatam as the principal avatar of God. The Bhagavatam states that as soon as Krishna left this world, about five thousand years ago, the ocean covered Dvaraka. One problem with Rao’s discovery is that he gave an age of just 3,500 years to the underwater ruins he discovered. This leads me to suspect that either the date he gave is wrong or that the remains of the Dvaraka of Krishna’s time lie further out to sea. The existence of the newly discovered sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay 9,500 years ago make the existence of a 5,000 year-old Vedic city in the same region all the more likely.



Architectural remains of ancient India’s Vedic culture are to be found not only underwater, but also still standing on the Indian subcontinent. During my recent lecture tour in South India, following the Hyderabad conference, I saw, for example, the Mallikarjuna temple in Vijayawada, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The temple is situated on a hill overlooking the Krishna River. The present temple structure was built in the tenth century A.D. by King Tribhuvana Malla of the Chakukya dynasty, but according to tradition, the first temple on the site was built by King Yudhisthira, one of the heroes of the epic Mahabharata, about five thousand years ago. There are hundreds of such sites throughout India, many of them of far greater reputed antiquity. One of my goals is to find archaeologists in India willing to help document the true antiquity of such monuments.



But for now the focus is underwater, on the sunken city in the Gulf of Cambay. If it turns out to be a city of the Vedic culture, it could sink the Aryan migration idea for good.

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[pusan]

[quote name='sumishi' date='12 September 2011 - 12:19 AM' timestamp='1315766473' post='112833']

X-posting from topic Sarasvati Civilization

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[size="3"] Here's a followup 2002 article to the one by David Lewis I posted a few posts above: The Enigma of India's Origins.



Written by Michael Cremo, who identifies himself as a "Vedic" creationist. Needless to say, the mainstream/propagandastream "scholars" are generally hammer and tongs after him.



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Can you please give references to Gulf of Cambay findings being characterized as "city" ? I've read Kathiroli, Badrinarayanan, Rao et al's publication in Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology'2004. But there are no claims the authors make for there being a "city". They characterize the houses as "wattle and daub" structures, and findings of microliths and fired (albeit ill-fired) pottery.

[Husky]

[quote name='sumishi' date='12 September 2011 - 12:19 AM' timestamp='1315766473' post='112833']Here's a followup 2002 article to the one by David Lewis I posted a few posts above: The Enigma of India's Origins.



Written by Michael Cremo, who identifies himself as a "Vedic" creationist. Needless to say, the mainstream/propagandastream "scholars" are generally hammer and tongs after him.

[/quote]

Sumishi, maybe you're not yet aware of Cremo and gang. Michael Cremo - and some colleague of his - are ISKCONites, and who, like others, attempted cryptoism to peddle creationism. Fortunately, TalkOrigins long ago discussed their attempts to derail science. Unfortunately, TalkOrigins mistook ISKCON to be something Hindu (when ISKCON's founder explicitly said it was not <- a very lucky escape for Hindus, else Hindus would be forcibly saddled with even more of the uninvited: foreign "converts" :eek





Here:

1. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/lepper.html

Hidden History, Hidden Agenda

A Review of The Hidden History of the Human Race, by Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson. Badger, CA: Govardhan Hill Publishing. 1994.

By Bradley T. Lepper



The Hidden History of the Human Race is a frustrating book. The motivation of the authors, "members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (p. xix), is to find support in the data of paleoanthropology and archaeology for the Vedic scriptures of India. Their methods are borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists (whom they assiduously avoid citing).

(ISKCON uses "Vedic" mostly for ISKCONism.)

And there's a very obvious reason why they plagiarise from (fundamental) christians - their methods in general are often aligned: the need they feel to peddle creationism (foist their view on the world - Pass), and the missionising and subsequent wails of "persecution" (as happens in E Europe/Russia) are but some shared features.





http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/groves.html

But this time we get nearly a thousand pages! Gish, Bowden and Lubenow, the Christian creationists, can't raise even half of this between them. The difference is that Cremo and Thompson have read much, much more of the original literature than the other creationists, and their survey is correspondingly more complete. Yet I can't really say that their understanding is much greater, for all that; their tone of argument is as perverse, they are just as biased.

Sadly TalkOrigins mistakes them for representing Hindus on this page:

The letterhead is "Bhaktivedanta Institute, San Diego". Can this be a representative of that other fundamentalism, the Hindu variety? It can.

Remind ourselves what fundamentalist Hindus believe. Like fundamentalist Christians and Jews, they dismiss evolution.

Nonsense. ISKCONites do not represent Hindus, or therefore "fundamentalist Hindus" (whatever this new species may be).

And I don't know about others, but I've never encountered any Hindu bringing up say the diggajas, patalam and devalokam as objections to the planet's state. (Of course, the Hindu Gods are real; so even the Diggajas apparently - I wouldn't know - but all that's a different matter.)





2. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-...nists.html

Information about the NBC Television Show "The Mysterious Origins of Man"

On Sunday February 25th, 1996, NBC broadcast "The Mysterious Origins of Man," narrated by Charlton Heston, purporting to be a documentary about scientific evidence that would overturn currently accepted theories of human history. In fact, it was little more than a pseudo-scientific propaganda piece with large contributions by people affiliated with the Krishna Consciousness movement.

At least TalkOrigins here didn't refer to this as Hindu, but called it the ISKCON movement. Phew.



http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom.html

What's it all about?



On Sunday February 25th 1996, NBC broadcast [b]"The Mysterious Origins of Man" (hereafter MOM)[/b], narrated by Charlton Heston, purporting to be a documentary about scientific evidence that would overturn currently accepted views of human history and evolution.



In late May 1996, NBC issued a press release announcing that MOM would be re-broadcast on Saturday, June 8, 1996.



The film was produced by B. C. Video Inc. (P.O. Box 97, Shelburne, VT 05482, Ph: 800-846-9682), which has set up a web site to publicize it [offsite].



Although MOM was anti-evolutionary, it was not advocating scientific creationism, even though some of the "experts" and arguments are familiar to readers of scientific creationist literature. Instead, just as scientific creationism is an attempt to use science to support fundamentalist Christianity, MOM is apparently an attempt to use science to support Hinduism. Much of the material in the program is based on the contents of two books, Forbidden Archeology [offsite] and The Hidden History of the Human Race [offsite] by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, both of whom appeared on the show and are members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Both books are published by Govardhan Hill Publishing [offsite].



Other material for MOM came from Graham Hancock's book Fingerprints of the Gods [offsite], Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's book When the Sky Fell [offsite], and Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert's book The Orion Mystery [offsite].



[...]



Reviews of The Mysterious Origins of Man:



[...]



Claims made on "Mysterious Origins of Man"



[...]

Hindus approving of - hence peddling - ISKCONism (or other such famous global movements): know *what* you're cheering first.

If you don't know, then don't promote things. Better yet: avoid.

[sumishi]

[size="3"]^^

Husky, thanks for the above inputs.



But I am a little unclear on what your were exactly getting at!

Is it that:



[a] Writings of Cremo and gang (since they are ISKCONites) are suited for the trash bin. As a case in point, the above article by Cremo -- "Will India’s Sunken City Sink the Aryan Invasion Hypothesis?"



OR



[b] Their articles should be taken with a pinch / bucketful of salt, depending upon how much the "ISCKON' factor is involved?

[/size]

[Husky]

^ It's [c] I'd avoid, because they're motivated (have an agenda).





Posting this from IF's "Recent Status Updates" section (main page, RHS), because it may disappear from there in future:

dhu [color="#800080"](wrote)[/color] -

Priyadarshi: mouse OIT mus,musaka>mouse in oirope no later than neolithic, AIT dead



Today, 07:02 AM

[HareKrishna]

[quote name='Husky' date='28 September 2011 - 07:34 PM' timestamp='1317218191' post='113058']

Sumishi, maybe you're not yet aware of Cremo and gang. Michael Cremo - and some colleague of his - are ISKCONites, and who, like others, attempted cryptoism to peddle creationism. Fortunately, TalkOrigins long ago discussed their attempts to derail science. Unfortunately, TalkOrigins mistook ISKCON to be something Hindu (when ISKCON's founder explicitly said it was not <- a very lucky escape for Hindus, else Hindus would be forcibly saddled with even more of the uninvited: foreign "converts" :eek

Here:

1. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/lepper.html

(ISKCON uses "Vedic" mostly for ISKCONism.)

And there's a very obvious reason why they plagiarise from (fundamental) christians - their methods in general are often aligned: the need they feel to peddle creationism (foist their view on the world - Pass), and the missionising and subsequent wails of "persecution" (as happens in E Europe/Russia) are but some shared features.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/groves.htmlSadly TalkOrigins mistakes them for representing Hindus on this page:

Nonsense. ISKCONites do not represent Hindus, or therefore "fundamentalist Hindus" (whatever this new species may be).

And I don't know about others, but I've never encountered any Hindu bringing up say the diggajas, patalam and devalokam as objections to the planet's state. (Of course, the Hindu Gods are real; so even the Diggajas apparently - I wouldn't know - but all that's a different matter.)

2. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-...nists.html

At least TalkOrigins here didn't refer to this as Hindu, but called it the ISKCON movement. Phew.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom.html

Hindus approving of - hence peddling - ISKCONism (or other such famous global movements): know *what* you're cheering first.

If you don't know, then don't promote things. Better yet: avoid.

[/quote]



Prabhupad had said many times that Iskcon is not hindu.However iskconites today(from USA,UK Russia) claim to represent the true hindu culture(or the true vedic culture in contrast to corupted vedic of other non-iskcon hindus),in order to atract indian imigrants in that countries after they lost most of their white members.In many palces today Iskcon have more indian members than westerners.

[dhu]

[size="3"]Husky, this is the article.



Mice Migration and Human Migration: TwoLinked Journeys

by P. Priyadarshi

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55042900/Mice-Migration[/size]

Rajabi-Maham et al (2008) found that after reaching the Fertile Crescent mice expansion toward Europe and Asia Minor took at least two routes, tentatively termed the Mediterranean and the Bosphorus/Black Sea routes. This scenario resembles that of another domesticated species, the goat, and fits with the known progression of Neolithic culture, they note. Migration of both the goat and the domestic mouse took exactly the same routes, at the same time around 12,000 years ago. This cannot be a mere coincidence and is an evidence of Neolithic human migration from India with goat and Mus domesticus.(21)



Protracted commensality of Mus m. domesticus in India indicates that Homo sapiens sapiens was doing some primitive farming or foraging and storing food since much before actual onset of Neolithic migration. Indians of that era had possibly a settled life and home and they depended on cereal, fruit and tuber diet. Initially, population was small, and land abundant. Hence cultivation was not needed. Man used to harvest ripe grains (rice, barley, millets) from wild fields and store them. This stored food kept Mus domesticus tied to the Indian households. Pestering of human households by mice forced man to use more and more burnt clay pottery, and it must have prompted him to invent and use metal pottery much later in history.



..

Cognate words for ‘mouse’ are found exclusively within the Indo-European family of languages (English ‘mouse’, Latin mus, Sanskrit mUSaka, muSika, mUs, muSka, (22) Pahlavi musk), indicating expansion of domestic mouse out of India with migrating Neolithic culture of the Indo-European speakers of north India.

Mus diverged into three principal species, viz. Mus musculus domesticus, M. musculus musculus and M. castaneus by 500,000 years back (Geraldis, 2008; Din, 1996), and all the species continued to live in India.(3) In India, Homo erectus lived then. When Homo sapiens sapiens inhabited India in about 100,000 ybp or earlier, these species became adapted to live in and around human dwellings (Boursot, 1993).(4) Mice probably felt safer there. Tsutim et al (2008) found that human environment gives protection to sparrows from being predated by carnivorous birds and animals.(5) The same applies to mice. It is generally accepted that existence of these mice was so much dependant on human food, that they migrated with man as a passive migrant. “One of the most characteristic features of house mice life history is probably its commensalism in relation to humans. The worldwide colonization by this species is mainly due to passive transport by humans and is a consequence of its ecological dependence on humans.”(6) If not all, most of the Mus species can be found in India. Prager et al identified samples from Afghanistan as Mus musculus musculus and castaneus and samples from Pakistan, North India and Nepal as castaneus.(7) “Genetic data indicated that ranges of musculus, custaneous and domesticus likely correspond to three distinct paths of expansion from the Indian cradle.”(8) In fact later discovery of migration routes and distribution ranges of human male lineages (Y-DNA) R1a1a (Underhill, 2009); O2a (Kumar, Vikrant, 2007) and J2b (Sengupta, 2006; Priyadarshi, 2011) exactly overlap those of the three main Mus species.

[dhu]

[url="http://www.informatics.jax.org/silver/chapters/2-3.shtml"]2.2 WHERE DO MICE COME FROM?[/url]

2.2.1 Mice, people, and dinosaurs



The common ancestor to mice and humans was an inconspicuous rodent-like mammal that scurried along the surface of the earth some 65 million years (myr) before present (BP). It had to be inconspicuous because the earth was ruled by enormous dinosaurs, many of whom would have eaten any small mammal that could be caught. The glorious age of the dinosaurs came to an abrupt end with the collision of one or a few large extraterrestrial objects — perhaps asteroids or comets — into the earth's surface over a relatively short period of time (Alvarez and Asaro, 1990; Sheehan et al., 1991). Possible sites at which these impacts may have occurred have been identified in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and the state of Iowa (Kerr, 1991; Kerr, 1992; Kerr, 1993). It has been hypothesized that the impact resulted in the formation of a thick cloud of dust that dispersed and shrouded the earth for a period of years, leading to a scenario like a nuclear winter with the demise of all green life, and with that, all large animals that depended either directly on plants for survival or indirectly on the animals that ate the plants. At least a small number of our rodent-like ancestors were presumably able to survive this long sunless winter as a consequence of their small size which allowed them to "get by" eating seeds alone. When the sun finally returned, the seeds lying dormant on the ground sprung to life and the world became an extremely fertile place. In the absence of competition from the dinosaurs, mammals were able to become the dominant large animal group, and they radiated out into numerous species that could take advantage of all the newly unoccupied ecological niches. It was in this context that the demise of the dinosaurs brought forth both humans and mice as well as most other mammalian species on earth today.

2.2.2 From Asia to Europe and from Europe to the New World



The Muridae family of rodents, which includes both "true" mice and rats, originated in the area across present-day India and Southeast Asia. Phylogenetic and palaeontological data suggest that mice and rats diverged apart from a common ancestor 10-15 myr BP (Jaeger et al., 1986), and by 6 myr BP, the genus Mus was established. The Mus genus has since diverged into a variety of species (listed in Figure 2.2) across the Indian subcontinent and neighboring lands.



At the beginning of the Neolithic transition some 10,000 years ago, the progenitors to the house mouse (collectively known as Mus musculus, as discussed later in this chapter) had already undergone divergence into four separate populations that must have occupied non-overlapping ranges in and around the Indian subcontinent. Present speculation is that the domesticus group was focused along the steppes of present-day Pakistan to the west of India (Auffray et al., 1990); the musculus group may have been in Northern India (Horiuchi et al., 1992; Boursot et al., 1993); the castaneus group was in the area of Bangladesh, and the founder population — bactrianus — remained in India proper.



The house mouse could only begin its commensal association with humans after agricultural communities had formed. Once this leap in civilization had occurred, mice from the domesticus group in Pakistan spread into the villages and farms of the fertile crescent as illustrated in Figure 1.2 (Auffray et al., 1990); mice from the musculus group may have spread to a second center of civilization in China (Horiuchi et al., 1992); and finally, bactrianus and castaneus animals went from the fields to nearby communities established in India and Southeast Asia respectively.



Much later (~4000 yrs BP), the domesticus and musculus forms of the house mouse made their way to Europe. The domesticus animals moved with migrating agriculturalists from the Middle East across Southwestern Europe (Sokal et al., 1991) and the development of sea transport hastened the sweep of both mice and people through the Mediterranean basin and North Africa. Invasion of Europe by musculus animals occurred by a separate route from the East. Chinese voyagers brought these mice along in their carts and wagons, and they migrated along with their hosts across Russia and further west to present-day Germany where their spread was stopped by the boundary of the domesticus range (Figure 2.3). Finally, it is only within the last millennium that mice have spread to all inhabited parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the many islands in-between.

2.2.3 Tracing the movement of humankind with mice as markers



One interesting sidelight of the stowaway tendency of mice is that it is sometimes possible to observe the origin of human populations within the context of the mice that have come along with them. A clear example of this concordance is seen in the domesticus mice that have colonized all of North America, South America, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa in conjunction with their Western European human partners (Figure 2.3). A more complex example is observed in the Japanese islands where the native mice were long thought to be a separate subspecies or species group referred to in the literature as Mus molossinus. In fact, molecular phylogenetic studies have demonstrated that Japanese mice do not represent a distinct evolutionary line at all.



Instead, they appear to have been derived by hybridization of two other house mouse groups on the mainland nearby — musculus in China and castaneus in Southeast Asia (Yonekawa et al., 1988, Figure 2.3). The hybrid character of the mice parallels the hybrid origin of the Japanese people themselves.



Finally, there is the interesting observation of a pocket of mice from the castaneus group that has recently been uncovered in Southern California (Gardner et al., 1991). This is the only documented example of an established natural house mouse population in the Americas that is not derived from the Western European domesticus group. This finding is a testament to the strong wave of 20th century Asian migration to the West Coast of the United States.

[pusan]

Promising find. My congratulations. A pre-neolithic movement out of India cannot be ruled out given the genetic data.



My only objection is to associating it with spread of IE vocabulary out of India (the 'mus' cognates).



- The 'mus' vocabulary only travels westward from India, not eastward with the mouse ?

- The proposed migration path means a satemized IE from India maintains vocabulary till Persia (Avestan); then completely loses in Mesopotamia, reappears in Anatolia (but missing the important wagon-part vocabulary of cakra, aksha, isha). Then regains the almost complete IE vocabulary in the Mycenaen Greek and Aegean area, but completely centumized. The author dosen't explain the Baltic spread, but assuming that IE spreads further to the Baltic, it regains satemization! This is very irregular.

- How come 'mus' vocabulary isn't used much amongst the farming communities of south indian language family, where iluka, ili etc are more common. In south india, 'mus' vocabulary is mostly used in ritual, not functional context. It's hard to imagine out-of-india 'mus' vocabulary overpowering lands as far as europe but not southern states.



IMHO, author would not have associated the human migration event with spread of IE, if they'd have looked at a broader picture of IE vocabulary spread which is a bronze age event. Peer-review is a must in any inter-disciplinary study.

[HareKrishna]

Expansion of agriculture and mouse happen in 7000 bc.Expansion of IE happen in 4000 bc. 3000 years difference.The connection being...?

[pusan]

Exactly - there is no connection. But the paper makes the connection.

[rhytha]

[dhu]

[quote name='Pusan' date='08 October 2011 - 08:18 AM' timestamp='1318041617' post='113204']

Exactly - there is no connection. But the paper makes the connection.

[/quote]



The connection is that either C Asia was the Lebensraum of S Asia over a period of a few thousand years or that heathen discourse was syntactical rather than semantic-based. (In fact both are true, and one is a consequence of the other).

At any rate, there is overwhelming evidence for massive input from S Asia to Europe post-glacially and there is absolutely but absolutely nothing in the other direction.

It is over for gora but of course being such a shameless runt, AIT has maybe a few centuries of life yet within it. Jai ho.

[HareKrishna]

[quote name='rhytha' date='10 October 2011 - 01:01 PM' timestamp='1318231380' post='113247']



[/quote]

Fantasy map.I don't see Atlantis on it.Neither Pacifida or Mu continent.

[Virendra]

[quote name='dhu' date='20 November 2009 - 02:24 PM' timestamp='1258706765' post='102687']

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->You seem to follow the other AIT/AMT scholars in picking out insignificant things like 'spellings' of names (which incidentally are not in English). Wouldn't it be better if you just kept to the main arguments rather than 'spellings'?



Now, onto your argument that Mittani is older than Vedic, I would ask the AMT/AIT school to not spout random words as evidence. You seem to follow Witzel blindly in this case. The presence of ‘aika’ in Mittani IA is not a definite evidence of pre-RV period. 'Satta' used by the Mittani is more Prakrit than Vedic. So shall we say that Mittani is closer to Prakrit (and not just post-Vedic). A few words cannot make evidence (esp. when they can be interpreted anyway the 'scholars' want). Your claim that linguistic data 'undoubtedly' puts Vedic as younger to Mittani is far-fetched and misleading. Moreover, Mittani has only few IA words. As such, any ‘argument’ based on evidence of absence is baseless (hence, please stop stating that late RV-words are not present in Mittani). Finally, Mittani IA uses the word ‘mani’ which is from late-RV period. The presence of ‘aika’ does not prove Mittani as pre-RV. After all, Rg Veda was redacted many times before it was frozen and it has undergone pronunciation changes as well. Therefore, it is very much possible that ‘aika’ was used in RV and that it was changed to ‘eka’ during the redactions (similarly the other sounds such as ‘zdh’). Also, the Mittani would have crossed the Iranians on their way to Aratta. As such, it is possible that they took up some Iranian sounds. So, the argument that Mittani is pre-RV is not an ‘invincible’ one as Witzel and you would like us to believe. The truth is that Mittani uses a late RV word (mani). It has at least one Prakrit word form (satta). As such, we can definitely state that Mittani belongs to late RV or post-RV era. The fact that Mittani names are very similar to late RV books (Talageri 2008: 175 - 180) has been well established by Talageri. Also remember that Mittani IAs would have left the subcontinent a few centuries earlier before they conquered West Asia and that Mittani IA words are found in texts which were written much later. As such, any argument about ‘earlier sound forms’ is nullified as RV was redacted after this migration period. Words are better evidences than sounds in this matter. Mittani words support the OIT rather than AMT as they use late RV words.



The key argument of Lal and others is: Indra and Varuna were worshipped by these names only in the subcontinent. The Vedic people do not say that they came from any foreign land. Instead the Rg Veda speaks about an east to west 'expansion' (and not migration). The western lands are seen only in the later books. Then, we come across a later Vedic text which states that a set of people migrated to the west while the others migrated to the east. It also states that those who migrated to the west did not perform the Vedic rituals. As such, it fits the description of the Avestans who were not performing Vedic sacrifices. Then, you come across a land whose name is very similar to Aratta and where the IE entered as conquerors and still remembered their God Indra who was not worshipped by this name by any other IE group outside the subcontinent.



Common sense demands that we identify these conquerors as the Indo-Aryans who migrated to Aratta.



And why does it make you wonder that OIT scholars who do not accept any 'Aryan invasion' of India readily accept the 'Aryan invasion' of Aratta? There is no hypocrisy in this. There is simply no archaeological/literary evidence for any Aryan invasion of India while we have both for the Mittani Indo-Aryans.



As for your example about 'ostrich', I feel that it applies more to the AIT/AMT school than anyone else. After all, they keep on harping the same tune despite the fact that there is neither archaeological nor literary evidence to support their viewpoint.



Ravilochanan<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[/quote]



@Dhu, would you like to share your view on Arnaud's much debated review of Talageri's book? And about his views on Mittani here? - http://www.scribd.com/doc/21962376/Mitanni-Aryan-Gods



Regards,

Virendra

[dhu]

Arnaud is a joke.

Mittanis and Kassites were definitely from India and tellingly formed a special relationship with the Hittites. No other group (least of all greeks/germanics/"slavs"/etc) is associated intimately with the Hittites except these Indics.

While The Pontic Sindoi (referred as Sindoi ethnos Indikon) flanked the Northern coast of the Black Sea.

Together these had an effect of securing the Western zone.



Concerning Greater India, there were no equivalents to the the Mongol hordes which plagued China: Nichols has acknowledged this with regards to the so-called Tokharians, that they were not barbaric-type mobile. Nichols is contemplating a U-turn under pressure from Witzel, but cannot backtrack significantly because of such issues.



With Yavanas proved as originating from interior India and different from the Greeks Proto-monotheists, it is also certain that the Panca Gana (Sakas, Pahlavas, Kambojas, Paradas, Yavanas) were from the interior; that is , they are not refernced in Dasarajana with the Iranian propers. These names are actually preserved in both Punjab and further interior eg Kanojia, Sakaldiha, etc. Relations were maintained with kinsmen who migrated out and the connections were known... "Degraded Kshatriyas" actually refers those that migrated out.



The concept of tribe does not apply to india.

[ramana]

Dhu

With Yavanas proved as originating from interior India and different from the Greeks Proto-monotheists, it is also certain that the Panca Gana (Sakas, Pahlavas, Kambojas, Paradas, Yavanas) were from the interior; that is , they are not refernced in Dasarajana with the Iranian propers. These names are actually preserved in both Punjab and further interior eg Kanojia, Sakaldiha, etc.

A short note on these Yavanas would be greatly appreciated. Need it for my son who was looking for it since middle school.