gandharva wrote:
How does this impact AIT? Isn't neolithic age 10K-2K BC is prior to Aryan invasion?
Interestingly worded question.
I do not believe that there was any invasion of Aryans carrying language to India around 1500 to 1000 BC, so I cannot accept that some event was "prior to Aryan invasion". There was no Aryan invasion
But yes the neolithic age is prior to the quoted dates of the hypothetical Aryan invasion, and that complicates the Aryan invasion theory by upsetting its timeline.
The Aryan Invasion Theory is not about just any migration. It is about how a language (belonging to what they call the Aryan language family - now renamed 'Indo-European language family) was brought to India from the west via the North West route. That theory has specific dates based on lingusitics. The Aryan language reached Syria around 1700-1800 BC from Eurasia (or Europe) where the language is claimed to have originated before which those Syrians were speaking semitic languages. Later - by 1500-1200 BC the language reached India with Aryans who came from the west. But the Aryans themselves already existed in Eurasia (or Europe) speaking a mother language in Europe/Eurasia before 3000 BC and that language is nowadays called PIE.
So if Aryan language speakers were already there in Eurasia by 3000 BC who were the people who are supposed to have come to India in the neolithic period? Does it mean that the language reached India by demic diffusion before 1500 BC as claimed by the Aryan Invasion Theory? If the language reached India earlier than 2000 BC (Neolithic) then the idea that the language reached Syria in 1800-1700 BC before going to India is falsified. That linguistic theory has to be discarded.
So one might ask "OK so what? maybe the language did reach India before 2000 BC and it did come from the West". This is a new form of Aryan Invasion theory that claims that the language came by demic diffusion along with Agriculture. The paper linked by Arun Gupta addresses this theory and says that this demic diffusion model of language spread is unlikely
The paper starts with the statement:
It is pertinent that paternal gene pool of India comprises mainly HGs of autochthonous origin of Late Pleistocene ancestry and received very little gene flow from outside
But the paper says that it is going to concentrate on Haplogroup J2-M172 (and its branches) to see where it fits in the scheme of things. The paper concludes that migrations into India have occurred as early as the late Pleistocene - i.e more than 10,000 years ago.
Absence or negligible presence of classical markers of Eurasian demic diffusion in India advocates against it to be the sole explanation
Another frequently forgotten aspect of the Aryan Invasion theory is that Aryans in the north set up the caste system to exclude the black tribals of the south. This paper finds no genetic support for that
Remarkable presence of J2a-M410 among tribal groups inhabited in remote geographical regions strongly dismisses the earlier belief of it to be caste-specific.
However the paper finds that the branches of the haplogroup J2-M172 that this paper concentrates upon
1. Occurred in 355 out of 3000 plus Indian samples (about 12%)
2. it is most likely to have come from the North West of India
3. It shows evidence of having started coming in more than 10 to 12000 years ago
These findings show very ancient migrations and the all go against the Aryan Invasion Theory as proposed by linguists - and as accepted today because there is ZERO evidence of language from Europe or Eurasia prior to 1000 BC or so. What people are unwilling to see is that the language in India has (in the form of ancient texts) has internal evidence that takes it back to as far as 8000 BC