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New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India - and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46616574 Who are the Indians? And where did they come from?
In the last few years, the debate over these questions has become more and more heated.
Hindu right-wingers believe the source of Indian civilisation are people who called themselves Aryans - a nomadic tribe of horse-riding, cattle-rearing warriors and herders who composed Hinduism's oldest religious texts, the Vedas.
The Aryans, they argue, originated from India and then spread across large parts of Asia and Europe, helping set up the family of Indo-European languages that Europeans and Indians still speak today.
As it happens, many 19th Century European ethnographers and, of course, most famously, Adolf Hitler, also considered Aryans the master race who had conquered Europe, although the German leader considered them to be of Nordic lineage.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image caption The Harappan civilisation thrived in north-western India and Pakistan When scholars use the term Aryan, it refers to a group of people who spoke Indo-European languages and called themselves Aryans. And that is how I have used it in this article. It does not refer to a race, as Hitler used it or as some in the Hindu right wing use it.
Many Indian scholars have questioned the "out of India" thesis, arguing that these Indo-European language speakers - or Aryans - were possibly just one of many streams of prehistoric migrants who arrived in India after the decline of an earlier civilisation. This was the Harappan (or Indus Valley) civilisation, which thrived in what is now north-western India and Pakistan around the same time as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.
However, Hindu right-wingers believe the Harappan civilisation was also an Aryan or Vedic civilisation.
Tensions between the two groups backing these opposing theories have only increased in the last few years, especially since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India in 2014.
Into this long-running dispute has now stepped the relatively new discipline of population genetics, which has started using ancient DNA to figure out when people moved where.
How ancient DNA is transforming our view of the past Earliest evidence of humans outside Africa Studies using ancient DNA have been rewriting prehistory all over the world in the last few years and in India, there has been one fascinating discovery after another.
The most recent study on this subject, led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, was published in March 2018 and co-authored by 92 scholars from all over the world - many of them leading names in disciplines as diverse as genetics, history, archaeology and anthropology.
Underneath its staid title - The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia - lay some volcanic arguments.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image caption Dholavira in Gujarat state is one of the five largest Harappan sites The study showed that there were two major migrations into India in the last 10,000 years.
The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world's first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India.
This would have been between 7,000 and 3,000BCE. These Zagrosian herders mixed with the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent - the First Indians, descendants of the Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who had reached India around 65,000 years ago - and together, they went on to create the Harappan civilisation.
Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation In the centuries after 2000 BCE came the second set of immigrants (the Aryans) from the Eurasian Steppe, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan. They likely brought with them an early version of Sanskrit, mastery over horses and a range of new cultural practices such as sacrificial rituals, all of which formed the basis of early Hindu/Vedic culture. (A thousand years before, people from the Steppe had also moved into Europe, replacing and mixing with agriculturists there, spawning new cultures and spreading Indo-European languages).
Other genetic studies have brought to light more migrations into India, such as that of the speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages who came from south-eastern Asia.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image caption India's population is made up of a number of layers, according to the research As I write in my book, the best way to understand the Indian population is to imagine it as a pizza, with the first Indians forming its base. Though the base of this rather irregular pizza is thin in some places and thick in others, it still serves as the support that the rest of the pizza is built upon because studies show that 50% to 65% of the genetic ancestry of Indians derives from the First Indians.
On top of the base comes the sauce that is spread over the pizza - the Harappans. And then come the toppings and the cheese - the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European language speakers or Aryans, all of whom found their way into the subcontinent later.
To many in the Hindu right wing, these findings are unpalatable. They have been campaigning to change school curricula and remove any mention of Aryan immigration from textbooks. And on Twitter, several hugely popular right-wing "history" handles have long been attacking India's leading historians who have defended the theory of Aryan migrations and continue to do so.
For Hindu nationalists, there is a cost to admitting that the Aryans were not the first inhabitants of India and that the Harappan civilisation existed long before their arrival. It would mean acknowledging that Aryans or their Vedic culture were not the singular fountainhead of Indian civilisation and that its earliest sources lay elsewhere.
India's junior minister for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, was recently quoted in the media as saying: "Only Vedic education can nurture our children well and make them patriots who have mental discipline."
The idea of the mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as latter-day Muslim conquerors of India - such as the Mughals.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image caption Young Brahmins training to be priests in Varanasi - India is a predominantly Hindu nation These are not just theoretical debates. The ruling BJP government in Haryana state, which neighbours the Indian capital Delhi, has demanded that the Harappan civilisation be renamed the Saraswati river civilisation. Since the Saraswati is an important river that is mentioned in the earliest of the four Vedic texts, such a renaming would serve to emphasise the link between the civilisation and the Aryans.
The new study puts an end to these debates and it has thus come as a shock to the Hindu right-wing. In a tweet attacking its co-author Prof Reich, ruling party MP and former Harvard University professor Subramanian Swamy said: "There are lies, damned lies and (Harvard's 'Third' Reich and Co's) statistics."
However, the real message that the new research carries is an exciting and hopeful one: that Indians have created a long-lasting civilisation from a variety of heredities and histories.
The genius of the Indian civilisation during its best periods has been inclusion, not exclusion. Unity in diversity is, indeed, the central theme of India's genetic make-up.
Tony Joseph is the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, published by Juggernaut
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Posts: 165 | From: Miami Beach, Florida | Registered: Jun 2017
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From your article posted: "India's population is made up of a number of layers, according to the research As I write in my book, the best way to understand the Indian population is to imagine it as a pizza, with the first Indians forming its base. Though the base of this rather irregular pizza is thin in some places and thick in others, it still serves as the support that the rest of the pizza is built upon because studies show that 50% to 65% of the genetic ancestry of Indians derives from the First Indians.
On top of the base comes the sauce that is spread over the pizza - the Harappans. And then come the toppings and the cheese - the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European language speakers or Aryans,"
Pizza? Sweet Jesus who wrote this goofy shit! Posts: 288 | From: Asia | Registered: Mar 2016
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
The Indians were genetical Andamanders until the various in migrants came. They were the dasus of the Vedas, Sudra and non-castes of Manu law.
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^ There have been plenty of studies for a while now, though I can't cite any at the moment since I am still in the process of recovering files from before I got my pc fixed.
For the record, the Andamanese and some other aboriginal groups in Australia and Melanesia are descended from the theoretical 'Southern Coastal Route' Eurasians of the initial OOA. Those left in India are note exactly 'Andamanese' though the Andamanese are the closest genetically to them and are dubbed in genetics as 'Ancient South Indian' or ASI for short. Though these are relatively a minority in India whose pristine descendants are only represented by the most rural and isolated groups especially hunter-gatherers. Much of the genetic ancestry in India is the result of a slightly later immigration of OOA peoples of the theoretical 'Northern Inland Route' Eurasians who either branched off from the Southern Coastal folks OR come from another wave of OOA altogether. The Northern Inland migrants split off from the peoples who are ancestral to Europeans and East Asians and in India gave rise to 'Ancient North Indian' or ANI for short. Then in the last 10k years came the Neolithic Zagroseans in the northwest and the Austro-Asiatic Brahmaputrans in the northeast and Indo-Aryans, though as for the last group I am curious about the genetics which has been rather dubious.
Most of the genetic data hinting at the 'Aryan Immigration' Theory come from either living people today or from older sources but post-dating the Vedic period. It's a well know fact for example that India during the 1st millennium CE was invaded by peoples from Central Asia several times over. So unless they find conclusive DNA from Vedic times I will have to come to the same conclusion as for Bantu speakers in Southern and Eastern Africa and simply attribute the language(s) to cultural diffusion with very minimal immigration likely in the form of a tiny superstratum or ruling elite. The same can be said of the modern country of Turkey which speaks Turkic language but genetically only a tiny fraction has Turkic ancestry.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: The Indians were genetical Andamanders until the various in migrants came. They were the dasus of the Vedas, Sudra and non-castes of Manu law.
Only some of them are genetically Andamanese-like (read my first post above).
Also I think the situation in Vedic times was a little more complex than the typical dark-skinned or black dasya or dasus. P.K. Manansala wrote an excellent article on the topic called 'A New Look at Vedic India', though the article (and web hosting service for his stuff) is unavailable. Although his paper has a rather 'Austric' biased theme which I disagree with, he makes some rather elucidating points. One point would be that assuming an Aryan immigration did take place they would have encountered non-Aryans well before they reached the subcontinent and the term 'Aryan' was not a racial one. Even the Iranic peoples like the Persians and Medes made note of non-Aryan peoples as well in their regions and during Vedic times the Aryans of India even discounted or rather demoted the Aryans of Iran and Central Asia because they violated certain religious rituals which were orthodox to them and vice-versa Iranians discounting Indians as Aryans for the same reason.
By the way, what happened to the other sections of the forum??
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Other sections of the board are hidden. Spambots still chugging away, in fact ES got another new robot member yesterday. Goodmanerine revved up and running again today 20 minutes after this post.
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Every Indian has Ancestral South Indian geneology. Outside India no population shares relation to ASI. Dravidian speakers tend having more ASI than other Indians. Indian female uniparentals are predominantly ASI.
ASI is ~3/4 South Asian. South Asian is closer to East Asian though separate. 'Little Andamans' (who have no WestEurAsian components) are South Asian. But they are only distantly related to ASI. They were used to define WEA elements of Indians.
That's why I called Indians "genetical Andamanders."
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: The Indians were genetical Andamanders until the various in migrants came. They were the dasus of the Vedas, Sudra and non-castes of Manu law.
Meaning the Indians of a time before WEA contributed their ~1/4 to ASI. The indigenous aboriginal domiciled resident inhabitants before anybodies else showed up.
Of course supposition awaiting aDNA evidence.
EDIT aDNA identified Ancient Ancestral South Indian. AASI is the aboriginal component of the Rakhigarhi samples.
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^ you don't get it? Come on master. You are not that naive?
"Spambots still chugging away, in fact ES got another new robot member yesterday. Goodmanerine revved up and running again today 20 minutes after this post. "
Why do you think Dead/Cass keeps coming back?
@"Is there any research connecting Andamanese to Indians?" YES!!! It was posted here on this board or ESR.
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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All Andamanese belong to M31 and M32 mtDNA, subgroup of M which is unique to Andamanese people. the Onge of Little Andaman carry the Y-DNA Haplogroup D. It is found today at high frequency among populations in Tibet and Japan. The Andamanese are most genetically similar to the Malaysian Negrito tribe.
Haplogroup D-M174 is believed to have originated in Asia some 60,000 years before present.While haplogroup D-M174 along with haplogroup E contains the distinctive YAP polymorphism (which indicates their common ancestry), no haplogroup D-M174 chromosomes have been found anywhere outside of Asia
The Haplogroup D-M174 Y-chromosomes that are found among populations of the Japanese Archipelago (haplogroup D-M55 a.k.a. haplogroup D2) are particularly distinctive, bearing a complex of at least five individual mutations along an internal branch of the Haplogroup D-M174 phylogeny, thus distinguishing them clearly from the Haplogroup D-M174 chromosomes that are found among the Tibetans and Andaman Islanders and providing evidence that Y-chromosome Haplogroup D-M55 was the modal haplogroup in the ancestral population that developed the prehistoric Jōmon culture in the Japanese islands.
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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why don't you reference more recent studies? SMH!
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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Ancient genomes document multiple waves of migration in Southeast Asian prehistory
Mark Lipson1,*, Olivia Cheronet2,3,4, Swapan Mallick1,5, Nadin Rohland1, Marc Oxenham6, Michael Pietrusewsky7, Thomas Oliver Pryce8,9,10, Anna Willis11, Hirofumi Matsumura12, Hallie Buckley13, Kate Domett14, Giang Hai Nguyen15, Hoang Hiep Trinh15, Aung Aung Kyaw16, Tin Tin Win16, Baptiste Pradier9, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht1,17, Francesca Candilio18,19, Piya Changmai20, Daniel Fernandes2,3,21, Matthew Ferry1,17, Beatriz Gamarra3,4, Eadaoin Harney1,17, Jatupol Kampuansai22,23, Wibhu Kutanan24, Megan Michel1,17, Mario Novak3,25, Jonas Oppenheimer1,17, Kendra Sirak3,26, Kristin Stewardson1,17, Zhao Zhang1, Pavel Flegontov20,27,†, Ron Pinhasi2,3,*,‡, David Reich1,5,17,*,‡
Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia
The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded ancient DNA from 18 individuals. Comparisons with present-day populations suggest two waves of mixing between resident populations. The first mix was between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers associated with the Neolithic spreading from South China. A second event resulted in an additional pulse of genetic material from China to Southeast Asia associated with a Bronze Age migration. McColl et al. sequenced 26 ancient genomes from Southeast Asia and Japan spanning from the late Neolithic to the Iron Age. They found that present-day populations are the result of mixing among four ancient populations, including multiple waves of genetic material from more northern East Asian populations.
Science, this issue p. 92, p. 88; see also p. 31 Abstract
Southeast Asia is home to rich human genetic and linguistic diversity, but the details of past population movements in the region are not well known. Here, we report genome-wide ancient DNA data from 18 Southeast Asian individuals spanning from the Neolithic period through the Iron Age (4100 to 1700 years ago). Early farmers from Man Bac in Vietnam exhibit a mixture of East Asian (southern Chinese agriculturalist) and deeply diverged eastern Eurasian (hunter-gatherer) ancestry characteristic of Austroasiatic speakers, with similar ancestry as far south as Indonesia providing evidence for an expansive initial spread of Austroasiatic languages. By the Bronze Age, in a parallel pattern to Europe, sites in Vietnam and Myanmar show close connections to present-day majority groups, reflecting substantial additional influxes of migrants.
To obtain a broad-scale overview of the data, we performed principal component anal- ysis (PCA) with a set of diverse non-African populations (East and Southeast Asian, Australasian, Central American, and European [ 20–22 ]). When projected onto the first two axes, the ancient individuals fall close to present-day Chinese and Vietnamese, with Man Bac shifted slightly in the direction of Onge (Andaman Islanders) and Papuan (Fig- ure S1).
Ancient Genomics Reveals Four Prehistoric Migration Waves into Southeast Asia
Hugh McColl, Fernando Racimo, Lasse Vinner, Fabrice Demeter, Uffe Gram Wilken, J. Victor Moreno Mayar, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Constanza de la Fuente Castro, Sally Wasef, Ana Prohaska, Ashot Margarayan, Peter de Barros Damgaard, Rasmi Shoocongdej, Viengkeo Souksavatdy, Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, Mohd Mokhtar Saidin, Supannee Kaewsutthi, Patcharee Lertrit, Huong Mai Nguyen, Hsiao-chun Hung, Thi Minh Tran, Huu Nghia Truong, Shaiful Shahidan, Ketut Wiradnyana, Anne-Marie Bacon, Philippe Duringer, Jean-Luc Ponche, Laura Shackelford, Elise Patole-Edoumba, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Berenice Bellina-Pryce, Jean-Christophe Galipaud, Rebecca Kinaston, Hallie Buckley, Christophe Pottier, Simon Rasmussen, Tom Higham, Robert A. Foley, Marta Mirazon Lahr, Ludovic Orlando, Martin Sikora, Charles Higham, David M. Lambert, Eske Willerslev doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/278374Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
@ MensaMind By right Rey controls ES. Sami pays the bill. Not really concerned or I would buy ES. The robot members ruin the Today's Active Topics page my preferred way to find all the latests posts. Display Classifieds should be set for TAT the way its set for the Forums home page. Invisible. That way they can still fudge the analytics yet leave TAT clean for us.
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: Every Indian has Ancestral South Indian geneology. Outside India no population shares relation to ASI. Dravidian speakers tend having more ASI than other Indians. Indian female uniparentals are predominantly ASI.
ASI is ~3/4 South Asian. South Asian is closer to East Asian though separate. 'Little Andamans' (who have no WestEurAsian components) are South Asian. But they are only distantly related to ASI. They were used to define WEA elements of Indians.
That's why I called Indians "genetical Andamanders."
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: The Indians were genetical Andamanders until the various in migrants came. They were the dasus of the Vedas, Sudra and non-castes of Manu law.
Meaning the Indians of a time before WEA contributed their ~1/4 to ASI. The indigenous aboriginal domiciled resident inhabitants before anybodies else showed up.
Of course supposition awaiting aDNA evidence.
EDIT aDNA identified Ancient Ancestral South Indian. AASI is the aboriginal component of the Rakhigarhi samples.
Yes, but as I understand it ASI is also found with ANI in variable proportions depending on what part of the subcontinent with ASI being more prevalent in the south than in the north though not as much as you may think. ANI is much more pervasive, and ASI while being related to East Asian ancestry is closer to Andamanese and Australians while ANI is much closer to East Asians and Europeans.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Also I think the situation in Vedic times was a little more complex than the typical dark-skinned or black dasya or dasus. P.K. Manansala wrote an excellent article on the topic called 'A New Look at Vedic India', though the article (and web hosting service for his stuff) is unavailable. Although his paper has a rather 'Austric' biased theme which I disagree with, he makes some rather elucidating points. One point would be that assuming an Aryan immigration did take place they would have encountered non-Aryans well before they reached the subcontinent and the term 'Aryan' was not a racial one. Even the Iranic peoples like the Persians and Medes made note of non-Aryan peoples as well in their regions and during Vedic times the Aryans of India even discounted or rather demoted the Aryans of Iran and Central Asia because they violated certain religious rituals which were orthodox to them and vice-versa Iranians discounting Indians as Aryans for the same reason.
I also forgot to add that Manansala's piece also points out that according to the Vedas there are Melecchas (non-Aryan/barbarians) who became Aryans further supporting the use of the label as something else other than ethnic. I am of the personal belief that 'Aryan' was in fact a religious term describing those who adhere to Vedic religious rites. The fact that early Hinduism was a proselytizing religion as shown by post-Vedic texts and the Vedic texts themselves speaking of Aryans demoted to non-Aryans and Melecchas becoming Aryans seems to strongly support my assertion.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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What would the implications of all this be for how we imagine people of the ancient Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization? It seems likely to me that they would have been dark-skinned and therefore what DJ would call "black", but what of their other physical features? Would they have at least vaguely resembled modern Andaman Islanders, or would they have been closer to modern "dark Caucasoid" South Indians?
This sculpture of an Indus Valley man has full "Negroid" lips, but he also seems to have straighter hair and a prominent "Caucasoid" nose.
On the other hand... This dancer seems to have more "Negroid" features such as a flat nose and full lips. I remember there was a paper posted on ES long ago which claimed she was evidence of an African connection, but couldn't she have also been a native Indus Valley woman?
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Harappan, and Mohenjo Daro too, have been called black, w/o quote mark, by Black American scholars for over 100 yrs now. The view was horse & 'wheels' Steppe in-migrants wrecked indigenous civilizations. In India they borrowed, added and introduced varna and religious/legal anti-blackism to the civ they found. Some genomic findings can support some of those scholars' ideas. Not all. Today we know post-3000 BCE climate was a major culprit.
It's sad to see the birth of one West Eurasia civilization twin characteristic, racism and supremacy, being born there in India so very long ago. From where did this hatred come to their head and, woe has been permanent ever since.
The concept spread west and north and invoked where and whenever pale expansion confronts dark domains and assimilation, segregation, or 'extermination' follow. Rarely does true integration, an equal amalgam national culture, evolve. Credit Alexander for trying!
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: Every Indian has Ancestral South Indian geneology. Outside India no population shares relation to ASI. Dravidian speakers tend having more ASI than other Indians. Indian female uniparentals are predominantly ASI.
That's why I called Indians "genetical Andamanders."
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: The Indians were genetical Andamanders until the various in migrants came. They were the dasus of the Vedas, Sudra and non-castes of Manu law.
Meaning the Indians of a time before WEA contributed their ~1/4 to ASI. The indigenous aboriginal domiciled resident inhabitants before anybodies else showed up.
Yes, but as I understand it ASI is also found with ANI in variable proportions depending on what part of the subcontinent with ASI being more prevalent in the south than in the north though not as much as you may think. ANI is much more pervasive, and ASI while being related to East Asian ancestry is closer to Andamanese and Australians while ANI is much closer to East Asians and Europeans.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:Also I think the situation in Vedic times was a little more complex than the typical dark-skinned or black dasya or dasus. P.K. Manansala wrote an excellent article on the topic called 'A New Look at Vedic India...
Incorrect. Relying on genomics
"The Andamanese were consistent with being isolated descendants of an ancient East Asian-related population that contributed to South Asians. [...] The Little Andamanese were crucial here because they are related—albeit distantly—to the ASI but do not have the West Eurasian-related ancestry present in all mainland Indians, so we could use them as a reference point for our analysis. [...] the population structure of India before around 4,000 years ago was profoundly different from what it is today. Before then, there were unmixed populations, but afterward, there was convulsive mixture in India, which affected nearly every group.
So between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago—just as the Indus Civilisation collapsed and the Rig Veda was composed—there was a profound mixture of populations that had previously been segregated. [...] The ASI were also mixed, a fusion of a population descended from • earlier farmers expanding out of Iran (around 25 percent of their ancestry), and • previously established local hunter-gatherers of South Asia (around 75 percent of their ancestry).
And this is what I've written. But I think you mistook AASI for ASI. No biggie.
Last post for me here. In an other thread, I'm delving into Rakhigarhi and critiques of Indian genomics by Indians themselves.
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I trust Rashidi over Manansala about dasus and stuff. Most of all I trust the Indian texts themselves. This is not religion its societal construction. Did a 'convert' submit to being classed Sudra and thus liable to have their backside slit for sitting in the wrong place, as per the Manusmriti?
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