Very well put. Having AASI this early in north of subcontinent means genetic is not going support OIT. OIT at this point so unsupported that it just reinforces opposite models. Unfortunately they are falling in to Steppe contact == Arya trap all over again.A_Gupta wrote:With this new preprint + the assumption that the Steppe ancestry is correlated with Indo-European languages, the story that Indo-European languages entered India post-IVC; that Vedas, Mahabharata etc., are at a maximum age of 3500 years before present, etc., is reiterated. Perhaps Rg Veda composition started in the Asian Inner Mountain Corridor, and the verses with geography references were added much later, etc. If Kaliyug began 3100 BC, that was somewhere in Central Asia.
There was no Out-of-India except for some Indus periphery folks, but these Indus periphery are outliers at BMAC, neither they nor what is supposed to be the original South Asian hunter-gatherer population didn't leave much of a trace outside of India.
"ANI and ASI were still largely unformed by 2000 BCE", and since most Indians are descended from ANI + ASI, it means the peopling of India really began after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. So this is either the triumphant hurrah or the last gasp of the invasionists, depending on which way you think this is going to play out.
PS: the "no significant incursion into India that left a genetic imprint in the last 14,000 years" goes obsolete.
AASI has been in India deep in time.
The "Iranian Agriculturalist" contributed to the Indus Periphery persons some 6500 years ago.
IVC people are taken to be a mixture of AASI and Iranian Agriculturalist from 6500 years ago.
The Indus Periphery persons have no Steppe ancestry, plus the Steppe has no AASI component it seems, so one cannot argue that "Steppe_MLBA" has some Indian-origin component.
Therefore the only OIT signal would be AASI, and there is no OIT signal in this model.
The argument that genes do not correlate with language is a truism; but can it work in this case? We'd have to postulate that there was a diffusion of Sanskrit or its precursors without movement of people from North India into Iran, BMAC and Steppes long before the Indus Valley Civilization (and from the Steppe people into Europe); and in particular that Sanskrit or precursors were one of the languages of the people of AASI origin. This could very well be true; but it is next to impossible to demonstrate. One might say this was just as hard to demonstrate before this preprint; but before this preprint one did not have to demonstrate language propagating outward while people were moving in the opposite direction.
If there is no aDNA from India that (a) has little AASI component and (b) can plausibly be ancestral to some component that is currently taken to be from outside India ("Iranian Agriculturalist", "Steppe EMBA or MLBA"), then IMO, the OIT story is over. Vedic Saraswati, archeo-astronomy dates etc., will have to find another explanation.
PS: tongue-in-cheek, some of what Talageri finds in the Rg Veda, e.g., names of various peoples that correspond to branches of IE-speaking people works if those parts of the Rg Veda are steppes-literature.
There is other possibility to explain earlier IA chronology in India. It is possible that IA spread from Iran and IVC peripherals and BMAC were already speaking IA languages. Steppe (R1a) could be in India after 1000bc, a second wave assimilated in to already expanding civilization. Mind you, earliest R1a they found in India is 400bc in Pakistan.
IMO, Something like this is best explanation http://new-indology.blogspot.com/2014/1 ... le-of.html