THEORY of ARYAN invasion TRUTH OR MYTH?
The Aryan invasion myth or history?
The Vedas are ancient Indian sacred texts which describe a warrior society of semi pastoralist nomadic tribes called Aryans who engaged in warfare, quite frequently, and cattle raiding. and it was long believed that these so-called Aryans came from outside of India but this theory is now very unpopular in India today and the word Aryan is only used to describe the high castes who come from India.
Despite being unpopular it is now agreed by scientists to be correct. The academic roots of the Aryan invasion theory are tied up with the indo-european theory which was developed by Sir William Jones, a Welsh judge who lived in India during the British Raj. and he could speak multiple languages;Latin, Greek, Welsh, English... and in his capacity as a judge in India he had to be able to learn to speak Indian languages too and what he realized is that the ancient holy language of the Vedas, Sanskrit, was undoubtedly related to Latin and Greek and also even to Germanic and Celtic languages. and this was in 1786, but after then, linguists historians and archaeologists developed a theory to realize that there were one people from whom all these languages derived and these are called indo-europeans.
Now originally a lot of European scholars believed that the indo-Europeans came from Asia and some even believed they came from India. that was until a German named Heinrich Schultz in 1826 first suggested a European origin for the indo-europeans. in 1851 the Englishman Robert Latham developed this idea and argued specifically for a southern Russian origin for the indo-europeans and this theory became the most popular and is the one that has become dominant even now, today. The European origin for indo-european languages was widely agreed by linguists because there are a greater diversity of different indo-european languages in Europe than anywhere else in the world and although there are several indo-european languages in India they're actually quite closely related.
During and since the Second World War the term aryan has also become associated with the Nazi Party in Germany because they used this term interchangeably with "indo-european"and even with "German people." The term "Aryan race" had already been used to apply, not just to these specific indo-europeans who invaded India, but also more widely to their ancestors, the indo-europeans who founded all the indo-european languages. but it's a mistake to associate the idea that the Aryan invaders were European with the Nazis because some scholars such as Herman Guntert actually argued for an Asian origin for the Aryans, and he was a Nazi affiliated scholar! so the idea of a European origin is not a Nazi invention in fact many Nazis believed in the Asian origin.
After the war, the Russian origin hypothesis was developed by scholars such as the feminist author, Marija Gimbutas who thought of the indo-europeans as a warlike people from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine and Western Kazakhstan. Her only major opponent at this time was Colin Renfrew. Sir Colin Renfrew believed that the indo-europeans originated in Anatolia, and these two theories were pretty much the only ones in play since the war. no one at that stage took seriously the idea of an Indian origin for the indo-europeans. If the early indo-europeans were from Europe then it stands to reason that the Indo-Aryans who are later descendants of these, and the ones who brought Sanskrit and Vedic religion into India, would also have been of European origin and in fact the idea that the Aryans came from outside India was a very common and popular theory in India for a very long time. This was even the prevailing view among Indian nationalists at the time of Indian independence and in fact the first Indian Prime Minister Nehru wrote a book called 'Discovery of India' in 1946 in which he said that the Aryans invaded India. This was made into a film in the 80s in which the same points are reiterated it wasn't just in India that this was an accepted historical fact. widespread belief among British academics, as well, was that the Aryans invaded India.
You can see so in this documentary from the BBC called 'Buried Treasure'. Sudden tragedy brought this ancient civilization to a violent end. I want you to imagine for a moment that you are back in 1500 BC and are looking out over the straight streets and brick houses of mohenjo-daro suddenly smoke and flames begin to rise amongst them and at one of the main streets there streams a horde of swordsmen led by a swaying figure in an outlandish chariot. Thirty four centuries after it happened, the archeologists of the 20th century dug and found these bones the massacred mute evidence of how an age-long civilization perished within the hour moreover we can relate this evidence with the earliest literature of India.
The Rig Veda, which it is agreed tells in a non traditional and symbolic way, of the Indus Valley and its invasion by the Aryans the hymns in the Rig Veda make clear that the mobile city less Aryan invaders differed at every point from the long static citizens which they invaded. but more recently a conspiracy theory has developed which states that not only is the Aryan invasion theory untrue but both that and even the indo-european linguistic theory itself, are lies invented by Europeans for colonial purposes - they want to divide and rule the people of India and they made up this lie that they could therefore distinguish between different kinds of Indians - and this is not only popular among certain left-wing subversive groups in the mid twentieth century in Europe but has become a prevailing view among Indian nationalists now in 2018.genetic studies revealed that there was an invasion into India, or you could call it a migration if you prefer, and that people migrating into India during the Bronze Age had European ancestry and brought European ancestry into India.
We can look at earlier DNA and early evidence and how this has all been mounting up to now where it becomes really very difficult to argue that it didn't happen. Nowadays DNA studies look at auto somal DNA which is looking at all of the genome and looking at bits that are held in common by different populations to see how people are related, but earlier, more basic genetic science from the 90s and the early 21st century, looked only at a few markers on the paternal line which we call a y hap lo group, and that shows your ancestry going a long way back on the male line.Now early studies already picked up on the fact that people in Eastern Europe and people in South Asia, mainly the high caste Brahmins or Aryans in India, share a Y hap lo group which is called r1a that means somewhere along the line they've got shared ancestry but it didn't tell us where that came from... meanwhile in Eastern Europe the population forms called the Yamnaya and the Yamnaya, we have data from, this is from the Far Eastern Europe, near the Urals. and they are intermediate between the northern tip of this near Eastern Group and the hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe around 4000 or 3000 BC the DNA from a people called (by archaeologists) Yamnaya enters Europe.
This was proven conclusively in 2015 in a study by Haak and colleagues entitled'massive migration from the steppe is a source for indo-european languages in Europe'. Now the Yamnaya were a chariot riding, equestrian, pastoralist people of the Russian steppes, and these are the same people as the kurgans that Marija Gimbutas said were the indo-europeans. Her primary rival, Sir Colin Renfrew, has now admitted that his Anatolia theory was wrong, in the light of evidence from the DNA, which proves a massive migration into Europe from the steppe. what is clear however is that Marija Gimbutas showed a series of remarkable insights when she emphasized the importance of what she called the kurgan invasion, what we might now call the yamnaya invasion, which is now abundantly documented by ancient DNA. Maria's Kurgan hypothesis has been magnificently vindicated by recent works. Now if we know that the yamnaya were the ones who brought the indo-european languages into Europe, then we should expect to see yamnaya blood in modern Indians, if they are the ones who brought the indo-european languages into India. This is called a principal component analysis chart. the distance between the dots represents the genetic relationship between different skeletons (DNA) or modern people (DNA samples) ,as you can see the people in India form a Cline and those people in India who speak indo-european languages are closer to modern Europeans than those Indians who speak Dravidian languages are. This is because some Indian people have more ancestry from the yamnaya than others. when the Yamnaya entered Europe, they mixed with the people who were already there; Neolithic European farmers, and this created a new group of people called the Corded Ware culture of Germany. skeletons from the corded ware culture show that most of their DNA is the same as that of Yamnaya mixed in this population and the actual contribution from the corded ware complex people is at least 70%.it's a massive replacement of the German population and however afterward in Northern Europeans there's a large proportion of ancestry from this group,this is the single most important contributor to European populations in many places, especially in Northern Europe today, and it comes from the east.
But there is a crucial distinction while most yamnaya men carried the r1b hap lo group, most of the Corded Ware people of Germany carried the r1a hap lo group, just like the modern high caste in India do. High caste Hindus today can have as much as 30% of their DNA from yamnaya-like people of the Bronze Age steppes. So speaking a little bit more broadly to the question 'is their steppe related ancestry in India?' in 2016 we published a paper on ancient DNA from the ancient Near East and this is complicated and unresolved in particular because there's no ancient DNA from India right now (2017) because thermal conditions make DNA preservation more difficult (in India), although the progress is now being made, but if you look at the proportion of ancestry from steppe and Iranian inferred West Eurasian related ancestry,steppe ancestry is confidently inferred to exist in almost every Indian group, both indo-european speakers without exception, and the relative proportion of of steppe related compared to Iranian related ancestry as inferred by this model, which is not a perfect model,is consistently higher in groups that speak indo-european languages, is consistent with the idea that there might be a contribution from a Yamnaya related population in India. But Yamnaya DNA can't have come directly from Yamnaya going into India because the hap lo groups are different and the time frame for when this DNA entered India is after the time when the Yamnaya existed. the oldest example of r1a ever found was published in 2017 in a paper called 'the genomic history of southeastern Europe' by mathieson and colleagues. It comes from Ukraine not India! and it dates to about 5500 years ago. It was part of the proto-yamnaya Sredny Stog culture.
Yet on a principal component analysis chart it clusters close to the corded ware samples and this is approximately 1,000 years before the corded ware culture expanded. what this shows is that both r1a and r1b were ancient Eastern European hap lo groups that were spread across Europe and Asia by indo-europeans.the corded ware culture migrated east into Asia to create sintashta and Andronovo cultures and the males of both of these Bronze Age steppe cultures carried the R1a y hap lo group in the paper mentioned by Reich earlier from Lazaridis and colleagues in 2016 it says that and Andronovo couldn't havebeen the ones who brought the Yamnaya DNA into India because we don't see that Neolithic European farmer DNA in modern Indians and since andronovo were descended from the corded ware culture which was a mixture of Neolithic farmer from Europe and yamnaya, we would see both the yamnaya and that Neolithic European farmer DNA if it had been brought in by Andronovo.
However newer evidence brings the claim into question. even before DNA evidence existed, the andronovo culture were strongly argued to be the bearers of the proto-indo-iranic language due to their location and the archaeological presence of chariots. the oldest depictions of wheeled vehicles ever, which predate even the indo-europeans, come from Eastern Europe. not long after that, the indo-europeans started to spread this technology across the Eurasian steppe.the earliest fully developed spoked wheeled horse chariots are from the chariot burials of the andronovo culture dating to about 2000 BC. Chariots play an important role in the early Aryan religion in India; many of the gods ride chariots as they do in other indo-european religions such as the Nordic one or the Roman one the spoke wheel remains a very important symbol in India today and it's even on the Indian flag presence of European phenotype in South Asia has long been noted the British were very conscious of the fact that high caste Indians had a lighter complexion than low castes and presumed this was due to European admixture.
There are also higher rates of European phenotype such as tallness fair-skin and blue or green eyes found in North India and Pakistan compared to in South India and this was argued to be due tot he earlier presence of Aryans in the northwest. the highest rates of European phenotype in South Asia occur today among the Kalash people of the Chitral district of Pakistan. 18.2% of whom have the r1a hap lo group and the kalash people have on average close to 50% Yamnaya ancestry. Blue eyes evolved in Europe among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and blondism spread in and from Europe during the Bronze Age so we know that these phenotype must have come from Europeans at some point but DNA has shown that the yamnaya,although European, were brunettes and did not have blonde hair and blue eyes.the andronovo people on the other hand were very often blonde and blue-eyed.if the yamnaya DNA had reached India directly from a yamnaya invasion into India, then none of these phenotype would be present in South Asia and the male Brahmins would have the r1b hap lo group and not the r1a hap lo groups so what about this new study on ancient Indian DNA? the out of India hypothesis is impossible to defend.
In 2018 a paper was released by Narasimhan and colleagues entitled 'the genomic formation of South and Central Asia' in 2017, Reich said, in the clip earlier, that no ancient samples from South Asia had been obtained, but now they have, it has been proven that there was a migration of middle to late bronze age steppe peoples into India who carried Neolithic European DNA and likely spoke indo-aryan languages the paper included middle to late bronze age samples from a pathway leading from Central Asia into India known as the inner Asian mountain corridor and these samples were clearly Eastern European migrant populations.they labeled these as belonging to the forest-steppe middle-to-late-bronze-age complex. most of these people cluster with Bronze Age Eastern Europeans and some even cluster with Bronze Age central Europeans they're very close to modern people from Russia and Ukraine who speaks Slavic languages. using the West Siberian hunter-gatherer individuals as a reference population along with other pre Chalcolithic groups that have been previously reported in the ancient DNA literature. We document the presence of a genetically relatively homogenous population spread across a vast region of the Eastern European and trans-Ural-steppes between two thousand and fourteen hundred years before the Common Era. Many of the samples from this group are individuals buried in association with artifacts of the corded ware, srubnaya, Petrovka, Sintashta and Andronovo complexes, all of which harbored a mixture of steppe early-to middle-Bronze-Age ancestry and ancestry from European middle Neolithic agriculturists. this is consistent with previous findings showing that following westward movement of Eastern European populations and mixture with local European agriculturalists there was an eastward re-flux back beyond the Urals.
David Reich actually admits in his book 'who we are and how he got here'that he made his findings on Indian genetics more palatable to Indians after the Indian collaborators wouldn't cooperate after he shared his initial findings. he made it all seem more PC so people would swallow it but now many have misunderstood what it showed. terms like Indus periphery and ancient ancestral South Indians and ancestral North Indians are deliberately obscure terms designed to hide the facts and that what is being described is an invasion of European ancestry into India. the yamnaya-like ancestry is always described in media reports on this paper as "Central Asian" because it came via Central Asia and never mentions that yamnaya were themselves descended from prehistoric Eastern European hunter-gatherers or that the middle-Late-Bronze-Age invaders were even more like modern Europeans than yamnaya were! many used to think the Aryans were related to the Bactria-margiana archaeological complex. the people of Bactria-margiana were mostly descended from people related to Iranian Neolithic farmers with a little ancestry from Anatolian farmers and even a bit of Siberian admixture but this paper shows three things; first the BMAC people did not contribute much genetically to South Asia at all second yamnaya like step ancestry only arrives among the BMAC people around 2000 BC and third there is actually evidence of Indian migration into the BMAC rather than the reverse.
The fact that yamnaya like ancestry shows up in the BMAC region so late means the Aryan invasion of India can't have happened until after 2000 BC which is already hundreds of years after the yamnaya culture ended. Before the Aryan invasion, there was a grand civilization in the Indus Valley,this is the one Sir Mortimer wheeler was talking about in the British clip about mohenjo-daro . it is quite likely to be this source of Dravidian languages in India and it contributed to the genetics of all Indians today. it is referred to as the Indus Valley Civilisation and although we have rich archaeological findings from this culture we didn't have any DNA. if we saw an absence of steppe DNA in Indus Valley culture people then we would know an Aryan invasion brought the steppe DNA and Sanskrit language later on. in this new paper, samples from the periphery of the Indus Valley culture serve as very good proxies for the Indus Valley culture, and they don't have any Yamnaya DNA! however the samples from the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan do have yamnaya DNA and this appears there from 1200 BC and onward which is contemporary with the andronovo culture and proves the step DNA was brought in at this time by migrants. the findings from that paper were reinforced by yet more samples released later in 2018 as part of a paper by damgaard and colleagues entitled 'the first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe' expansions into Asia it said: another interesting fact that the DNA seems to indicate is that it seems likely the Dravidians were also migrants and that they arrived from Iran earlier than the Aryans. geneticist Razib Khan commented: "because the Dravidians were not primordial but expanding only somewhat ahead of indo-aryans they were part of an interactive social cultural sphere with the indo-aryans.
Very high frequency of r1a1az 93 in some non Brahmin South Indian groups even tribal ones suggest that the expansiveness of some paternal indo-aryan kin networks across the whole subcontinent".
In other words the spread of Aryan and Dravidian languages and DNA across India was not defined by just two events but by a complex combination of many mixing and migrations to form the current Indian subcontinent showed earlier (see PCA) ancient DNA has now shown that there is that y hap lo group r1a in eastern european remains dating to the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Eneolithic and the Bronze Age.
What's more all these Bronze Age peoples who carry this hap lo group do not have any South Asian admixture.conversely, South Asians who speak indo-european languages do have significant amounts of admixture from Eastern European hunter-gatherers. An invasion of people carrying European DNA into India did occur and this has changed the DNA of modern Brahmins and Aryan caste people in India today. Ancient DNA now reinforces what archaeology, linguistics, and modern DNA were already telling us: that the Aryan invasion is a historical fact, not a myth.
THANKYOU.......
The Vedas are ancient Indian sacred texts which describe a warrior society of semi pastoralist nomadic tribes called Aryans who engaged in warfare, quite frequently, and cattle raiding. and it was long believed that these so-called Aryans came from outside of India but this theory is now very unpopular in India today and the word Aryan is only used to describe the high castes who come from India.
Despite being unpopular it is now agreed by scientists to be correct. The academic roots of the Aryan invasion theory are tied up with the indo-european theory which was developed by Sir William Jones, a Welsh judge who lived in India during the British Raj. and he could speak multiple languages;Latin, Greek, Welsh, English... and in his capacity as a judge in India he had to be able to learn to speak Indian languages too and what he realized is that the ancient holy language of the Vedas, Sanskrit, was undoubtedly related to Latin and Greek and also even to Germanic and Celtic languages. and this was in 1786, but after then, linguists historians and archaeologists developed a theory to realize that there were one people from whom all these languages derived and these are called indo-europeans.
Now originally a lot of European scholars believed that the indo-Europeans came from Asia and some even believed they came from India. that was until a German named Heinrich Schultz in 1826 first suggested a European origin for the indo-europeans. in 1851 the Englishman Robert Latham developed this idea and argued specifically for a southern Russian origin for the indo-europeans and this theory became the most popular and is the one that has become dominant even now, today. The European origin for indo-european languages was widely agreed by linguists because there are a greater diversity of different indo-european languages in Europe than anywhere else in the world and although there are several indo-european languages in India they're actually quite closely related.
During and since the Second World War the term aryan has also become associated with the Nazi Party in Germany because they used this term interchangeably with "indo-european"and even with "German people." The term "Aryan race" had already been used to apply, not just to these specific indo-europeans who invaded India, but also more widely to their ancestors, the indo-europeans who founded all the indo-european languages. but it's a mistake to associate the idea that the Aryan invaders were European with the Nazis because some scholars such as Herman Guntert actually argued for an Asian origin for the Aryans, and he was a Nazi affiliated scholar! so the idea of a European origin is not a Nazi invention in fact many Nazis believed in the Asian origin.
After the war, the Russian origin hypothesis was developed by scholars such as the feminist author, Marija Gimbutas who thought of the indo-europeans as a warlike people from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine and Western Kazakhstan. Her only major opponent at this time was Colin Renfrew. Sir Colin Renfrew believed that the indo-europeans originated in Anatolia, and these two theories were pretty much the only ones in play since the war. no one at that stage took seriously the idea of an Indian origin for the indo-europeans. If the early indo-europeans were from Europe then it stands to reason that the Indo-Aryans who are later descendants of these, and the ones who brought Sanskrit and Vedic religion into India, would also have been of European origin and in fact the idea that the Aryans came from outside India was a very common and popular theory in India for a very long time. This was even the prevailing view among Indian nationalists at the time of Indian independence and in fact the first Indian Prime Minister Nehru wrote a book called 'Discovery of India' in 1946 in which he said that the Aryans invaded India. This was made into a film in the 80s in which the same points are reiterated it wasn't just in India that this was an accepted historical fact. widespread belief among British academics, as well, was that the Aryans invaded India.
You can see so in this documentary from the BBC called 'Buried Treasure'. Sudden tragedy brought this ancient civilization to a violent end. I want you to imagine for a moment that you are back in 1500 BC and are looking out over the straight streets and brick houses of mohenjo-daro suddenly smoke and flames begin to rise amongst them and at one of the main streets there streams a horde of swordsmen led by a swaying figure in an outlandish chariot. Thirty four centuries after it happened, the archeologists of the 20th century dug and found these bones the massacred mute evidence of how an age-long civilization perished within the hour moreover we can relate this evidence with the earliest literature of India.
The Rig Veda, which it is agreed tells in a non traditional and symbolic way, of the Indus Valley and its invasion by the Aryans the hymns in the Rig Veda make clear that the mobile city less Aryan invaders differed at every point from the long static citizens which they invaded. but more recently a conspiracy theory has developed which states that not only is the Aryan invasion theory untrue but both that and even the indo-european linguistic theory itself, are lies invented by Europeans for colonial purposes - they want to divide and rule the people of India and they made up this lie that they could therefore distinguish between different kinds of Indians - and this is not only popular among certain left-wing subversive groups in the mid twentieth century in Europe but has become a prevailing view among Indian nationalists now in 2018.genetic studies revealed that there was an invasion into India, or you could call it a migration if you prefer, and that people migrating into India during the Bronze Age had European ancestry and brought European ancestry into India.
We can look at earlier DNA and early evidence and how this has all been mounting up to now where it becomes really very difficult to argue that it didn't happen. Nowadays DNA studies look at auto somal DNA which is looking at all of the genome and looking at bits that are held in common by different populations to see how people are related, but earlier, more basic genetic science from the 90s and the early 21st century, looked only at a few markers on the paternal line which we call a y hap lo group, and that shows your ancestry going a long way back on the male line.Now early studies already picked up on the fact that people in Eastern Europe and people in South Asia, mainly the high caste Brahmins or Aryans in India, share a Y hap lo group which is called r1a that means somewhere along the line they've got shared ancestry but it didn't tell us where that came from... meanwhile in Eastern Europe the population forms called the Yamnaya and the Yamnaya, we have data from, this is from the Far Eastern Europe, near the Urals. and they are intermediate between the northern tip of this near Eastern Group and the hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe around 4000 or 3000 BC the DNA from a people called (by archaeologists) Yamnaya enters Europe.
This was proven conclusively in 2015 in a study by Haak and colleagues entitled'massive migration from the steppe is a source for indo-european languages in Europe'. Now the Yamnaya were a chariot riding, equestrian, pastoralist people of the Russian steppes, and these are the same people as the kurgans that Marija Gimbutas said were the indo-europeans. Her primary rival, Sir Colin Renfrew, has now admitted that his Anatolia theory was wrong, in the light of evidence from the DNA, which proves a massive migration into Europe from the steppe. what is clear however is that Marija Gimbutas showed a series of remarkable insights when she emphasized the importance of what she called the kurgan invasion, what we might now call the yamnaya invasion, which is now abundantly documented by ancient DNA. Maria's Kurgan hypothesis has been magnificently vindicated by recent works. Now if we know that the yamnaya were the ones who brought the indo-european languages into Europe, then we should expect to see yamnaya blood in modern Indians, if they are the ones who brought the indo-european languages into India. This is called a principal component analysis chart. the distance between the dots represents the genetic relationship between different skeletons (DNA) or modern people (DNA samples) ,as you can see the people in India form a Cline and those people in India who speak indo-european languages are closer to modern Europeans than those Indians who speak Dravidian languages are. This is because some Indian people have more ancestry from the yamnaya than others. when the Yamnaya entered Europe, they mixed with the people who were already there; Neolithic European farmers, and this created a new group of people called the Corded Ware culture of Germany. skeletons from the corded ware culture show that most of their DNA is the same as that of Yamnaya mixed in this population and the actual contribution from the corded ware complex people is at least 70%.it's a massive replacement of the German population and however afterward in Northern Europeans there's a large proportion of ancestry from this group,this is the single most important contributor to European populations in many places, especially in Northern Europe today, and it comes from the east.
But there is a crucial distinction while most yamnaya men carried the r1b hap lo group, most of the Corded Ware people of Germany carried the r1a hap lo group, just like the modern high caste in India do. High caste Hindus today can have as much as 30% of their DNA from yamnaya-like people of the Bronze Age steppes. So speaking a little bit more broadly to the question 'is their steppe related ancestry in India?' in 2016 we published a paper on ancient DNA from the ancient Near East and this is complicated and unresolved in particular because there's no ancient DNA from India right now (2017) because thermal conditions make DNA preservation more difficult (in India), although the progress is now being made, but if you look at the proportion of ancestry from steppe and Iranian inferred West Eurasian related ancestry,steppe ancestry is confidently inferred to exist in almost every Indian group, both indo-european speakers without exception, and the relative proportion of of steppe related compared to Iranian related ancestry as inferred by this model, which is not a perfect model,is consistently higher in groups that speak indo-european languages, is consistent with the idea that there might be a contribution from a Yamnaya related population in India. But Yamnaya DNA can't have come directly from Yamnaya going into India because the hap lo groups are different and the time frame for when this DNA entered India is after the time when the Yamnaya existed. the oldest example of r1a ever found was published in 2017 in a paper called 'the genomic history of southeastern Europe' by mathieson and colleagues. It comes from Ukraine not India! and it dates to about 5500 years ago. It was part of the proto-yamnaya Sredny Stog culture.
Yet on a principal component analysis chart it clusters close to the corded ware samples and this is approximately 1,000 years before the corded ware culture expanded. what this shows is that both r1a and r1b were ancient Eastern European hap lo groups that were spread across Europe and Asia by indo-europeans.the corded ware culture migrated east into Asia to create sintashta and Andronovo cultures and the males of both of these Bronze Age steppe cultures carried the R1a y hap lo group in the paper mentioned by Reich earlier from Lazaridis and colleagues in 2016 it says that and Andronovo couldn't havebeen the ones who brought the Yamnaya DNA into India because we don't see that Neolithic European farmer DNA in modern Indians and since andronovo were descended from the corded ware culture which was a mixture of Neolithic farmer from Europe and yamnaya, we would see both the yamnaya and that Neolithic European farmer DNA if it had been brought in by Andronovo.
However newer evidence brings the claim into question. even before DNA evidence existed, the andronovo culture were strongly argued to be the bearers of the proto-indo-iranic language due to their location and the archaeological presence of chariots. the oldest depictions of wheeled vehicles ever, which predate even the indo-europeans, come from Eastern Europe. not long after that, the indo-europeans started to spread this technology across the Eurasian steppe.the earliest fully developed spoked wheeled horse chariots are from the chariot burials of the andronovo culture dating to about 2000 BC. Chariots play an important role in the early Aryan religion in India; many of the gods ride chariots as they do in other indo-european religions such as the Nordic one or the Roman one the spoke wheel remains a very important symbol in India today and it's even on the Indian flag presence of European phenotype in South Asia has long been noted the British were very conscious of the fact that high caste Indians had a lighter complexion than low castes and presumed this was due to European admixture.
There are also higher rates of European phenotype such as tallness fair-skin and blue or green eyes found in North India and Pakistan compared to in South India and this was argued to be due tot he earlier presence of Aryans in the northwest. the highest rates of European phenotype in South Asia occur today among the Kalash people of the Chitral district of Pakistan. 18.2% of whom have the r1a hap lo group and the kalash people have on average close to 50% Yamnaya ancestry. Blue eyes evolved in Europe among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and blondism spread in and from Europe during the Bronze Age so we know that these phenotype must have come from Europeans at some point but DNA has shown that the yamnaya,although European, were brunettes and did not have blonde hair and blue eyes.the andronovo people on the other hand were very often blonde and blue-eyed.if the yamnaya DNA had reached India directly from a yamnaya invasion into India, then none of these phenotype would be present in South Asia and the male Brahmins would have the r1b hap lo group and not the r1a hap lo groups so what about this new study on ancient Indian DNA? the out of India hypothesis is impossible to defend.
In 2018 a paper was released by Narasimhan and colleagues entitled 'the genomic formation of South and Central Asia' in 2017, Reich said, in the clip earlier, that no ancient samples from South Asia had been obtained, but now they have, it has been proven that there was a migration of middle to late bronze age steppe peoples into India who carried Neolithic European DNA and likely spoke indo-aryan languages the paper included middle to late bronze age samples from a pathway leading from Central Asia into India known as the inner Asian mountain corridor and these samples were clearly Eastern European migrant populations.they labeled these as belonging to the forest-steppe middle-to-late-bronze-age complex. most of these people cluster with Bronze Age Eastern Europeans and some even cluster with Bronze Age central Europeans they're very close to modern people from Russia and Ukraine who speaks Slavic languages. using the West Siberian hunter-gatherer individuals as a reference population along with other pre Chalcolithic groups that have been previously reported in the ancient DNA literature. We document the presence of a genetically relatively homogenous population spread across a vast region of the Eastern European and trans-Ural-steppes between two thousand and fourteen hundred years before the Common Era. Many of the samples from this group are individuals buried in association with artifacts of the corded ware, srubnaya, Petrovka, Sintashta and Andronovo complexes, all of which harbored a mixture of steppe early-to middle-Bronze-Age ancestry and ancestry from European middle Neolithic agriculturists. this is consistent with previous findings showing that following westward movement of Eastern European populations and mixture with local European agriculturalists there was an eastward re-flux back beyond the Urals.
David Reich actually admits in his book 'who we are and how he got here'that he made his findings on Indian genetics more palatable to Indians after the Indian collaborators wouldn't cooperate after he shared his initial findings. he made it all seem more PC so people would swallow it but now many have misunderstood what it showed. terms like Indus periphery and ancient ancestral South Indians and ancestral North Indians are deliberately obscure terms designed to hide the facts and that what is being described is an invasion of European ancestry into India. the yamnaya-like ancestry is always described in media reports on this paper as "Central Asian" because it came via Central Asia and never mentions that yamnaya were themselves descended from prehistoric Eastern European hunter-gatherers or that the middle-Late-Bronze-Age invaders were even more like modern Europeans than yamnaya were! many used to think the Aryans were related to the Bactria-margiana archaeological complex. the people of Bactria-margiana were mostly descended from people related to Iranian Neolithic farmers with a little ancestry from Anatolian farmers and even a bit of Siberian admixture but this paper shows three things; first the BMAC people did not contribute much genetically to South Asia at all second yamnaya like step ancestry only arrives among the BMAC people around 2000 BC and third there is actually evidence of Indian migration into the BMAC rather than the reverse.
The fact that yamnaya like ancestry shows up in the BMAC region so late means the Aryan invasion of India can't have happened until after 2000 BC which is already hundreds of years after the yamnaya culture ended. Before the Aryan invasion, there was a grand civilization in the Indus Valley,this is the one Sir Mortimer wheeler was talking about in the British clip about mohenjo-daro . it is quite likely to be this source of Dravidian languages in India and it contributed to the genetics of all Indians today. it is referred to as the Indus Valley Civilisation and although we have rich archaeological findings from this culture we didn't have any DNA. if we saw an absence of steppe DNA in Indus Valley culture people then we would know an Aryan invasion brought the steppe DNA and Sanskrit language later on. in this new paper, samples from the periphery of the Indus Valley culture serve as very good proxies for the Indus Valley culture, and they don't have any Yamnaya DNA! however the samples from the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan do have yamnaya DNA and this appears there from 1200 BC and onward which is contemporary with the andronovo culture and proves the step DNA was brought in at this time by migrants. the findings from that paper were reinforced by yet more samples released later in 2018 as part of a paper by damgaard and colleagues entitled 'the first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe' expansions into Asia it said: another interesting fact that the DNA seems to indicate is that it seems likely the Dravidians were also migrants and that they arrived from Iran earlier than the Aryans. geneticist Razib Khan commented: "because the Dravidians were not primordial but expanding only somewhat ahead of indo-aryans they were part of an interactive social cultural sphere with the indo-aryans.
Very high frequency of r1a1az 93 in some non Brahmin South Indian groups even tribal ones suggest that the expansiveness of some paternal indo-aryan kin networks across the whole subcontinent".
In other words the spread of Aryan and Dravidian languages and DNA across India was not defined by just two events but by a complex combination of many mixing and migrations to form the current Indian subcontinent showed earlier (see PCA) ancient DNA has now shown that there is that y hap lo group r1a in eastern european remains dating to the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Eneolithic and the Bronze Age.
What's more all these Bronze Age peoples who carry this hap lo group do not have any South Asian admixture.conversely, South Asians who speak indo-european languages do have significant amounts of admixture from Eastern European hunter-gatherers. An invasion of people carrying European DNA into India did occur and this has changed the DNA of modern Brahmins and Aryan caste people in India today. Ancient DNA now reinforces what archaeology, linguistics, and modern DNA were already telling us: that the Aryan invasion is a historical fact, not a myth.
THANKYOU.......
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