Three years after digging out human skeletons from the Harappan-era graveyard in Rakhigarhi village, archaeologists have concluded that there was no large-scale influx of foreigners or migration of locals, indicating those living in Haryana and the Ghaggar basin now are descendants of original inhabitants.
Prof Vasant Shinde, Vice Chancellor of Deccan College, Pune, said on Friday that the DNA analysis of 5,000-year-old skeletal remains belonging to the Indus Valley Civilisation revealed that there had been no migration from this region for the last 10,000 years.
I don't see how this would not destroy the AIT.
Swami Vivekananda said the same thing, IIRC, based on his extensive (foot) travels all over India - (to paraphrase) "Don't believe any such nonsense as Aryans in the north or Dravidians in the south. I can tell you that the people all over India share a common ancestry." This might be a pretty bad paraphrase, actually, got to look up his actual quote. But his anti-AIT views were pretty well known, and vehemently expressed.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 19 Jun 2018 08:50
by Jarita
What would destroy AIT conclusively would be the presence of so called steppe DNA in samples a lot older than this, indicating the Indic origins of such DNA. Correct me if I am wrong please. But this appears to be a tautology.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 22 Jun 2018 18:12
by A_Gupta
Reproducing for this one sentence:
Following his own family tree, Zimmer shows us that counterintuitive facts lie even in the humble pedigree. If you pursue your lineage far enough, the branching forks of a family tree begin to rejoin, such that if your ancestry is European back to the time of Charlemagne, you are related to Charlemagne himself!
BBC is soon coming out with "Legend of the Golden Man - Secret Warrior of the Steppes" or something very similar in name. They are getting in on the act, which means the pressure is beginning to tell. The reference is to Scythians. We need to keep an eye.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 23 Jun 2018 15:31
by Supratik
We should wait for the Rakhigarhi results to come out as it is not clear what exactly they looked for in the DNA. Are they looking at ANI/ASI or haplotypes? We have to account for earlier observations in the Indian genetic pool.
Jarita wrote:What would destroy AIT conclusively would be the presence of so called steppe DNA in samples a lot older than this, indicating the Indic origins of such DNA. Correct me if I am wrong please. But this appears to be a tautology.
If I may suggest, its time to shift strategy. We must act as if OIT has won and AIT is defeated. As long as we play on the AIT turf, the best we will do is keep poking holes. The AIT slimes will continue to peddle bullshit like they have done for 2 centuries. No amount of smoking gun evidence is going to make them budge.
1) We need to build up the OIT edifice. Its important to build on top of what people like Talageri have done. They have established the beachhead. We need to fit the rest of the pieces. Example: how did proto-Sanskrit move from India to Central Asia, Iran and onwards to the Steppes? How did animals migrate from India to the West? What archaeo-astronomy/paleo-botanical evidences of movement are there?
2) We need to build links across the East-West-Central axis inside India. The current North-South divide is imperialistic and artificial. We need to show how central India hunter gatherers exchanged ideas with Eastern India farmers. This is also a good defense against AIT. If we develop a full fledged pan-India model, we can kill any AIT argument with "But your model doesn't explain the tribal-villager connection between South-Central Indians and West-Coastal Indians
3) The AIT debunking must continue in parallel. But without a well developed homeland theory, there is nothing to replace it. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 23 Jun 2018 17:14
by chetak
Please circulate widely. For those in or near Bengaluru on July 1, do attend this if you are interested in the topic.
Courtesy: Prof Ashok Aklujkar's forward in bvparishat Google group.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 24 Jun 2018 00:27
by Prem
A_Gupta wrote:This is about sparrows, but seems to be the same kind of bogus extrapolation the linguists engage in: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/ ... -years-old
"This swamp sparrow’s song is more than 1500 years old".
JE Menon wrote:Can someone here date the Markandeya Purana?
Have not run into datable references from it, but then I have not actively searched for them.
Any specific context? reason?
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 30 Jun 2018 18:09
by JE Menon
Saw your response now... Thanks Nilesh. I'm getting a sense that it is going to be a new attack front. Nothing specific yet.
So far my own (admittedly limited) research is suggesting it to be anywhere between 300 CE and 700 CE. But this is just stuff on the net. And somehow that seems incorrect to me. I suspect it is definitely a BCE composition, although bits may have been added later.
Just wondered if any of the scholars here knew.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 30 Jun 2018 21:02
by Vayutuvan
chetak wrote:Please circulate widely. For those in or near Bengaluru on July 1, do attend this if you are interested in the topic.
Courtesy: Prof Ashok Aklujkar's forward in bvparishat Google group.
Her new book, right? I rifled through it quickly at the local library. Interesting that even a small town library like ours added it. Must be an academic who is on the board of our library.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 03 Jul 2018 06:24
by sudarshan
Out of curiosity (and you would all understand that this question can't just be googled to find the answer), would or should evidence of the Islamic incursions show up anywhere in the Indian gene pool? Or does one have to look among the Muslim population to find this evidence? I understand that the Islamic wave was numerically a (relatively) minor one as far as the Indian landmass goes, and also that the vast majority of Muslims in India today are natives who were forcibly converted.
Will edit out or delete this post if it is too nonsensical or sensitive.
You will find the contents of this article very exciting. And the article does provide background references (clickable links). Do download those papers and read them.
Just an anecdote: I was in conversation yesterday in the Middle East with a couple of Syrians/Lebanese.... The Syrian guy as part of the conversation mentioned that in fact the Indians "were the teachers of the Arabs". He said it without embarrassment or any sense of resentment or negativity, more a sense of statement of fact. It will be fascinating if we are able to access old Arab records into the interactions between the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, North Africa and India.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Jul 2018 11:45
by Arjun
Nilesh Oak wrote:Folks,
You will find the contents of this article very exciting. And the article does provide background references (clickable links). Do download those papers and read them.
Fantastic stuff! Traditional history of origin of Agriculture may be upended soon...
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Jul 2018 17:27
by A_Gupta
The 2006 paper by R. Premathilake, "The emergence of early agriculture in the Horton Plains, central Sri Lanka: linked to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic changes" seems to have been pretty much ignored, if one goes by the number of citations this paper has received.
A_Gupta wrote:The 2006 paper by R. Premathilake, "The emergence of early agriculture in the Horton Plains, central Sri Lanka: linked to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic changes" seems to have been pretty much ignored, if one goes by the number of citations this paper has received.
The culture(s) that developed in South India were very advanced.
The Ramayan tells us that Sri Lanka was prosperous during those times.
Sea levels began dropping intermittently starting ~20,000 years ago which opened connectivity.
The Bharatas may have integrated the myths that were prevalent during those times in the region into the Ramayan Itihasa to create what I call a common culture currency. A caste may have been able to 'purchase' acceptability by integrating its unique myth into the Itahasa to show that it understood the anthropology and could therefore adhere to rules of the greater society. This may have been instrumental when transitioning to mass agrarian culture b/c it relied heavily on joint settlements to buy and sell crops, sharing of technology and resources, and protection against elements within social environment and megafauna in natural environment.
There is evidence to show that the Syriac Christians did the same thing w/ the Saint Thomas myth. They Syriac Christians began deviating further from their semitic brethren when they began placing more of an emphasis on retelling the Saint Thomas story within the framework of local traditions that they were very much apart of to gain wider acceptability. The Portuguese penalized them heavily for this and changed it.
So in a sense, story telling ritual was the apparatus which served as the glue for society rather than the state and joint institutions which Christendom worked to perfect over the course of hundreds of years.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Jul 2018 21:36
by Arjun
A_Gupta wrote:The 2006 paper by R. Premathilake, "The emergence of early agriculture in the Horton Plains, central Sri Lanka: linked to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic changes" seems to have been pretty much ignored, if one goes by the number of citations this paper has received.
Are you suggesting the Sri Lanka paper will not stand scrutiny? Is it in a known journal?
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 05 Jul 2018 00:30
by A_Gupta
Arjun wrote:
A_Gupta wrote:The 2006 paper by R. Premathilake, "The emergence of early agriculture in the Horton Plains, central Sri Lanka: linked to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic changes" seems to have been pretty much ignored, if one goes by the number of citations this paper has received.
Israeli archaeologists have uncovered dramatic evidence of what they believe are the earliest known attempts at agriculture, 11,000 years before the generally recognised advent of organised cultivation.
The study examined more than 150,000 examples of plant remains recovered from an unusually well preserved hunter-gatherer settlement on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.
The site also revealed evidence of rudimentary breadmaking from starch granules found on scorched stones, and that the community may have been largely sedentary, with evidence of consumption of birds throughout the year, including migrating species.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 12 Jul 2018 15:54
by A_Gupta
If you look for an inheritance tree, you will find a tree; but a tree is only a model.
Multiregional theory of human origins in Africa: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... ns/564779/
Perhaps the same is true for the Indo-European languages.
This can be a tricky concept to grasp, because we’re so used to thinking about ancestry in terms of trees, whether it’s a family tree that unites members of a clan or an evolutionary tree that charts the relationships between species. Trees have single trunks that splay out into neatly dividing branches. They shift our thoughts toward single origins. Even if humans were widespread throughout Africa 300,000 years ago, surely we must have started somewhere.
Not so, according to the African-multiregionalism advocates. They’re arguing that Homo sapiens emerged from an ancestral hominid that was itself widespread through Africa, and had already separated into lots of isolated populations. We evolved within these groups, which occasionally mated with each other, and perhaps with other contemporaneous hominids like Homo naledi.
The best metaphor for this isn’t a tree. It’s a braided river—a group of streams that are all part of the same system, but that weave into and out of each other.
These streams eventually merge into the same big channel, but it takes time—hundreds of thousands of years. For most of our history, any one group of Homo sapiens had just some of the full constellation of features that we use to define ourselves. “People back then looked more different to each other than any populations do today," says Scerri, “and it’s very hard to answer what an early Homo sapiens looked like. But there was then a continent-wide trend to the modern human form.” Indeed, the first people who had the complete set probably appeared between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 15 Jul 2018 11:28
by JE Menon
Consider this, we have been only properly open 30 years or so, and you find stuff like this in the most unexpected of places:
Supposedly an ancient Indian warfare training school in Florence, Italy - although it looks to me like some sort of ancient eastern warfare exhibition event. Nevertheless, it means someone in Italy is studying and preparing for such an event.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 20 Jul 2018 23:55
by A_Gupta
The Late Holocene starts about 4,250 years ago, during a massive drought that struck Eurasia and destroyed several ancient societies. The team found clear evidence of that event in a cave in Meghalaya, a state in northeastern India, so the age is termed the Meghalayan.
Formal subdivision of the Holocene Series/Epoch: a Discussion Paper by a Working Group of INTIMATE (Integration of ice-core, marine and terrestrial records) and the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (International Commission on Stratigraphy)
the much-awaited DNA study of the skeletal remains found at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana, shows no Central Asian trace, indicating the Aryan invasion theory was flawed and Vedic evolution was through indigenous people.
According to Rai, the evidence points to a predominantly indigenous culture that voluntarily spread across other areas, not displaced or overrun by an Aryan invasion. “The condition of the human skeletons, the burial...all show absence of palaeo-pathology symptoms which could indicate ailments due to lack of medical care. The persons here were healthy; denture morphology showed teeth free of any infection; bones are healthy, as is the cranium,” Rai told ET.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 01:28
by Prem
For comparison purpose,
Hope DNA test can be done on those found buried in n Baghpat with chariot and swords.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 05:49
by Shwetank
I'm still not clear on the recent DNA results, wasn't the whole argument of the pro-AIT crowd that central asians arrived after Harappan settlements? So if their DNA had been found then it would disprove they arrived later and hence an AIT, but the reverse would be taken by them as further confirmation.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 06:10
by disha
There were no Harappans and no Aryans.
If you believe that there were, then you are on a wild goose chase of proving who came from what or where.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 06:35
by Pulikeshi
disha wrote:There were no Harappans and no Aryans.
If you believe that there were, then you are on a wild goose chase of proving who came from what or where.
The Hara-Appa peeps were Green skinned and only ate vegetables.
The infuriated non-veg eating chariot driving White skinned Aryans (racists that they were!) eliminated greens!!
Much later the chankiyan SDRE peeps of the deep state south contaminated the Aryans and created North Indians - ASI & ANI per Hara-ward.
AWI (Iran, etc) and AEI (Tibet, Burma, etc.) had no role to play in the chariot race or eating contest as they were not too bright!
</sarc always ON>
Shwetank wrote:I'm still not clear on the recent DNA results, wasn't the whole argument of the pro-AIT crowd that central asians arrived after Harappan settlements? So if their DNA had been found then it would disprove they arrived later and hence an AIT, but the reverse would be taken by them as further confirmation.
Bhai, lets wait for the paper shall we.... no one has provided the results here yet!
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 08:16
by Shwetank
disha wrote:There were no Harappans and no Aryans.
If you believe that there were, then you are on a wild goose chase of proving who came from what or where.
I didn't comment on who did or did not exist, I referred to the settlements with that term, maybe some people prefer Indus Valley or Saraswati but this is splitting hairs as I think most people know what its referring. I didnt' say what I believe in either. Not sure how just sarcasm which doesn't address the point of the post contributes anything to this thread.
Pulikeshi wrote:Bhai, lets wait for the paper shall we.... no one has provided the results here yet!
Sure, that is always eventually required but this is the main result related by the team, mentioned earlier as well after long waits for the data and speculation by various genetics and history enthusiast people. I'm just wondering about the basic logic not some statistical construct requiring analysis of their model assumptions or data scrutiny (for instance, whether they really did get a certain ancestral population or not). Assuming the result is correct, how does it lead to the strong anti-AIT conclusion against the traditional Max Mueller type theories? Obviously it doesn't prove AIT as some people may think I am saying (though AIT supporters will probably interpret it as strong support). At the moment, from what I can tell, it doesn't prove strongly in either direction for what happened around 1500 BC for supposed start of Vedic age (again I am not saying this is when it really started or there were was no continuity, just traditional AIT model) unless the DNA dates to around that period or after it. Just asking what I'm missing...
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 11:23
by Prem Kumar
Shwetank: what I see in your post is something that a lot of us Indians do.
1) We accept the first theory taught (AIT) without question, even though it was completely cooked up
2) We expect any competing theory (like OIT) to be like Caesar's wife (spotless)
Before we analyze the pros and cons of Rakhigarhi, Rai etc, we need to get over this mindset. Repeat to yourself "AIT is fake. There is no such thing as Aryans. Indian civilization is indigenous. Vedic/pre-Vedic civilization went out of India and spread language/culture throughout Europe"
Then look at the data!
Right now, you are still using AIT as a framework and looking at whether even the tiniest speck of Rakhigarhi findings might support it - God forbid! This means that you are still operating in the "AIT stage". As long as we operate in that stage, there shall be no room for any other theory. In the "AIT stage", facts that don't fit AIT will be discarded. Facts that fit will be added as ornaments to strengthen the fake theory. This has been going on for 200 years.
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 20:12
by A_Gupta
https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/s ... ans/300463
We Are All Harappans
02 AUGUST 2018 LAST UPDATED AT 5:30 AM
SUNIL MENON, SIDDHARTHA MISHRA
The Rakhigarhi project shines light on an old enigma: the Harappans were genetically ‘Ancestral South Indian’ stock. Which is to say, all of us in South Asia are their children.
Looking forward to the analysis!
Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2
Posted: 04 Aug 2018 21:47
by A_Gupta
And Witzel strikes again. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/s ... nge/300465
After Meluhha, The Melange
India was never isolated. It’s seen a number of migrations, including the Vedic ‘Aryans’—and the Veda was no continuation of Harappan religion.
