Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[member_22872]

^^^ why is that TOI and other news media are so quick at publishing rubbish while they have to wait for publishing anything that has substance wrt disproving AIT?, and for that they have only to wait because 'the jury is still out' on the matter of Indian history? I see more 'anything Europeans throw at us must be true and we lop it up because it is yummy yummy and tasty tasty' phenomenon here.

[Nilesh Oak]

Forget PIE. Assuming, Dr. Sullivan and Dr Kalyanaraman's decipherment to be in the right direction if not 100% correct, it is more tangible than PIE. So can this tell anything about language of Indus-Sindhu-Saravaswati Civilzation? it appears to be Sanskrit (obviously), but is it Vedic Sanskrit? can one use phonetics to this and draw conclusions as to it's progression?

Early indications, based on our efforts using Sullivan Code, the SSVC language appears to be mix of Sanskrit, Prakrut, Apabhramsha.. Does seems to have few tamil (or telgu?...please correct me) words such as 'Selvan'

[member_22872]

Nilesh ji thanks. Selvan doesn't sound like Telugu, if archaic, I don't know. I Need to read up on Apabhramsha. It would be very interesting about how this can solve AIT question, if it is a combination of multiple languages, doesn't it say there is atleast quite amount of language 'admixture' so how can one decisively use phonetic change theory now?

[RajeshA]

Papers on Archaeobotanics in the Indian Subcontinent by Dorian Q. Fuller

[RajeshA]

Published on August 24, 2012
By Subodh Varma
Mother of Sanskrit and related languages was spoken by Turkish farmers, says new study: Times of India

NEW DELHI: Ma (Hindi), mater (Latin), mutter (German), mere (French), madre (Spanish), madar (Persian), matka (Polish) - these are words from different languages but they all mean 'mother'. There are many words like that common to languages from Iceland to Sri Lanka, including many (but not all) Indian languages. All these languages - about 494 in all - are clubbed together to make the Indo-European family of languages. Scientists believe that they must have had a common origin.

But where? A study published in today's Science magazine puts forward evidence that they originated in a language spoken in Anatolia, part of modern Turkey, 8000 to 9500 years ago. The language spread and changed over the millennia and exists today in these different forms.

Quentin D.Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, one of the leading scientists of the study said in a Science podcast interview with Isabelle Boni that such a massive spread can be explained only by a "fairly major powerful mechanism". That mechanism, according to Atkinson, could be agriculture.

"With the advent of agriculture, populations would have been growing, and as they grew, the next generation would have had to expand out a bit from the current range," he said in the interview. "And, if that process went on generation after generation, it doesn't take very long to cover a very large area."

It's also possible that when agriculture spreads into an area that's already inhabited by hunter-gatherers they might find the agricultural lifestyle fairly appealing and adopt agricultural technology and the language of its carrier, he said

The theory that Indo-European language spread riding piggy back on agricultural expansion was put forth by Professor Colin Renfrew in 1987. It says that the languages spread between 8,500 and 9000 years ago, with the spread of agriculture from what is now Turkey, but Anatolia. The latest research appears to confirm this, though many experts are not convinced.

The alternative and much more popular theory put forward by Maria Gimbutas is that pastoralists in the Russian and Ukranian steppes north of the Black Sea - the so called Kurgan culture - drove long distances in their chariots and settled in distant places. It is they who were responsible for the spread of the Indo-European languages some 5000 to 6000 years ago.

So how did Atkinson and his colleagues come to the conclusion that the spread of languages started from Anatolia not Russia, and that too 4000 years earlier?

They selected 6000 cognates - similar sounding words with same meaning from different languages - from 103 languages of the Indo-European group and fed it into a computer armed with data about all the regions. The idea was to build a language family tree. Then they followed how cognates built up or were lost in different languages. For building a time scale, they marked the known times for certain language events - like they knew that Romance languages like Romanian started diverging from Latin after the Romans withdrew from that region in the 3rd century CE. From all this data and the computer program shuffling it around, they came to the conclusion that Anatolia was the most likely candidate.

Since Atkinson's study is largely a computer modeling exercise it may take some more years for hard evidence to be collected in its support.

And now the Study

Science 24 August 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6097 pp. 957-960

Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family: Science
Remco Bouckaert¹, Philippe Lemey², Michael Dunn³⁺⁴, Simon J. Greenhill⁵⁺⁶, Alexander V. Alekseyenko⁷, Alexei J. Drummond¹⁺⁸, Russell D. Gray⁵⁺⁹, Marc A. Suchard¹⁰⁺¹¹⁺¹², Quentin D. Atkinson⁵⁺¹³

¹ Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
² Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Rega Institute, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
³ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Post Office Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, Netherlands.
⁴ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Kapittelweg 29, 6525 EN Nijmegen, Netherlands.
⁵ Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
⁶ School of Culture, History & Language and College of Asia & the Pacific, Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, ACT, Australia.
⁷ Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA.
⁸ Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
⁹ Department of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, ACT, Australia.
¹⁰ Department of Biomathematics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
¹¹ Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
¹² Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
¹³ Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, UK.

Abstract

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.

--------

1) Why are there only two competing hypothesis? These guys did not look at India! Is that not India Blindness?!

2) So the basic vocabulary data from European and many Indian languages point to Anatolia where there is some Hittite or is it Proto-Indic, rather than Pontic Steppes where there are no ancient languages found! Big Deal!

And this the crap that TOIlet is dishing out! Sanskrit's Mama came from Turkey!!!

[KLP Dubey]

Thanks for your post. My comments:

Quite right. In traditional vedic teaching, we are always taught X ṛṣi Y devataḥ before the mantra recitation. That comes from the vedic anukramaṇi. But what is also told is that these ṛṣis were revealed the mantra, they are not authors.

The question of "rishis being revealed the mantra" only arises once the rishis are personified into human beings. That in itself is a later development, so it becomes irrelevant. The sounds corresponding to "rishis" in the RV are not describing human beings at all. Some people started using these sounds as personal names later and now people try to reverse-engineer meanings of the RV based upon that event.

The rationalizations that the "rishi" was revealed the mantra are only the personal opinions found in the Vedic shakhas. However, everyone agrees that the only relevant purpose is to perpetuate the sounds of the Rgveda correctly. Other things are merely speculative and an idle pastime. Anyone can assume anything they want and see what fun they can have with the sounds of the Rg Veda.

So far, nobody has a set of internally consistent humanly-defined meanings for the Rgvedic words. Therefore it makes little sense to use the Rg Veda as a historical witness. As I said before, the only way one can legitimately use it in the OIT/AIT debate is in the sense of "I can prove that person X in location Y at time Z associated a certain sound in the RV with a particular earthly (or even celestial) object". But it seems people are indiscriminately using the RV to "prove" whatever they feel like. I pointed out that this is not a new fad, people have been using the RV to do all sorts of things since time immemorial.

However, I've never found the "divine origin" theory in any brāhmaṇa or vedic literature. I'm inclined to think that this "divine origin" theory is a much later development. Neither the word ṛca, nor ṛṣi means one whom things are revealed.

Indeed. Obviously, since the sounds of the RV are eternal, they cannot possibly have an "origin" (whether divine or not, it is irrelevant). The Vedic philosophical branch (Mimamsa) rightly refuses to waste time on such questions of "is there a god or not". The eternality of the RV was an accepted status quo, till Nyaya-Vaisheshika and Sankkya philosophers started to question it. It is they who came up with this "divine origin" theory (i.e., composed by humans under Godly inspiration). This claim is exactly equal to what one finds in religious discourse (e.g., some prophet spoke under divine inspiration). This theory was discredited and the NV and Sankhya schools are long defunct. The eternal veda, which has no birth date, no expiry date, nor any other historical connection whatsoever, still remains the status quo.

The ṛgveda mantras themselves use the word a-takṣad (constructed) for the chanda-s ...

...
All internal evidence from ṛgveda points to the fact that the seer was very comfortable with attributing the skilful authorship of these hymns to humans; while acknowledging Gods to be the inspirers eg. Sarasvati here called as the inspirer of good thought ...

The "divine origin/revealed text" theory looks like a later development.

[/quote]

I hope you can see the critical flaw in this line of thinking. You are using Sanskrit meanings to reverse-engineer the meaning of Rgvedic sounds. The Sanskrit meanings are humanly-derived and it is impossible to trace the ancestry (and hence reliability) of the persons who made these associations. The nirukta and nighantu are completely confused about the meanings of the RV sounds and merely list all the known meanings that people assigned to them till that date. The critical point is that nirukta/nighantu etc are just catalogs of associations, not source material for interpreting the RV.

Sanskrit is a humanly-created language which uses as its basic material the sounds of the Veda and the patterns observable in the RV sounds in order to create grammatical rules. Sanskrit meanings have arisen over the ages from historical associations of RV sounds with earthly objects and human actions. These meanings themselves keep changing and can never be considered to be reliable. You cannot then go back and start analyzing the RV based on them.

Namaskar,

KL

[member_23686]

Nilesh ji,

Thank you for the book Loved the bonus too

[shiv]

When one speaks of language coming into India or going out of India, the robustness of the theory should be tested for truth to see if the theory stand up to newer or more radical theories. The conventionally "accepted" theory of migration into India with Rig Veda being dated to 1200 to 1000 BC stands against other theories that seek to place the Rig Veda prior to 3000 BC. But what if the Rig Veda can be taken only as far back as - say 100 BC. What are the arguments for and against this?

Here is one.

Assuming Rigveda was in Sanskrit and not PIE, Panini was after Rigveda and knew Sanskrit

I have undelined and bold fonted my assumption this time...

Shiv ji, .. you are in trouble, watch out..

Panini mentions Shravisthadi ganana, i.e. Shravishtha (Dhanishtha) as first nakshatra
and assuming most conservative ancient date (little fantasy.. not more ) The timing of Dhanishta at winter solstice is during year precisely 1429 BC.

Fine. If Panini was 1429 BC that is fine . In fact I don't care if Rig Veda is dated exactly 1200 BC if the method of arriving at that date involves no bluffing and explains all reasonable anomalies. I will even believe every word about PIE. But there appear to be too many holes. Even that is OK. But the holes are being covered up by bullshitting. That is not OK.

The Saraswati river is a huge hole and explaining away archaeoastronomic refs while jumping at the idea of horse graves is characterstic of "What the mind does not know the eye does not see"

But remember that proof for Sanskrit exists only fom 150 AD. Why not Christmas day 33 BC as the date when Rig veda was composed? What goes against this idea?

As far as I can tell, Gautama Buddha knew or knew about the vedas, so the Vedas predated him. The Buddha is dated tio some time prior to 500 BC and in any case, Emperor Ashoka who lived after 300 BC spread Buddhism. So dating the Veda to a date prior to 500 BC is resonable.

Is there any proof that sanskrit, or the Vedas existed before 1000 BC? If you accept modern theories of dating Vedas to 1200 BC or so because there were horse graves in central Asia it is fine. But this is not proof that the vedas existed before 1000 BC.

For all dates prior to 1000 BC one has to refer to what is contained internally in the Rig Veda. But is 1200 BC wrong? Why not 1200 BC? Seems like a good enough date for the Rig Veda. Lets say the linguists are bullshitting about spread of language from central Asia. Let's say that is all fake. Would that make a date of 1200 BC for Rig Veda more aceptable to all? After all Avestan is dated to 1200 BC. But even if it came later (300 BC) no problems. And Old Iranian of Behistun is welcome to stay at 300 BC. So then can we accept 1200 BC for Rig Veda? The problem as I see it are the Mitanni texts of 1500 BC which has words that sound like Sanskrit. There are only a handful of words and they could indicate a 1500 BC date for Sanskrit. Still, 1500 BC does not in any way go against an AIT or OIT. But what is missing for a 1500 BC date for early Sanskrit? The Saraswati river. And explanations for astronomical observations. Of course 1500 BC makes the date very inconvenient for the Pontic steppe hypothesis. Things are a bit too fine, but like I said, ignore the Central Asia horse manure as bullshitting and look objectively only at dating Sanskrit.

More later.

[RajeshA]

X-Posting from a Sulekha Blog "Fabricating History – 2000 BC" by Rajee Kushwaha.

Dear Rajee Kushwaha,

Let's take your TOIlet article first! TOIlet says Sanskrit's Mama came from Turkey!

It is based on a paper in Science Magazine!
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family


Here is what the Abstract says:
There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the <b>Pontic steppes</b> about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.


1) Why are there only two competing hypothesis? Why did these guys not look at India? Is that not India Blindness!

2) So the basic vocabulary data from European and many Indian languages point to Anatolia where there is some Hittite or is it Proto-Indic, rather than Pontic Steppes where there are no ancient languages found! Big Deal!

My belief that SANSKRIT, as a crude spoken language belonged to NAGAS is further vindicated by a recent scientific study which say that the mother of all languages was the LANGUAGE Spoken in Antolia, Turkey, some 8500- 9000 years ago. And definitely, they were the migrating Nagas who had moved up North and West from ancient Coastal region called KUMARI KANDHAM or SUNDA LAND.

Now you are here making your speculations about NAGAS and how they migrated out and spread Crude Sanskrit throughout Eurasia! Is this something you just want to believe in seclusion or have our masters in Europe also conceded this?

So if you are trading recognition with the Europeans, saying you will give them Sanskrit if they give you NAGA Crude Sanskrit, have you received any nod or a handshake? If you haven't and you are still giving than what kind of bargain and business acumen is that?

Beliefs are based on our own perceptions---- which is the result of our inclinations, biases, preferences, exposures, understanding and of course knowledge. But logic is based on what you see as a fact.

Facts are you see Sanskrit everywhere in India, and if it is not spoken as much as it was once, then it is still there in our Sanskritized languages. Fact is that our scriptures based on Sanskrit have a deep history!

So I don't know what you are seeing as a fact! If some European science journal would tell you Europeans originate from Apes while Indians originate from Donkeys, would you buy that too? If some European science journal says that through computer modeling they have ascertained that the Vedas are junk, would you accept that too?

I can only say, your beliefs seem to be based not on facts but on facts as dished out by Western journals and the foreign-owned Indian media!

I hope you see the problem: You are not willing to question the West!

[svinayak]

Thanks for your post. My comments:

Quite right. In traditional vedic teaching, we are always taught X ṛṣi Y devataḥ before the mantra recitation. That comes from the vedic anukramaṇi. But what is also told is that these ṛṣis were revealed the mantra, they are not authors.

The question of "rishis being revealed the mantra" only arises once the rishis are personified into human beings. That in itself is a later development, so it becomes irrelevant. The sounds corresponding to "rishis" in the RV are not describing human beings at all. Some people started using these sounds as personal names later and now people try to reverse-engineer meanings of the RV based upon that event.

The rationalizations that the "rishi" was revealed the mantra are only the personal opinions found in the Vedic shakhas. However, everyone agrees that the only relevant purpose is to perpetuate the sounds of the Rgveda correctly. Other things are merely speculative and an idle pastime. Anyone can assume anything they want and see what fun they can have with the sounds of the Rg Veda.

So far, nobody has a set of internally consistent humanly-defined meanings for the Rgvedic words. Therefore it makes little sense to use the Rg Veda as a historical witness. As I said before, the only way one can legitimately use it in the OIT/AIT debate is in the sense of "I can prove that person X in location Y at time Z associated a certain sound in the RV with a particular earthly (or even celestial) object". But it seems people are indiscriminately using the RV to "prove" whatever they feel like. I pointed out that this is not a new fad, people have been using the RV to do all sorts of things since time immemorial.

However, I've never found the "divine origin" theory in any brāhmaṇa or vedic literature. I'm inclined to think that this "divine origin" theory is a much later development. Neither the word ṛca, nor ṛṣi means one whom things are revealed.

Indeed. Obviously, since the sounds of the RV are eternal, they cannot possibly have an "origin" (whether divine or not, it is irrelevant). The Vedic philosophical branch (Mimamsa) rightly refuses to waste time on such questions of "is there a god or not". The eternality of the RV was an accepted status quo, till Nyaya-Vaisheshika and Sankkya philosophers started to question it. It is they who came up with this "divine origin" theory (i.e., composed by humans under Godly inspiration). This claim is exactly equal to what one finds in religious discourse (e.g., some prophet spoke under divine inspiration). This theory was discredited and the NV and Sankhya schools are long defunct. The eternal veda, which has no birth date, no expiry date, nor any other historical connection whatsoever, still remains the status quo.

The ṛgveda mantras themselves use the word a-takṣad (constructed) for the chanda-s ...

...
All internal evidence from ṛgveda points to the fact that the seer was very comfortable with attributing the skilful authorship of these hymns to humans; while acknowledging Gods to be the inspirers eg. Sarasvati here called as the inspirer of good thought ...

The "divine origin/revealed text" theory looks like a later development.

I hope you can see the critical flaw in this line of thinking. You are using Sanskrit meanings to reverse-engineer the meaning of Rgvedic sounds. The Sanskrit meanings are humanly-derived and it is impossible to trace the ancestry (and hence reliability) of the persons who made these associations. The nirukta and nighantu are completely confused about the meanings of the RV sounds and merely list all the known meanings that people assigned to them till that date. The critical point is that nirukta/nighantu etc are just catalogs of associations, not source material for interpreting the RV.

Sanskrit is a humanly-created language which uses as its basic material the sounds of the Veda and the patterns observable in the RV sounds in order to create grammatical rules. Sanskrit meanings have arisen over the ages from historical associations of RV sounds with earthly objects and human actions. These meanings themselves keep changing and can never be considered to be reliable. You cannot then go back and start analyzing the RV based on them.

Namaskar,

KL

Excallant post.



So far, nobody has a set of internally consistent humanly-defined meanings for the Rgvedic words. Therefore it makes little sense to use the Rg Veda as a historical witness. As I said before, the only way one can legitimately use it in the OIT/AIT debate is in the sense of "I can prove that person X in location Y at time Z associated a certain sound in the RV with a particular earthly (or even celestial) object". But it seems people are indiscriminately using the RV to "prove" whatever they feel like. I pointed out that this is not a new fad, people have been using the RV to do all sorts of things since time immemorial.
I have told many times that RgV is the only entity which has antiquity and hence is used by every 'expert' and narrator to show thei analysis has credibility.
They have used false association and extrapolated the period to modern analysis of languages and it is without logic.


The west wants history to their 'history' and antiquity to their languages and culture.

[member_23686]

Wiki says that brahmi script developed from aramaic

They have a table that derives brahmi (and devnagari) from greek. Maybe this is AMT in script. Can gurujans check?

[RajeshA]

Regarding Sanskrit's Mama comes from Anatolia

Actually this study is interesting! The "researchers" checked out two hypethesis: Pontic Steppes and Anatolia with their "computer model"!

Now I can't really comment on how good their model is!

But what is very interesting is that they checked out only two hypothesis! - Pontic Steppes and Anatolia! Why did they not check India? Is it too big an effort if one has a model and the data? Hmmm!

I bet they did check up India and were shocked to find that India is the origin, a place they don't want anything to do with! Why would Anglo-Germans want India to be their Civilizer?

The fact that they left out India is really a dead give-away! India is the place of origin of Indo-European languages!

[member_22872]

From:

Family Tree Languages Has Roots Anatolia, Biologists Say

Historical linguists see other evidence in that the first Indo-European speakers had words for “horse” and “bee,” and lent many basic words to proto-Uralic, the mother tongue of Finnish and Hungarian. The best place to have found wild horses and bees and be close to speakers of proto-Uralic is the steppe region above the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Kurgan people who occupied this area from around 5000 to 3000 B.C. have long been candidates for the first Indo-European speakers.

But Wim Borsboom in his article:
INTRODUCTION - An Ancient God Rediscovered
says about IVC's technological prowess in those times:

Apiary:
* the honey was used for sweetening and to make mead (soma),
* the wax was collected for sealing and attaching arrow and lance heads to shafts and handles,

so from above it can be concluded that, since the first speakers of IE had words for bees, and an apiary was found in IVC, it can then conclusively said the first IE speakers were no one else but IVC people? I think the reasoning is very similar to the horse burial argument that since horse burials were found in Andronov culture and since horse was mentioned in Rg Veda, hence Andronov people are the real 'Aryans'. What I mean to suggest is if horse burials were linked to mention of horses in Rg Veda, and linguists consider that to be the reason why Kurgans/Steppe people are real Aryans who later composed Rg Veda in India, then what about IVC people? they had bees, they have used them and first IE speakers had words for bees, then IVC people should be the first IE speakers. If linguists don't accept the above argument, then horse argument too doesn't hold water...now I think a new argument will be brought forth that first IE speakers brought bees with them too to IVC.

[SaiK]

We can conclude the direction by the term "Indo-European" Languages. It is sad for the AiT-Nazis that it wasn't termed Euro-Indian Languages. Also, the premise is ambiguous for these reason:

Indo - "European Languages"
Euro - "Indian Languages"
"Indo-European" Languages
"Euro-Indian" Languages

all depends on the hyphenation.

[member_20317]

Published on August 24, 2012
By Subodh Varma
Mother of Sanskrit and related languages was spoken by Turkish farmers, says new study: Times of India

Abstract

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.

[A_Gupta]

The theory that Indo-European language spread riding piggy back on agricultural expansion was put forth by Professor Colin Renfrew in 1987. It says that the languages spread between 8,500 and 9000 years ago, with the spread of agriculture from what is now Turkey, but Anatolia. The latest research appears to confirm this, though many experts are not convinced.

The mechanism of language spread in Colin Renfrew's model is essentially the population explosion of the agriculturalists compared to the previous hunter-gatherers. In his model, imagine an agricultural zone expanding 10-15 miles per generation on the average, supporting 5-10 times the population previously supported. No invasions or migrations, and the language of the agriculturalists becomes dominant. If the technology was carried and copied to other areas, you might have many expanding zones of agriculturalists.

The earliest archaeological traces of agriculture in India are in the northwest, Mehrgarh, 6000BC, I believe. It is within the realm of possibility that IE languages arrived 6000 BC to India along with agriculture, the Harappa culture was IE speaking, there is no discordance with the Saraswati; much of the Rg Veda was composed after the horse arrived in India - which could be during Harappa's heyday - and its language was always native to India (if being in India for 2000 years or more make it native ) , and includes older material. If the north of India was always mostly IE speaking, it would explain why ancient place names there all have IE roots; why Rg Veda has only about 4% of non-IE borrowings (even according to ardent AITers) compared to 35-50% of ancient Greek. Also the riddle of the Saraswati river is solved.

The main reason (apart from AITer version of linguistics) that this may not work is population genetics.

[SaiK]

^.. yeah. If I go with a predetermined chain of events, and geographical data even to a hard core mumbai slum, I can apply bayesian, morkov, monte carlo, critical chain to predict exact points in a set of points, as those points are already accepted as given data.

[svinayak]

Mother of Sanskrit and related languages was spoken by Turkish farmers, says new study: Times of India

Dont know how many realise that they are trying to get the origin of all things to Greek and pre Greek region.

Utlimately make sure that all early antiquity is only in Europe/Greek

[Nilesh Oak]

Abstract

We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses.

As Saik ji said, this model can be further improved and error probability completely removed, if the model is refined further via markov but also crystal ball random generator. In each case 'perturbation theory' can be invoked for further refinement (rav_g ji, I am sure you can link that clip of 'perturbation theory' from Jurasic park'). For added safety gage R&R can be peformed for multiple simulation runs using Oak -Armstrong ranking method of Gage R&R.

I want to get in academia. Too tired of doing real work. Senior Lecturership with full tenure would do.

[RajeshA]

Anatolia is code-word for Greece!

[A_Gupta]

Worth a read.
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/9222/1/9222.pdf?DDD5+

It has this quote, and then makes it relevant to India

It is possible to make arbitrary groupings of population (geographic, linguistic, self-identified by faith, identified by others by physiognomy, etc.) and still find statistically significant allelic variations between those groupings. For example, we could examine all people in Chicago, and all those in Los Angeles, and find statistically significant differences in allele frequency at **some** loci.

[member_20317]

SaiK ji yes the word 'predict' you mentioned is the key.

Is it not funny that we are using 'predict' for things that have already happened.

Will they be willing to actually predict into the future using these models. After all there is infinitely more data present today compared to the historical period. That should help their Bayesian approach.

Ok let me put it like this. A virus colony grows a particular way. You draw out the data and then try to apply it to achieve predictions. Does not work out you go back to petri dish tinker with your data and the virus and then loop while the predictions dont come true in practice. The data is there, the feedback mechanism is there to feed both sides of the equation.

Now lets say I restrict you to only one or say two or ten trials. Would you be confident (before actually doing your prediction-production matching) that this many number of trials that I am allowing to you will be enough. Mind you I am asking you to commit on your confidence without your having actually witnessed any part of the real world experimentation. Well since you are not a Paki and cannot sport 400% confidence and since you are an Indian SDRE, I presume you do not have any confidence.

Now if you do not have confidence going forward in time, how can you have confidence going backward in time. And if your confidence is basically nil then what confidence do you supply to your model esp. when it is Bayesian.

And being Bayesian, somebody would say you have nil probability of zero error.

SaiK ji, actually putting your Jaan, Maan and Maal at stake, into your models, helps in clearing up the mind of all cobwebs, like nothing else.

Baki sab maya hai.

[member_20317]

As Saik ji said, this model can be further improved and error probability completely removed, if the model is refined further via markov but also crystal ball random generator. In each case 'perturbation theory' can be invoked for further refinement (rav_g ji, I am sure you can link that clip of 'perturbation theory' from Jurasic park'). For added safety gage R&R can be peformed for multiple simulation runs using Oak -Armstrong ranking method of Gage R&R.

I want to get in academia. Too tired of doing real work. Senior Lecturership with full tenure would do.

Nilesh ji, I want to stay away from having to teach. I know I do not have enough good karm by my side.

Only fair too since I do not understand even one word out of all the models and mathematics you mentioned.

But I have confidence in my spreadsheets and they pertain to making money in zero-sum games.

The water finds its own way downwards every time a new way.

[KLP Dubey]

Dear RajeshA,

KLP Dubey ji,

you have just said that the Vedas are beyond our understanding. If that is the case, why are they called Veda - Knowledge? And if this knowledge is not accessible to our brains, then what is the need for humans to exert themselves in preserving them?

I didn't say the Vedas are "beyond our understanding". I said "they are currently not understood". I also did not mean that the words of the Veda are completely unintelligible. I meant that there is no guarantee at all that a particular humanly-derived "meaning" is correct (for example, they keep changing over the ages), hence the RV can not be used to settle historical and linguistic arguments.

What is the need for humans to exert themselves in preserving the Veda ? Answer: there is absolutely no "compulsion". The sounds of the veda are eternal, universal, and exist independent of any human connection. The Veda is in not in the least concerned or affected if you and I "decide" to not "preserve" them.

So what if the Veda was not "preserved on earth" at all ? In the past:

- The Indians would not have been able to learn (and propagate to the rest of the world) phonetics if they couldn't imitate the vedic sounds.

- The Indians would not have been able to discover or propagate grammar if they could not observe the patterns of the vedic sounds.

- The Indians could not have created the Sanskrit language.

- There would have been no impetus in India to conceive elaborate re-enactments of the cosmic processes in the form of earthly yajnas. No Indian would have discovered and propagated geometry, arithmetic, trigonometry, algebra, etc in the pursuit of such elaborate exercises.

- The association of RV words with celestial objects would not have been possible. Thus no astronomy. No cosmology.

- There would have been no impetus in India to read spiritual meanings into the Veda. There would be no upanishads. No philosophy. No Indian would be the first to attempt to examine the Self (physical and mental). No physiology. No medicine. No cognitive science.

Can keep adding to this. It's not a surprise that we find statements in the old literature such as "the Vedas are the source of all knowledge".

Best Wishes,

KL

[shiv]

The earliest archaeological traces of agriculture in India are in the northwest, Mehrgarh, 6000BC, I believe. It is within the realm of possibility that IE languages arrived 6000 BC to India along with agriculture, the Harappa culture was IE speaking, there is no discordance with the Saraswati; much of the Rg Veda was composed after the horse arrived in India - which could be during Harappa's heyday - and its language was always native to India (if being in India for 2000 years or more make it native ) , and includes older material. If the north of India was always mostly IE speaking, it would explain why ancient place names there all have IE roots; why Rg Veda has only about 4% of non-IE borrowings (even according to ardent AITers) compared to 35-50% of ancient Greek. Also the riddle of the Saraswati river is solved.

The main reason (apart from AITer version of linguistics) that this may not work is population genetics.

The one objection I have to some of these language spread models is what seems to me to be an underlying assumption that modern man (Homo sapiens) who has been around for over 100,000 years was a sort of half-ape brute till 10,000 years ago and suddenly developed all sorts of new skills including language.

The reason for this model that seems to do the rounds is actually the way modern science works. Science depends on proof or attestation. The date of the evidence is taken as the date of start of a given observation. Clearly such an assumption is meaningless. If something is discovered and dated to a particular era, the absence of evidence that it existed before that cannot be taken to mean evidence of absence. While anyone who does science knows this and mentions this fact at least in passing, lay literature tends to take the meaning as "This entity did not exist before this date". For example, if the earliest Bronze object found is 3000 BC it does not mean that humans could never have had Bronze in 4000 BC. It may have been there but it has not been found so far.

How this applies to languages is that I am certain humans had language even 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. Since languages spread with humans and population growth a language - or a set of words that occur over a very large area are more likely to have been coined at a very early stage of human migration rather than a late spread by force.

If you look at lists of cognate words in 100 odd languages - and lists are available, you find that most of them are Swadesh lists of words that all humans are most likely to use. The total number of words that are remarkably similar is actually pretty small. I would love to be able to use a Venn diagram to map very similar words in languages. No one seems to have done that. The only thing that is done is a mathematical calculation of linguistic closeness which does not convey the picture very meaningfully because there is no mention of statistical significance. I am certain that some of these things are on "to be done" lists and linguistics is a field that Indians could still enter and add logic and science to mumbo jumbo.

But great closeness of some words like "Father", "leg" etc could mean that these words were coined at a very remote date in the past when human populations were very small and still migrating to occupy vast areas of the earth that were unoccupied by humans. The possibility that some of these words could be 25,000 years old should not be discarded. The most likely explanation for very wide and uniform spread of some cognates in human populations is hardly likely to be people who went on horses forcing words down people throats. The later is possible, but not plausible. Some words are probably just old.

The other thing is the very plausible spread of humans 20 km per generation. One can expect a society to spawn off groups of people who go and settle at another spot that gives them some benefits. But when it comes to death or finding a mate they return to the earlier area they migrated out from. If this happens for 5 generations one ends up having relatives or "one's own people" over a wide area extending dozens of km. If such spread has occurred for 1000 years it would be difficult for an invader to simply come and wipe out all previous populations in his lifetime.

The invasion/migration due to horse/chariot model has a degree of plausibility but it would be wrong to exclude earlier language spread. It is equally plausible that the whole IE speaking area were already speaking IE when the horse got domesticated and further spread due to horse was merely the further spread of the same family of languages The IE family may be a relic of a very very remote past. Polytheism, fire rituals etc could also be of very remote origin. The horse terminology could have been added as a superstrate of an IE language on top of a pre existing IE language. After all if two people pee in a bucket you cannot later split the pee and say this belongs to X and the other to Y. If you mix pee and blood you can say "pee is superstrate" and "blood is substrate" or vice versa. IE language of 5000 BC mixing with IE language of 2000 BC may not leave any visible trace unless you are willing to look for it and are not hung up on a "single point in space and time" hypothesis which is the WitMer voodoo school methodology

If Indians were already speaking a very ancient IE tongue, the horse terminology from another IE speaking people would only add to the vocabulary of IE with more cognates.

[SaiK]

see.. the markov chain can be used for reverse purposes - reverse markov chain - transition probabilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
And there is no data to say, that whatever transitions they probably used, actually was reversed in the first place.

see, if it is all about probability distribution, one could actually use their very own data and reverse it., and no special proof is required to say, it was black that became white. Except of course, the pakis who are a pain in the rear for both Indos and Euros, sitting right on the inter-connecting data source geographically.

[shiv]

On this therad we have discussed meanings of some of the less obscure jargon used by linguists and among them are the concept of "substrate", "adstrate" and "supestrate". In retrospect I would judge these words as politically convenient definitions to describe language with no fixed meaning.

One language mixed with another is called a Creole. One language mixed with another where one language is supposed to have been imposed on a people, the imposer-victor language is called supestrate and the loser language gets the "substrate". When nobody could be declared winner/loser , words are said to be borrowed and called adstrate. These concepts have very broad definitions and their utility is IMO very narrow.

When a specialty is early in its infancy or underdeveloped scientifically you have these vague overlapping definitions. In the past in surgery there used to be the terms "subtotal thyroidectomy", "hemithyroidectomy", "thyroid lobectomy, "partial thyroidectomy" etc coined by different people to describe overlapping concepts with no specific meaning other than what the person who coined it (and his students) demanded the definition ought to be.

A language mixture of two very different languages is a mixture of two languages whether you call it a Creole, adstrate, substrate, superstrate whatever. When you call a mixture "superstrate" instead of "adstrate" you are saying victory for one. This is fine when the history is known. But history should not be cooked up on the basis of calling one language superstrate and another one substrate.

germanic and Romance languages have a large percentage of non Indo European words. But Indo European is very widely dispersed all over the world. Sanskrit is almost 100% Indo-European. Can this be explained in any way?

One possibility is to hypothesize that a basic Indo European vocabulary spread early in human history - let me say 40,000 years ago. It may have become widesperad over Europe and Asia. Germanic languages are said to have a mixture of Basque. There is a hypothesis that the Basques were descended partly from interbreeding with Neanderthals, and that Basque may have been a Neanderthal language. If proto-Basque was a pre existing language in Europe then the mirating IE people would have mixed with them.

In the case of India, perhaps the earliest human migrations in the North (not along the coast) were Indo-European speaking. If all later migrations to India came from Indo-European speaking areas, it would mean that Indo-European languages form superstrate, substrate and adstrate in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is Creole of Prakrit+Prakrit+more Prakrit. Not only would this explain lack of mixture with other non IE langauges, it would also suggest great antiquity for Sanskrit as claimed and it would not go against the horse origin hypothesis.

But it would kill the 2000 BC to 1000 BC migration of IE theory. The linguistic schLOLars won't like it.

[SaiK]

Per the PIE chart, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo ... n_language
the parent for anatolian is indo-euro, and so is for indo-aryan which is again from indo-iranian.

The problem in this pie chart, is that indo [with an european tail] is slammed ahead for being a parent of other language with political intentions.

For example:
http://www.learnsanskrit.org/start/roots/gerunds

copied by

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Gr ... #Gerundive

copied by

latin and englicks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund

clearly shows the language transitions and directions.

[member_20317]

Dont know how many realise that they are trying to get the origin of all things to Greek and pre Greek region.

Utlimately make sure that all early antiquity is only in Europe/Greek

Acharya ji, these guys just cannot get language out of their head.

Since migration does not support PIE so now they are looking for some other crutch to land up in India. Agriculture is the new crutch. But since the PIE itself has to stand on its feet on its own strength any introduction of PIE into any modeling will only vitiate the model. This is exactly like pre 20th Century Christianity skewed virtually all of human effort to achieve better understanding. Cow ke uppar cow.

The strange part is Indics themselves consider different parts of Central Asia and Middle East as Indic areas and Greeks reaching India via Anatolia and the CA or ME is like being in India the whole time.

[Lilo]

March of the Aryans: A window back into debris of time

a large portion of “The March of the Aryans” is devoted to the Aryans leaving India – and then returning to their homeland again after realising that no land in Asia and Europe was as peaceful as India. It is an attempt to put the misconceptions about the Invasion of Aryan theory, propounded by many, right.

“The Aryan impulse to leave Bharat Varsha (India) arose after the assassination of their spiritual leader, Sindhu Putra, as the apprehension was that the murder had been plotted by the lords of the lands,” the writer said.

After Sindhu Putra’s death, many had their Aryan lands and farms confiscated for no fault. But overriding all the fears was their belief that “somewhere under the vast sky there must be the ‘Land of Pure’ where their assassinated spiritual leader (Sindhu Putra) resides”. And they went out to search for that land.

“But wherever they went, they found degradation, brutality, injustice, slavery,” Gidwani said.

Eventually, it dawned on those wandering Aryans that their homeland of India was better than the rest of the world into which they had tumbled in their futile search for a home earlier.

The “March of the Aryans” details their knightly deeds and attachment to the concept of “Daya (compassion), Dana (charity) & Dharma (righteousness)”.

In their ancestry, the Aryans were Hindus. “I stress that never did they belong or considered themselves as a different people. Many, at different times, have tried to highlight the difference between the ancient Hindu and the Aryan in support of the Aryan invasion theory of India which I hope ‘March of the Aryans’ clearly shows as false and frivolous, thereby agreeing with those who had questioned the Aryan Invasion theory,” Gidwani said.

The British, in presenting the Aryan Invasion Theory offered no proof. They did not need to. Hundreds of Indian historians rushed forward to earn their doctorates, promotions, patronage and government-aided jobs and positions for supporting the British theory of Aryan Invasion of India, Gidwani says.

The book tries to prove that the British “invented” the Aryan Invasion theory and this myth was created to prove that Indians were incapable of ruling themselves.

It is set in 8,000 BC and says that the Aryans originated from India in 5,000 BC.

The writer, who has researched the reign of the ancient king Bharat in his book, says the king, after whom the country is named, encapsulated the spirit of an uncorrupted India.

Gidwani is also the best-selling author of the “The Sword of Tipu Sultan”, which was adapted into a tele-serial.

OIT getting mainstream??
or is it buttressing of the "Aryan" identity by penning Aryan centric epics/sagas ?

[Murugan]

Return of The Aryans - Also from Bhagwan Gidwani

This book tells the epic story of the Aryans - a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance and the rise and fall of civilizations. Vast and absorbing, the novel tells the stories of characters like the gentle god, Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the physician-sage Dhanawantar and his wife, Dhanawantari; and Nila who gave his name to the river Nile.

Bhagwan S. Gidwanis The Sword of Tipu Sultan was a bestseller in India, with many translations and forty four reprints. It was followed by a major TV serial for which Gidwani also wrote the script and screenplay. Bhagwan S. Gidwani lives in Montreal.

[rohitvats]

<SNIP>But it would kill the 2000 BC to 1000 BC migration of IE theory. The linguistic schLOLars won't like it.

Hakeem sahab, please pardon me if the question seems stupid (the subject matter is too thick for my mango-abdul brain), but from what has been discussed in the forum, it seems the situation facing the western scholars was thus:

- Linguists realize that Indian sub-continent, Persia and Middle-East have a family of similar looking languages - which are called as 'sister' languages by them

- they then realize that since it is an accepted wisdom (actually, created wisdom) that Aryans came from Steppes into India and went west towards Europe, these Aryans also needed to have a language. But there was problem - there is no known source of Aryans in steppes having any language.

- Add to it the fact that languages in India and western/eastern Europe too have some similarity

- But to think that Aryans went out from India to these areas and carried with them their language is blasphemy.

- Pronto - the solution is PIE - the mother language which seeded everything around it in 360 degree circle. And then everything to date has been done to hold on this dogma. Because if PIE crashes, so does the AMT/AIT Theory. And India gains prominence as the mother civilization - something a western world view dominated discourse would be loathe to accept.

[shiv]

- Pronto - the solution is PIE - the mother language which seeded everything around it in 360 degree circle. And then everything to date has been done to hold on this dogma. Because if PIE crashes, so does the AMT/AIT Theory. And India gains prominence as the mother civilization - something a western world view dominated discourse would be loathe to accept.

rohit, PIE can never crash because it is cooked up. It cannot be proved or disproved. It has been pushed as THE solution by a series of winks and nudges, and obviously, the people who push it (which is not everyone) spend exactly zero time in checking for anything that might be wrong.

There are a bunch of "inviolable" sound (pronunciation) change "laws" that have been noted. (I will, in due course see how far these laws have been checked for accuracy and compare the method with other sciences) And it has also been noted that certain types of changes in sound occur consistently. What is done in reconstruction of a proto language is to take two (or more) languages, look at similar words (cognates), apply the "laws" of sound change and for every such word "calculate" a possible earlier proto word that must have existed assuming that both languages are descended from a common ancestor. This is an interesting exercise but when you create a proto language by this method and start claiming that this language actually existed, it becomes garbage.

It becomes garbage because of the number of known and unknown unknowns in this method. You might have only two languages left from a common ancestor. Maybe there were originally five. The sounds of three of them have been lost forever and those sounds may have had an important component in the pronunciation that does not show up. Secondly, they may not exactly be daughter languages. Third, some of the so called daughter languages may be dead languages from which pronunciation (sound) has been guessed by a convoluted and clever process of decipherment. The exact timeline of those languages may be unknown and only guessed, (like Sanskrit, Old Persian and Avestan) and the languages used for reconstrcution may not really be "sister" languages.. The sound of a given language may have changes in pronunciation due to mixture of some unknown language which is assumed to be a simple pronunciation change over time. So a reconstrcued proto language is only a "best guess"

But it does not end here. PIE has taken many separate "best guess" languages from Europe and Asia and combined all these best guess languages into a bestest guess "super language" called PIE which not only adds up all the presumed sound shifts, it also compounds every known and unknown error along the way. This "bestest guess" superlanguage is now referred to as a language that really existed and is used "to explain" how other languages were born from this super language. That has happened on this thread.

As if that was not enough, this bestest guess cooked up language has conveniently been placed in an area where no history of any known language exists. All timelines have been adjusted to fit because nothing in archaeology or linguistics is ever stated with a degree of accuracy less than about 500 years. everything is vaguely dated except when it comes to facts that may upset the language story. Then you start getting dates like 1467 BC.

The whole PIE thing is a huge huge strawman. By attacking the strawman (PIE) we do not even begin to address the numerous series of bluffs and assumptions made in the construction of an entire story of language and history of half the world. PIE is just one of the bluffs.

From our viewpoint:

• Dating Sanskrit without reconciling all the chronological and geographic data in the Rig Veda is the second bluff.
  
  Meekly (and maliciously) accepting plain lies about the life of society described in the Rig Veda and using selective data points where convenient is bluff number three. This latter bluff is now widely quoted in an enormous number of references.

And anyone who calls this bluff gets accused of various things, starting from being jingoists to me being called a person unwilling to read or look up dictionaries.

The situation is a mess and it only means that AIT supporters just need to be dealt with as viciously as they have mauled the data. As you can see on this thread, personal attacks and jibes are all part of the game the minute someone starts question the "wisdom" of lingustic schLOLars.

[RajeshA]

March of the Aryans: A window back into debris of time

a large portion of “The March of the Aryans” is devoted to the Aryans leaving India – and then returning to their homeland again after realising that no land in Asia and Europe was as peaceful as India. It is an attempt to put the misconceptions about the Invasion of Aryan theory, propounded by many, right.

OIT getting mainstream??
or is it buttressing of the "Aryan" identity by penning Aryan centric epics/sagas ?

Lilo ji,

From the look of it, this looks extremely suspicious!

It looks more like AIT 3.0 and is designed only for local Indian consumption! Nobody in the rest of the world would ever lose sleep over proving that first the Aryans left India (only to return back). But I can see many Macaulayized Indians taking up this theory and running with it!

Its psychology is more on the lines of "I have robbed your house, and raped your wife! But somehow your whole screaming and protesting is getting on my nerves. So here is a lolly and suck on it. I, the Aryan, just pulled it out of my musharraf a short time back! But don't tell anyone outside about the theory, because they will laugh at you!"

I wouldn't probably have been so forthright rejecting this a few months ago, but in a little discussion with one Mr. Rajee Kushwaha on Sulekha, I am now 400% sure, what this is all about! For your delight, I am reproducing Mr. Rajee Kushwaha's last post!

I am not saying that Sanskrit originated in Antanolia nor I am saying that some ANATONIAL language is mother of SANSKRIT. it is your interpretation.

I am drawing analogy from this study that ANCIENT PEOPLE in Antonia were of Indian origin---- who spoke crude form of SANSKRIT till it got enriched in a period of time------- this study shows the EXTENT of Ancient Indians or the NAGAS reach into various regions after the last ICE AGE around 10000 years back. This was what also claimed by Bhagwan Gidwani. In his masterpiece RETURN OF THE ARYANS.

------ Now you are here making your speculations about NAGAS and how they migrated out and spread Crude Sanskrit throughout Eurasia! Is this something you just want to believe in seclusion or have our masters in Europe also conceded this?-------

I am NOT making any speculation nor I am influenced by European----- you have a some kind of kink in your brain that you do not want to synthesize Lingual, geographical, geological, archaeological and folk lore parts of history to understand basic thing. You are too drowned in your self glory theme. Based on your EVERYTHING INDIGENOUS THEORY you want to ignore the existing facts.

If NAGAS had not gone to Rumania, Germany, turkey, Syria and Austria , how come many Sanskrit words in their local dialects are found. This study had picked up only some 6000 words ---- but read RETURN OF THE ARYANS----- some phrases and words by ROMANIAN GYPSIES are of Sanskrit origin.

Read RAJESH KOCHHAR, famous archaeologist and Surveyor General of India, who wrote the VEDIC HISTORY OF India and found linkages in Sanskrit and Avestic. This was NOT possible if the ANCIENT INDIANS had not migrated to this land. I call them NAGAS ---- ancient NRIs----- they came back as Aryans. FOR THAT MATTER also read Dr NS Rajaram and Dr David Frawley---10000 years of Indian History HIDDEN HORIZON. Also, read Dr S RADHAKRISHANA ----- HINDU VIEW OF LIFE.
Problem with you guys is that you were picking up half wit information from the net----- where there are postings with Vested interests. You are NOT trying to collate all the information----- you guys think That Veda knowledge is Aryan---- I say it was of NAGAS , which was usurped by RETURNING NAGAS---- because of their higher status in life as do the modern NRIs of today.

If the word ARYA exists in RigVeda it does not establish its Antiquity prior to Nagas. The word ARYA itself has two Sanskrit roots----Aa and Ri------ it's union makes ARYA. Aa means NOT and Ri implies COMMON. Thus ARYA implies NOT COMMON or a NOBLE PERSON. It was neither a RACE nor a lingual fraternity but an entitlement or a designation . It showed the social status of a person. Same way RIG VEDA is made of Ri +Ga + vid-------- Ri--- common---- Ga--- hymns or verses and Vid----- knowledge. Meaning common hymns of knowledge ( for rituals) --- same is true of other Vedas such as ATHARVA or SAM VEDAS.

In any case VEDAS were compiled much later----- they are teachings of primarily four Vedic RISHIS,ie. VASHISTA, VISHAVMITRA, BHRIGU and ATRI from MANDLA 2 to 7------ MANDLA 1, 8,9,10 are later additions by their descendants. It is a mere collection of some 1028 verses.

VASHISTA's brother AGASTYA,S crossing of Vindhyas is well recorded in the Puranas and Upnishads. So, it is the Eastward journey of the Aryans from North and West.

Please understand that only thing INDIGENOUS of ARYANS was their NAGA ancestry----- do not try to claim their something which historically, mythologically, linguistically and archaeologically can not be proved. And I am not a person who believes blindly what European say----- I am deducing from what Indian scholars of knowledge and expertise have said.
Let us differ with each other decently, let us not ridicule each other----- it is my right to put foth my point as yours. Convince me if you can. Problem with you guys is that you want to flout your degrees more than what you have read or know and you remain swimming only in your well of convictions. Must know Degrees are NOT CERTIFICATE OF KNOWLEDGE.

Basically this guy is saying we should have let the Brits to rule India, because they were just Aryanized NRIs coming back home!

So all this chatter about Returning Aryans or Returning Nagas is just AIT 3.0 for local consumption in India, whereas the Europeans after having appropriated Sanskrit and the Vedas can continue their historical engineering and be left alone by pesty Hindooos, who should be satisfied with the lolly! Mera Accha Beta, Tum Lolly Khao!

[D Roy]

gentlemen do notice one thing though,

the gradual shift of the PIE type theories towards the west.

The german indologists started with central asia and iran , steppes etc.

then the brahmi script chaps took it to babylon , sumeria et al..

and now we have anatolia.

in another twenty years its will be greece.

[shiv]

PIE song. The people who composed your horse-eatin', horse-burying Rig Veda sang such songs to put your ancestors to sleep. They must have died soon, listening to this

Uploader and other comments

Bhloesom is the genitive plural of bhlos = flower, in germanic languages the common bhlo-stem has been developped with m like blume or bloom and with -s here instead and the ending -om for plural genitive has not been preserved in germanic languages consider gothic genitive plural innovation -e.

òn = we: in indoeuropean we had different stems for first plural person NS was for we intending simply we (and more than 2 people) MES was for inclusive we (and more than 2 people and meaning something like we of the family, we of ours) VEI meant we two, dual, germanic languages extended it to all first plural first person: WIR, VIT, VI, WE in this text instead we have òn (accusative òns) from NS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_gkhkVbs84

[RajeshA]

X-Posting from a Sulekha Blog "Fabricating History – 2000 BC" by Rajee Kushwaha.

I am drawing analogy from this study that ANCIENT PEOPLE in Antonia were of Indian origin---- who spoke crude form of SANSKRIT till it got enriched in a period of time------- this study shows the EXTENT of Ancient Indians or the NAGAS reach into various regions after the last ICE AGE around 10000 years back.

It's okay for you to claim something, but are Western "scholars" accepting anything of the sort? Can you tell me some Western scholar testifying this!

You may point to David Frawley and N. S. Rajaram, who may have put forward such theories, but they are vociferous in their opposition to any "Return of Aryans" or "Return of Nagas"! And for their views of Indians moving out into rest of Eurasia in ancient times, they are severely attacked by these racist European historians!

What the study says is "There are two competing hypotheses for origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. "

Has anyone doing this idiotic study conceded anything about the origin of Sanskrit, be it crude or otherwise being in ? NO

I have been all over the Internet and have read studies on genetics, linguistics, archaeology, archaeo-geology, archaeo-astronomy, and what not!

Take it from me; No Westerner linguistics historian is conceding anything with respect to India being the origin of even crude Sanskrit!

So in the Western community of racist linguists and historians, your theory of Nagas venturing out and spreading crude Sanskrit through the world and taking it to Anatolia is still-born!

you have a some kind of kink in your brain that you do not want to synthesize Lingual, geographical, geological, archaeological and folk lore parts of history to understand basic thing. You are too drowned in your self glory theme. Based on your EVERYTHING INDIGENOUS THEORY you want to ignore the existing facts.

Sir your existing facts are being manufactured in Europe since late 18th century! The Europeans didn't like that the high ancient culture of India should be considered as superior and more ancient than Greek culture, but they couldn't escape the language similarities and so they started to manufacture the whole Central Asian and Anatolian origin of Aryans theory. Aryan Invasion Theory was created to explain Sanskrit in India. All utter bullshit, but because of British rule and domination of their chamchas even after Independence you have millions of Indians believing in the crap they dished to us!

The Europeans have successfully shifted their inferiority complex to us Indians.

As far as glory is concerned, why all this juxtaposition against Truth. My only aim here is to preserve our ancient civilizational identity and treasures which belong to us.

Also there is absolutely nothing wrong with Glory. Why do you think people compete in the Olympics, if it is not for glory? Do you think all the other civilizations do not assert their claims on glory? So why this appeal to Indians to renounce glory!

At least my sanskaar taught me, I should not desire what is not mine! But what is mine (culture, family, civilization), I should fight to preserve it! And if my civilization happens to be glorious, than so it is! What is wrong with that! Should I then kill my civilization because it is glorious and some crackpot tells me that my modesty demands that I not desire glory?

If NAGAS had not gone to Rumania, Germany, turkey, Syria and Austria , how come many Sanskrit words in their local dialects are found. This study had picked up only some 6000 words ---- but read RETURN OF THE ARYANS----- some phrases and words by ROMANIAN GYPSIES are of Sanskrit origin.

You are completely correct. You can call them Nagas if you wish. Some would call them Aryans. The point is that Indians went out of India and our language did spread throughout Eurasia. I agree with you! But No mainstream Western linguist or historian believes that though!

But the migrations is not the reason for our difference. You are claiming that they came back and became India's Elite, which is the distorted history which the Europeans want to push, and you obviously too!

Read RAJESH KOCHHAR, famous archaeologist and Surveyor General of India, who wrote the VEDIC HISTORY OF India and found linkages in Sanskrit and Avestic. This was NOT possible if the ANCIENT INDIANS had not migrated to this land. I call them NAGAS ---- ancient NRIs----- they came back as Aryans.

Vedic Sanskrit and Avestic are dialects. Of course one would notice similarities. And these linkages are known from time immemorial. It is common knowledge, and Rajesh Kochhar had no role in finding those linkages!

Iranians were Indians. Read Shrikant Talageri's book "The Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence"!

Ancient Indians migrating out of India is not our dispute! Our dispute is on the return of the "Aryans"!

You see if the West doesn't recognize the first part - of Ancient Indians knowledgeable in Sanskrit (crude, proto, otherwise) migrating out; but only assert Aryans, knowledgeable in Sanskrit, coming in into India and giving us Sanskrit for the very first time, then all these theories of yours of Nagas with crude Sanskrit really go out of the window, and all you get is Aryans (read Europeans) coming and giving us civilization!

Also, read Dr S RADHAKRISHANA ----- HINDU VIEW OF LIFE.
Problem with you guys is that you were picking up half wit information from the net----- where there are postings with Vested interests.

If vested interests are about saving Indian past from Europeans, then I would say I would say I am guilty.

However I see vested interests very much keen to sell our civilization to the Europeans, just so that they do not have to live with the ignominy of not having any ancient history worth the name! So the ignominy should shift to Indians, because as you said, we don't need any "glory"!

You are NOT trying to collate all the information----- you guys think That Veda knowledge is Aryan---- I say it was of NAGAS , which was usurped by RETURNING NAGAS---- because of their higher status in life as do the modern NRIs of today.

Sir, Arya simply means noble. It was the Europeans who came up with this "Aryan bullshit" of Aryans referring to first races and then to people speaking Sanskrit-like Languages from which Sanskrit and other European languages grew" AND who lived somewhere in Central Asia. The word Aryan did not even exist before the Europeans read the Indian scriptures. Now they are trying to shift the center for origin further to the West near Anatolia, so that they can claim Aryanhood!

Now you wish to give the Ancient Indians, who migrated out and spread Sanskrit-like languages, the name "Naga"! I find it arbitrary, so I will continue to call them Ancient Indians. I do not wish to load words which are found in our scriptures with fully new meanings, as if Nagas was used as a designation for all ancient Indians. If you have any evidence of the contrary, do share!

If the word ARYA exists in RigVeda it does not establish its Antiquity prior to Nagas.

Your sentence means nothing! You arbitrarily give the word Naga to Ancient Indians, and then say that the word did not exist prior to Ancient Indians, even though it is the Ancient Indians put it there!

Why the need to create such confusion?

The word ARYA itself has two Sanskrit roots----Aa and Ri------ it's union makes ARYA. Aa means NOT and Ri implies COMMON. Thus ARYA implies NOT COMMON or a NOBLE PERSON. It was neither a RACE nor a lingual fraternity but an entitlement or a designation . It showed the social status of a person.

Yes. The Europeans however changed the meaning! They redefined the word Arya or Aryan to mean a race of people who spoke something similar to Sanskrit who invaded/migrated into India, introducing proto-Sanskrit into India for the very first time, and became India's new Elite creating the Vedas and all the rest of the scriptures. They are defined as originally NOT from India!

In any case VEDAS were compiled much later----- they are teachings of primarily four Vedic RISHIS,ie. VASHISTA, VISHAVMITRA, BHRIGU and ATRI from MANDLA 2 to 7------ MANDLA 1, 8,9,10 are later additions by their descendants. It is a mere collection of some 1028 verses.

1028 hymns (39,831 padas) are only in the Rig Veda! And what is the need to say "mere"!

Please understand that only thing INDIGENOUS of ARYANS was their NAGA ancestry----- do not try to claim their something which historically, mythologically, linguistically and archaeologically can not be proved.

First you define Arya the way it is defined in our scriptures as someone noble (in thought and deed), and now you go ahead and use the European definition, and then say our whole corpus of scriptures comes from outsiders who invaded us and became our elite and thus basically gave us our civilization, and before that as "Nagas" we were basically barbarians without any culture or civilization!

As far as scientific proof is concerned, there is absolutely zero proof that there was ever an Aryan Invasion or even a Migration into India! You have simply a few conjectures from Western historians for South Asia followed by baseless assertions!

All the archaeological, archaeo-astronomical, genetic, geological and textual evidence shows that there was never an Aryan Invasion, or Aryan migration in the last 12,500 years. I have discussed all the genetic evidence in previous posts.

Do you see anywhere in our texts any hint of even some people coming from Central Asia and becoming our Elite? In all the Vedas, Puranas and elsewhere, there is zero mention of something like that happening.

And I am not a person who believes blindly what European say----- I am deducing from what Indian scholars of knowledge and expertise have said.

Everything that your "Indian scholars" from Indian academic circles are teaching the same thing as the Europeans! They are only doing field work for them!

It is only a few Indians who have really had the guts and the intelligence to bat for our civilization - B.B. Lal, Shrikant Talageri, Subhash Kak, S. Kalyanaraman, N.S. Rajaram, T.R.S. Prasanna, Premendra Priyadarshi, etc. They have taken Aryan Invasion Theories by the horn and proved it wrong!

Rajesh Kochhar as I read dated Mahabharata to a period which fits European sensibilities. Bhagwan S. Gidwani is just another joker working for the European historians.

It looks more like AIT 3.0 (AIT, AMT == AIT 2.0) and is designed only for local Indian consumption! Nobody in the rest of the world would ever lose sleep over proving that first the Aryans left India (only to return back). But I can see many Macaulayized Indians taking up this theory and running with it!

Its psychology is more on the lines of "I have robbed your house, and raped your wife! But somehow your whole screaming and protesting is getting on my nerves. So here is a lolly and suck on it. I, the Aryan, just pulled it out of my back-side a short time back! But don't tell anyone outside about the theory, because they will laugh at you!"

So all this chatter about Returning Aryans or Returning Nagas is just AIT 3.0 for local consumption in India, whereas the Europeans after having appropriated Sanskrit and the Vedas can continue their historical engineering and be left alone by pesty Hindooos, who should be satisfied with the lolly! They will say, "Mera Accha Beta, Tum Lolly Khao!"

It is a whole-scale Robbery of Indian Civilization taking place here!

You are not the first one to talk about Aryans having the right to rule as they were of some higher social status. The British too said the same thing. Being Aryans it was their right to rule India and responsibility to bear the white man's burden. Perhaps we should have let the Brits to rule India, because they were just Aryanized NRIs coming back home, as per your theory!

ancient NRIs----- they came back as Aryans. "..... "which was usurped by RETURNING NAGAS---- because of their higher status in life as do the modern NRIs of today."...."I'm my mind they were NOTHING BUT REFINED NAGAS , AS ARE THE NRIs of today."..." "My contention is that language is always developing and refining and so did SANSKRIT of Nagas, when it left shores of India and when it returned as ARYANISED."

Rajee ji,

what I am reading here is an effort to tell Indians that they are inferior, that it is only when one becomes NRI that one becomes superior! What is all this about NRIs and their "higher status in life". This is really an inferiority complex, fair and square! It is saying well those who returned as NRIs have some superior right to be considered having higher status and similarly they should be given the status as the new elite!

I am an NRI and have been living abroad for over 20 years. I have never felt any urge to feel superior or to think I deserve more than some Indian in India!

So what does make NRI have higher status in life! Is it the connection with the gori chamree? Is that how Nagas too became "Aryanized"?

2000 Years ago, the British and the Germans were considered barbarians! They have no history from that time, except some stones!

As far back as 26,000 years Indians on the other hand were doing Timekeeping and were marking Rohini as our nakshatra for summer solstice! Since 3,600 BCE the Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilization is considered as the world's most organized, productive and largest civilization out there, trading with many other regions.

I would really like to know what is origin and reason for this tremendous lack of self-esteem among some Indians? Why this submissive nature and urge to kowtow to Europeans?

[RajeshA]

Dear RajeshA,

KLP Dubey ji,

you have just said that the Vedas are beyond our understanding. If that is the case, why are they called Veda - Knowledge? And if this knowledge is not accessible to our brains, then what is the need for humans to exert themselves in preserving them?

I didn't say the Vedas are "beyond our understanding". I said "they are currently not understood".

Was there ever a time when the Vedas were understood? If yes, by whom? If no, who would be able to understand in the future if not humans?

There are many Brahmins who have seen it as their life's work to both preserve the Vedas and to study them! You are basically saying there is nobody who understands them! And as soon as a human would presume some meaning in some word in the Vedas, it would automatically be false! It is interesting that you can make such a generalized statement!

I also did not mean that the words of the Veda are completely unintelligible. I meant that there is no guarantee at all that a particular humanly-derived "meaning" is correct (for example, they keep changing over the ages), hence the RV can not be used to settle historical and linguistic arguments.

Sir, any two people reading any text would understand it based on their own experiential context. So there is no guarantee any two people would see the same meaning in any text! It is a trivial statement!

What is the need for humans to exert themselves in preserving the Veda ? Answer: there is absolutely no "compulsion". The sounds of the veda are eternal, universal, and exist independent of any human connection. The Veda is in not in the least concerned or affected if you and I "decide" to not "preserve" them.

So what if the Veda was not "preserved on earth" at all ? In the past:

- The Indians would not have been able to learn (and propagate to the rest of the world) phonetics if they couldn't imitate the vedic sounds.

- The Indians would not have been able to discover or propagate grammar if they could not observe the patterns of the vedic sounds.

- The Indians could not have created the Sanskrit language.

- There would have been no impetus in India to conceive elaborate re-enactments of the cosmic processes in the form of earthly yajnas. No Indian would have discovered and propagated geometry, arithmetic, trigonometry, algebra, etc in the pursuit of such elaborate exercises.

- The association of RV words with celestial objects would not have been possible. Thus no astronomy. No cosmology.

- There would have been no impetus in India to read spiritual meanings into the Veda. There would be no upanishads. No philosophy. No Indian would be the first to attempt to examine the Self (physical and mental). No physiology. No medicine. No cognitive science.

Can keep adding to this. It's not a surprise that we find statements in the old literature such as "the Vedas are the source of all knowledge".

Best Wishes,

KL

I think you are contradicting yourself! Here you are saying many types of knowledge were derived from the Vedas! Though I disagree that without it, humans would have had no astronomy, linguistics, physiology or medicine, etc.

There are enough civilizations on Earth who have managed all that on their own without the help of the Vedas!

Earlier however you were flaying people for using the Veda in the above fashion! Here is what you wrote:

- Other Indians came up with the idea of performing "wishful-thinking" sacrifices with the words of the Veda serving as the essential component. The idea was to try and re-enact/emulate on Earth in some small way the cosmic processes of the Veda, and thereby have some hope of deriving a material benefit. This led to the Brahmanas and kalpasutras. Unfortunately these Yajnas don't work correctly as they are supposed to by the authors of the brahmanas.

- Some other guys started seeing "spiritual visions" in the Vedic words and started philosophical inquiry into things like the nature of the Self etc. The Upanishads. Vedanta. Etc. for example, one Shankara claimed that the ultimate reality (brahman) is "blissful and undifferentiated", while at the same time forcefully stating that the Vedic words are indeed eternal and cannot be altered. Another obvious logical failure.

- Some others started personifying certain sounds in the Veda (e.g., "Vishnu") and started manufacturing stories and legends (perhaps because these sounds have a certain power and those guys 'liked' these sounds). In other words, connecting Vedic word to human experiences in order to create legends. The vast corpus of Puranic literature.

You have very forcefully made your case that all fundamental aspects of Hinduism such as Yajnas, Philosophical Enquiry, Puranic literature, etc. deriving from the Vedas are abysmal failures and logical fallacies! The various sciences that have grown out of Vedas or in parallel to the Vedas being heard are also just flukes which occurred when Indians assigned some meaning to the words of the Vedas!

- In the absence of knowledge regarding the "meaning" of the Vedic roots and derived forms, the best one can do is:
(i) Try to faithfully reproduce the originally "received" sounds as best as possible using the human vocal apparatus. This led to the discipline of phonetics.
(ii) Try to observe and catalog the patterns and rules in the formation of derived forms. This led to the discipline of grammar.

In fact I would say, even in grammar one would to some extent have to assign some meaning to the words, even if it is just the word's gender, so I guess even the second point cannot be valid as per your contention!

I guess phonetics are the only thing that one can use Vedas for and that only if we faithfully reproduce the Vedic sounds generation after generation if we go by what you propose! However if we have Sanskrit, then we don't really need the Vedas themselves for phonetics!

So sir, you have reduced the use of Vedas to nothing! I suppose some Abrahamics would someday use this argument to claim that Vedas means nothing really, and a human can understand them not any more than he would understand some bird chirps!

I cannot disagree more! Just because through the Indian pursuits of sciences, Yajnas, Philosophy and Puranic Cosmology, the following status is challenged

The Rg Veda (and indeed the Rgvedic sounds) are eternal, have no authors*, are impersonal, and have no specific connection to, nor any interest whatsoever in, to the human race or cultures. The roots of Vedic are not of human agency and their true meanings are unknown.

it does not mean one should throw all the above pursuits out of the window or flay them as abysmal failures and logical fallacies!

I would see it thus, that those who thought up this stand simply lacked the creativity to explain both - the eternal nature of the Vedas and knowledge that one derives from them, as valid! You need to go back to the drawing board and rethink a better way on how to square the circle without breaking any of them!

[JwalaMukhi]

Sir, any two people reading any text would understand it based on their own experiential context. So there is no guarantee any two people would see the same meaning in any text! It is a trivial statement!

This is pretty significant. There is a reason why the stewardship of vedas is not vested in all and sundry like maintenance of public property. When it is responsibility of everybody, it signifies no one is responsible for it, except everyone deems it a gravy train to plunder at will. This is precisely what the western indologists and linguists have indulged in wantonly.

There is reason why there are GuruParamparas and very crucial in understanding the nuances of how and what. Given that why would one try to lap up something propounded by witmer gang whose experiential nature is limited to pizzaz and beer over local people who have dedicated their lives in stewardship of Vedas?

[RajeshA]

Continuing from a previous post:

Here is Shrikant Talageri's response to some objections raised by ManishH ji!

Talageri shows how the order of rivers mentioned in the Rig Veda actually moves from East to West and not from West to East as would be expected. Read this chapter and view with the image associated with the text
http://voiceofdharma.org/books/rig/ch4.htm

Rivers in order of mention in the Rig veda

Even a cursory look reveals contradictions in this diagram...

1. Sh. Talageri calls maṇḍala VI the oldest based on genealogical lists. Going by genealogy, the entire maṇḍala VI belongs to Bharadvāja kula. The sūkta VI.45 where Ganga is mentioned is ascribed to Samyu Bharadvāja, who is the son of Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya, descended from Bṛhaspati who is the son of Aṅgiras. Now since the ancestor ṛṣi Aṅgiras has composed other mantras in maṇḍala I itself, so how come maṇḍala VI is the earliest ? For reference, here is the genealogical data from Sh. Talageri's book :

http://voiceofdharma.org/books/rig/ch2.htm

The pro-domo placement of maṇḍala VI as the oldest is totally-self contradictory with Talageri's own basis - the genealogical tree. So placing Ganga in the "EARLY PERIOD" is totally incorrect.

1. About Mandala 6, I have given very detailed facts in my two books (The Rigveda- A Historical Analysis 2000, and The Rigveda and the Avesta The Final evidence-2008). Dealing specially with ManishH's arguments:
a) I do not know which newly invented Rigveda is known to ManishH, which is unknown to anyone else, and which has mantras by Angiras in Mandala 1! There is not a single mantra anywhere in the whole of the Rigveda which is attributed to the ancestral Angiras.

b) My book (2000) points out that the later Mandalas contain hymns fictitiously attributed to ancestors. Mandala 10, for example attributes a hymn to the ancestral Sudas, who is the hero of Mandalas 3 and 7. No scholar, so far as I know, has used this to claim that book 10 is older than or in line with books 3 and 7.

c) It is in order to stop this petty wastage of time on argumentation about the correctness or otherwise of my chronological order (6,3,7, 4,2, 5,8,1,9,10), that in my third book (2008), after again giving in detail all the incontrovertible evidence for this order, I pointed out that it was not necessary to accept my exact order in order to see the finality of my thesis. The westerners (Oldenberg to Witzel to Proferes) accept that books 2-7 are older than books 1, 8-10; and again that out of books 2-7, book 5 is later than the others and in line with books 1, 8-10. Their order, therefore, is old 2-4,6-7, middle 5, new 1, 8-10. This coincides exactly with my order, with only the internal order of books 2-4,6-7 remaining unconfirmed by the western scholars. And, even with only their threefold classification, I have given voluminous and absolutely unchallengeable evidence to show that the old books i) go far back beyond 2000 BCE on the basis of the Avestan and Mitanni evidence, and ii) are located to the east of the Sarasvati, deep within India, in that remote period, with no knowledge of the west.

2. There is no mention of 'yamuna' in maṇḍala VI.

Yamuna is not mentioned in book 6. So what? There is no reason why every book should mention every river of their area. Book 6 mentions Sarasvati and Ganga. And not only book 6, all the old books (2-4, 6-7) and even the middle book 5, mention the lakes, mountains, places and animals of the east (all of which are known to the new books as well), but not a single lake, mountain, place or animal of the west (which are all abundantly mentioned in the new books). And the old books mention the rivers in such an order as to show (moreover in the exact historical contexts) the movement from east to west in the old period. Therefore it is a complete picture. The kind of argument given by ManishH shows his utter inability to understand the data. Tomorrow will he argue that the composer of hymn 6.45 knows the Ganga, but not the Yamuna (which he does not mention) or any other Indian river, and that the composers of all the other hymns in book 6 know neither the Ganga nor the Yamuna because they mention neither of them?

------------ END OF SHRIKANT TALAGERI's MESSAGE---------------------

I'm not sure how many mistakes are there.

Well, this kind of statement does remind us of a certain tradition, No?

--------


If I may add my own thinking as to why Yamuna is not mentioned in Mandala VI, the oldest Mandala!

A paper first, first pointed out by ManishH ji in some other context.

Geology, G32840.1, January 23, 2012,
U-Pb zircon dating evidence for a Pleistocene Sarasvati River and capture of the Yamuna River [Full]
Authors: Peter D. Clift¹, Andrew Carter², Liviu Giosan³, Julie Durcan⁴, Geoff A.T. Duller⁴, Mark G. Macklin⁴, Anwar Alizai⁵, Ali R. Tabrez⁶, Mohammed Danish⁶, Sam Van Laningham⁷, and Dorian Q. Fuller⁸

¹ School of Geosciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, UK, and Key Laboratory of the Marginal Sea Geology,South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 164 Xingangxi Road, Guangzhou 510301, China
² Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Birkbeck College London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK
³ Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543, USA
⁴ Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB, UK
⁵ Geological Survey of Pakistan, Block 2, Gulistan e Jauhar, Karachi, Pakistan
⁶ National Institute for Oceanography, Clifton, Karachi 75600, Pakistan
⁷ School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-7220, USA
⁸ Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK

Abstract
The Harappan Culture, one of the oldest known urban civilizations, thrived on the northwest edge of the Thar Desert (India andPakistan) between 3200 and 1900 BCE. Its demise has been linked torapid weakening of the summer monsoon at this time, yet reorganization of rivers may also have played a role. We sampled subsurface channel sand bodies predating ca. 4.0 ka and used U-Pb dating of zircon sand grains to constrain their provenance through comparison with the established character of modern river sands. Samples from close to archaeological sites to the north of the desert show little affin-ity with the Ghaggar-Hakra, the presumed source of the channels. Instead, we see at least two groups of sediments, showing similarities both to the Beas River in the west and to the Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers in the east. The channels were active until after 4.5 ka and were covered by dunes before 1.4 ka, although loss of the Yamuna from the Indus likely occurred as early as 49 ka and no later than 10 ka. Capture of the Yamuna to the east and the Sutlej to the north rerouted water away from the area of the Harappan centers, but this change significantly predated their final collapse.
--------

Actually the authors mean Yamuna moving from Saraswati towards East! Interesting is that they say this change was between 47,000 BCE and 8,000 BCE!

That means that Mandala VI of the Rig Veda, the oldest Mandala, in which Yamuna is NOT mentioned must have been composed/heard between 47,000 BCE and 8,000 BCE!

I of course thank ManishH ji for pointing out this paper!