Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth: Part 2

[RoyG]

Good points, Anshuman. I'd forgotten that they'd talked about unpublished data. But I heard that Rakhigarhi paper was several months away, at least.

Its interesting to note that K. Thangaraj (who'd be involved in any Rakhigarhi paper) is also a co-author of the Vagheesh paper, though he is not a lead author. He said they didn't include Rakhigarhi data in the Vagheesh paper because good data wasn't available. Don't know what that means......

Why would he agree to findings if they aren't accurate considering hes seen the genetic data from his own data? could be he is trying to see where this steppe paper goes. there was also no counter response to josephs reponse.

[Murugan]

The traditionally priestly castes per Narasimhan et. al.
Pandit
Brahmin_Haryana
Brahmin_Nepal
Bhumihar_Bihar
Brahmin_Tiwari
Brahmin_UP
Bhumihar_UP
Havik
Brahmin_Karnataka...

Traditionally there are two types of priestly class in India:
1) Pancha Gauda (Saraswat, Gauda, Kanyakubja (UP, Bihar and East India), Maithili, Utkala) and
2) Pancha Dravida (Gujarati/Marwari/Mewara Brahmins (!!), Maharashtrian, Tamil/Malayali, Telugu and Kannada)

Yours truly is from Pancha Dravida group - Dravida Because of the clear geographical feature called vindhya range making Gauda and Dravida pradesha, repeat pradesha - a region only and not race.

It is known that Pancha Dravida terms for brahmins of south of vindhya was popularised by Kalhan, author of famous work Raj Tarangini in 12th Century CE.

Bhumihars are BrahmaKshatriya and not so called priestly class

Morontimer wheeler had a wild imagination of Aryan Invasion looking at 10-12 skeletons, his AIT theory was immediately taken up by people including my ancestors. This theory did not stand a chance but wheeled for 36 years. After the wheel stopped, Romila ben thapar took up the relay race and ran migration theory for another 36 years. Now too many cooks (spoil the broth) have come together to prove some sort of aryan migration with baseless and half studied material. Hope this theory now meets its 72 forever.

Ironically, many papers have been written, debates took place at every nook and corner on something that has no solid ground. To the contrary all the solid archaeological evidences are proving otherwise, the debate is going on which started with someone's wild baseless imagination.

[gandharva]

Looks like they don't have good data on Rakhigarhi samples. I don't know if this means that they are trying (or) they have tried and given up.

This is very unfortunate. The earlier set of Rakhigarhi DNA could not be analyzed due to contamination. There was hope by the researchers that the new set would yield results (because they had better protocols to prevent contamination and better labs to analyze the results). But things don't seem to have improved much

Rudradev: I understand that Mala is an existing Indian group and is not "ancestral'. But wouldn't DNA analysis help determine if there are present day Mala who carry ancient genes which could be predecessors to the Steppe/Iran markers that they also carry? IOW, is aDNA the only way?

The Dainik jagran article and earlier article by Dubey/Thangraj in Hindu as response to Joseph clearly said that they(Rai etc) have data,
The book by Reich,this paper with a specifically chosen person as lead author with Force fit data to suit specifically chosen conclusions gives a clear indication that they have tried their best to sabotage/Discredit Rakhi garhi results..
If you can get dNA from.swat,Iran you can get from Rakhi garhi too..

On Video as well.

https://twitter.com/Hiranyareta/status/ ... 1357901830

https://twitter.com/Hiranyareta/status/ ... 3254051840

[shiv]

Morontimer wheeler had a wild imagination of Aryan Invasion looking at 10-12 skeletons,.

[RoyG]

The Caspian region and trek to Altai Mountain region and perhaps even areas of the Inner Asian Mountain corridor are rich in Uralic language family which borrowed extensively from Indo-European. Surely, mingling with these people prior to the steppe exodus would've added at least a few words to the PIE lexicon which would've showed up in Sanskrit despite Uralic not being part of the Indo-European language family. However, we don't find even one. I find Talageri's observations logical unless I'm missing something.

[shiv]

PIE of 3000 BC lexicon was made up from daughter languages found in 20th century. If a language was included in making the lexicon, a a word will appear because PIE is a "circular construct" wherein daughter language words are used to create PIE after which PIE is said to be mother of the daughters who contributed to PIE.

May I point of that PIE is a huge con job foisted on us? Date wise and location wise.

I wonder if someone can take Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali and "reconstruct Sanskrit from that"?

May I point out something else? When I want to look at the history of my language - I start by looking at my ancient texts and the words included in them. I don't look at Russian or Latin. But why do Europeans look at Sanskrit. Because they had no clue how European languages were related until the "found" Sanskrit. Having found Sanskrit they could not discard it because they knew there was some link. So they called it proto Aryan, and later "PIE.

I have no reason to call it PIE. The history of my language might well lie in my own land. All my books and narratives tell me that is right and I wonder why I should suddenly start looking at my own language through European eyes and start talking about "PIE" a language that has been constructed only to link Sanskrit with Europe and yet keep its origin somewhere outside India. Why should I reject all that my narratives tell me and start hunting with fake PIE as a starting point.

If one must consider "all possible origins" of langauge, one must consider India as one possible point of origin. Why are Indians the first to reject that and jump and grab PIE?

[shiv]

I have made a "mala" aka thread of about 7-8 Tweets about PIE and IE. If you have the time and inclination please read
https://twitter.com/bennedose/status/984077230698414080

[gandharva]

"THE FARMING–LANGUAGE CO-DISPERSAL HYPOTHESIS from https://www.amazon.com/Human-Evolutiona ... 0815341482
Some language families have spread widely and rapidly

The approximately 6900 languages spoken throughout the world today can be grouped into more than 100 families, each on the basis of a hypothetical shared common ancestral language. The ancestral relationships between language families themselves are highly contentious, and probably impossible to reconstruct. A few families contain disproportionately large numbers of languages; for example, two (Austronesian and Niger–Congo) together encompass about 40% of all individual languages. The geographic distribution of such families is highly skewed: while some inhabit areas which contain a high diversity of unrelated languages with limited distributions, others occupy large continental regions in which few, if any, other languages are present (spread zones; Figure 12.7). Examples of spread-zone language families are Indo-European (including English, Greek, Iranian, Hindi, and most European languages) and Sino-Tibetan, including Chinese.

A single origin of languages within a family that is distributed over a wide area suggests a language range expansion, and (because few linguists believe that any language family can be more than 10 KY old) a recent one. To identify the likely geographic origin two characteristics have been used: the region of greatest linguistic diversity; and the region in which the deepest-rooting languages are spoken, based on reconstruction of their ancestral relationships from a study of shared specific innovations, analogous to the reconstruction of a phylogenetic tree."



Paleolithic and neolithic lineages in the European mitochondrial gene pool.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1915109/

An observation on the abv paper in this book. Chapter 12, pp372 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Evolutiona ... 0815341482

"The likely homelands of many of the largest language families appear to be situated in and around the centers of agricultural innovation described above. This led to the hypothesis that many of these families moved together with the expansion of agriculture in different areas of the world. Colin Renfrew60 suggested that the distribution of Indo-European was best explained by the dispersal to Europe of the first farmers from 10 KYA, spreading out of Anatolia and speaking their Proto-Indo-European language. This interpretation caused much argument among linguists, because it contradicted the standard view that the first Indo-Europeans were nomadic pastoral horse riders who spread westward from the Steppes north of the Black Sea around 5 KYA."


Early Agriculturalist Population Diasporas? Farming, Languages, and Genes
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/1 ... o.30.1.181

Observation on the abv paper in this book. Chapter 12, pp373 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Evolutiona ... 0815341482

"Peter Bellwood independently suggested a farming–language co-dispersal model for the spread of the Austronesian family (including Polynesian languages) in the Pacific.8 Other spread-zone languages may have been dispersed in the same way, including the Bantu languages, together with the spread of farming out of West Africa"

[gandharva]

[gandharva]

All of the abv images discussing language-gene relationship from the book https://www.amazon.com/Human-Evolutiona ... 0815341482 .

[shiv]

These are all language-gene hypotheses that need to be recognized as such. When you dig into proto languages you find that they all go a long way in basic anatomy and human relationships. Hand, foot, mother brother etc. But if languages spread with agriculture we need to see common words for rice, wheat, millets, maize and other agricultural produce. Rice apparently comes from "arisi" (Tamil). Funny innit? I can see no commonality in words for wheat, milk etc

All these studies seem to be mainly concerned with Europe. Naturally. They're their languages. India is a side issue - needed only for its Sanskrit link. No one outside India is really bothered. Marija Gimbutas is mainly concerned with Europe and is David Anthony. They will accept "nearby" places. Sanskrit is the anomaly. Kabab mein haddi.

Currently there is no evidence that a Proto-Sanskrit that was in India "A Prakrit" did not go on to become PIE. No evidence for or against. Cannot be ruled in. But cannot be ruled out

[gandharva]

^^^ Shiv Sir, That was FYI purposes only. A pretty recent book on Human Genetics taking linguistics and gene combo mainstream.

[A_Gupta]

^^^ Basic anatomy, human relationships are supposedly very basic and one will have words in the native language; while technology like "agriculture" or "cellular phones" will give rise to loan words. On the other hand, maybe Indians will morph into all saying "Daddy" instead of "Pitaji/Papa/...." and thus a supposedly basic relationship word will actually be a loan word.

PS: horse riding/breeding related stuff ought to be taken to be a technology giving rise to loan words in the various languages.

[gandharva]

[shiv]

^^^ Basic anatomy, human relationships are supposedly very basic and one will have words in the native language; while technology like "agriculture" or "cellular phones" will give rise to loan words. On the other hand, maybe Indians will morph into all saying "Daddy" instead of "Pitaji/Papa/...." and thus a supposedly basic relationship word will actually be a loan word.

PS: horse riding/breeding related stuff ought to be taken to be a technology giving rise to loan words in the various languages.

A few years ago - following BRF discussions I dug deep into PIE and reconstructions and suchlike. Can't go back - but recently I pulled out an old Excel file I had created of PIE cognates and selected words for body parts and human relationships and looked for the languages that had the greatest percentage of cognates with every other IE language. Sanskrit came up first, Latin second and Greek third. This only indicates the main languages from which PIE was reconstructed. This is counter intuitive because linguists themselves say that Greek is only 40% (or something) IE, while we know that languages like Lithuanian, Slovenian and Russian have a lot of cognates with Sanskrit. In that spreadsheet - the latter three languages score very low in commonality with PIE.

However I am reluctant to post this stuff unexplained and unedited in public because statistics can be used for every type of bullshitting.

[Nilesh Oak]

A few years ago - following BRF discussions I dug deep into PIE and reconstructions and suchlike. Can't go back - but recently I pulled out an old Excel file I had created of PIE cognates and selected words for body parts and human relationships and looked for the languages that had the greatest percentage of cognates with every other IE language. Sanskrit came up first, Latin second and Greek third. This only indicates the main languages from which PIE was reconstructed. This is counter intuitive because linguists themselves say that Greek is only 40% (or something) IE, while we know that languages like Lithuanian, Slovenian and Russian have a lot of cognates with Sanskrit. In that spreadsheet - the latter three languages score very low in commonality with PIE.

However I am reluctant to post this stuff unexplained and unedited in public because statistics can be used for every type of bullshitting.

Continue adding to it. its day will come, sooner than anticipated.

[Murugan]

I wonder if someone can take Hindi, Gujarati and Bengali and "reconstruct Sanskrit from that"?

Like many daughters together re-producing a mamma ?

*****
An encyclopedic work on India is needed. India's Asmita - the all out awareness of India/Indians' quest in mundane (science, languages, wars, literature, grammar, mathematics etc) and spirituality/philosophy systematically laid out in one work. This should be the base for anyone to start studying India/Indology. This is Bhagirath karya but if Bhagirath could do it, we can also do it.

This should also include history of aryan and linguistic theories propounded to confuse/belittle Indians in last few decades. This can be in flow chart form.

[Murugan]

Nilesh-ji do you have access to the verse where Duryodhan is calling Lord Krishna an Anarya ? Also Sita calling herself Anarya when she was shown effigy of Lord Rama by Ravana ?

[Anshuman.Kumar]

https://m.timesofindia.com/city/lucknow ... 431875.cms


I believe this talk of working on ancient DNA of 20 skeletons is very important starting from September 10 last year.

Seems they were not happy with what they got from Cambridge and elsewhere..So endeavored to do it on their own.

So Obviously it will take time.

[A_Gupta]

Old
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2013/0 ... aphor.html

But the idea of PIE itself still remains mostly a metaphoric prop. It is more a way to try to make sense of something that so far remains firmly in the 'unknowable' column (although it sees plenty of action in the 'theorizable' column) than an actual unified language that was actually spoken by actual people at some actual point in time.

As a language variationist by training, meaning as someone who conceptualizes variation and change as constant and defining features of living languages, I sometimes find it hard to justify (to myself, even) some of the compromises I have to make in order to teach concepts that can otherwise be difficult for students (and for me) to get their heads around. I do try to be up front about it, though, and explain to the students that I am asking them to join me in suspending our disbelief, that I think it's important for us to be conscious that we are in fact having to suspend disbelief and also for us to talk about why we have to, and that I haven't yet been able to figure out a way for us not to have to. When we talk about PIE, we are going for convenience, for the short version, using a word (PIE) or a phrase (Proto-Indo-European) that refers not to a single, discrete language (if there even is such a thing) but to a multitude of meanings -- overlapping, complementary, contradictory -- to save us the time and trouble of stopping and pondering what all is contained within that word or phrase because if we did stop to ponder it, there's a good chance that we would never have time for anything else.

So PIE is a relief, a tool, a technological development that saves us the trouble of risking a time-consuming mind-blow every time we need to refer to what were probably a lot of different ways of speaking that varied across space, probably to the tune of thousands of miles, and over time, possibly even thousands of years, but that still are somehow, at least metaphorically, one. And not just any one, but for us the one: Proto-Indo-European, the one that gave rise to so many other ones: Greek, Bengali, Portuguese, Czech, Kurdish, Icelandic, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Armenian, Yiddish, Latin, Afrikaans, Welsh, Catalan, Pashto, French, and English, to name a few. Some of them are still living and some are lost to the past, but even many of those lost languages have traces remaining somewhere in the approximately 440 Indo-European languages spoken in the 21st century by literally half the population of the planet Earth.

I think about this metaphor and ask the students to think about it (and about others we use in class) as a kind of "rounding off," roughly analogous to the way that we can do quick mathematical calculations of large numbers by rounding them off, trading off precision for speed and getting somewhere that probably isn't anywhere near close enough but we pretend it is because we have no choice. One metaphor explains another.

But there had to have been variation during the millenia that PIE is hypothesized to have been extant because there is always variation. Even in a classroom with 30 people in it, of whom 25 have lived their whole lives so far within a few hundred miles of one another, there is always significant variation. The students usually don't notice that much of it at first; like all speakers of all languages, they have spent their whole lives becoming proficient at instantaneously distinguishing between differences they need to pay attention to and the ones they can ignore. But in only a few short months, most of them become very, very good at noticing and describing even relatively slight differences among speakers.

On the other hand, the variation within what we conceptualize as 'PIE' was probably over time and across locations so great as to have meant mutual unintelligibility among its (possibly imaginary) speakers. So in essence, in teaching the Indo-European hypothesis, I am asking the students to imagine and accept as a kind of reality an idealized version of a language that nobody ever really spoke, to make a deal with me to treat the abstract as absolute, even though we know it isn't. Not even close. And yet.

[Murugan]

Coming up next:

Proto-Indo-European Relgion
Proto-Indo-European Society
and
Pre-Indo-Europeans

[A_Gupta]

FYI:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/08/278374
Ancient Genomics Reveals Four Prehistoric Migration Waves into Southeast Asia

[A_Gupta]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/17/164640
2017 paper
Dissecting Population Substructure in India via Correlation Optimization of Genetics and Geodemographics
Abstract

India represents an intricate tapestry of population substructure shaped by geography, language, culture and social stratification operating in concert. To date, no study has attempted to model and evaluate how these evolutionary forces have interacted to shape the patterns of genetic diversity within India. Geography has been shown to closely correlate with genetic structure in other parts of the world. However, the strict endogamy imposed by the Indian caste system, and the large number of spoken languages add further levels of complexity. We merged all publicly available data from the Indian subcontinent into a data set of 835 individuals across 48,373 SNPs from 84 well-defined groups. Bringing together geography, sociolinguistics and genetics, we developed COGG (Correlation Optimization of Genetics and Geodemographics) in order to build a model that optimally explains the observed population genetic sub-structure. We find that shared language rather than geography or social structure has been the most powerful force in creating paths of gene flow within India. Further investigating the origins of Indian substructure, we create population genetic networks across Eurasia. We observe two major corridors towards mainland India; one through the Northwestern and another through the Northeastern frontier with the Uygur population acting as a bridge across the two routes. Importantly, network, ADMIXTURE analysis and f3 statistics support a far northern path connecting Europe to Siberia and gene flow from Siberia and Mongolia towards Central Asia and India.

[A_Gupta]

Also from 2017
The genetic legacy of Zoroastrianism in Iran and India: Insights into population structure, gene flow and selection.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/05/128272

Abstract

Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest extant religions in the world, originating in Persia (present-day Iran) during the second millennium BCE. Historical records indicate that migrants from Persia brought Zoroastrianism to India, but there is debate over the timing of these migrations. Here we present novel genome-wide autosomal, Y-chromosome and mitochondrial data from Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians and neighbouring modern-day Indian and Iranian populations to conduct the first genome-wide genetic analysis in these groups. Using powerful haplotype-based techniques, we show that Zoroastrians in Iran and India show increased genetic homogeneity relative to other sampled groups in their respective countries, consistent with their current practices of endogamy. Despite this, we show that Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) intermixed with local groups sometime after their arrival in India, dating this mixture to 690-1390 CE and providing strong evidence that the migrating group was largely comprised of Zoroastrian males. By exploiting the rich information in DNA from ancient human remains, we also highlight admixture in the ancestors of Iranian Zoroastrians dated to 570 BCE-746 CE, older than admixture seen in any other sampled Iranian group, consistent with a long-standing isolation of Zoroastrians from outside groups. Finally, we report genomic regions showing signatures of positive selection in present-day Zoroastrians that might correlate to the prevalence of particular diseases amongst these communities.

[shiv]

^^My comment on that link

The period 690 to 1300 CE is within the historic period. Migrations from Iran to India are well documented. Recall that Emperor Darius was a Zoroastrian and his Behistun inscription dates to 500 BC - so the migrations documented in this study have nothing to do with original migrations in the 1000 BC period and earlier. Zoroastrianism was already at its peak in 500 BC

[A_Gupta]

Worldwide Patterns of Ancestry, Divergence, and Admixture in Domesticated Cattle

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a ... en.1004254

Bos taurus taurus was domesticated in the Middle East while Bos taurus indicus was domesticated in India.

It is likely is that a hypothetical Punjab_N population from even before agriculture would have been related to the Iran_N people, somewhere along a cline between Iran_N in Iran (whose aDNA has been found) and peoples in India's interior.

If Iran_N(eolithic) ingressed into India with a demic diffusion of agriculture, they didn't bring their cattle along.

[sivab]

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ind ... 776710.cms

900-year drought wiped out Indus civilisation: IIT-Kharagpur

KHARAGPUR: The Indus Valley civilisation was wiped out 4,350 years ago by a 900-year-long drought, scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT-Kgp) have found. Evidence gathered during their study also put to rest the widely accepted theory that the said drought lasted for only about 200 years.

The study will be published in the prestigious Quaternary International Journal by Elsevier this month.

Researchers from the geology and geophysics department have been studying the monsoon’s variability for the past 5,000 years and have found that the rains played truant in the northwest Himalayas for 900 long years, drying up the source of water that fed the rivers along which the civilisation thrived. This eventually drove the otherwise hardy inhabitants towards the east and south, where rain conditions were better.

The IIT-Kgp team mapped a 5,000-year monsoon variability in the Tso Moriri Lake in Leh-Ladakh — which too was fed by the same glacial source — and identified periods that had continuous spells of good monsoon as well as phases when it was weak or nil.
“The study revealed that from 2,350 BC (4,350 years ago) till 1,450 BC, the monsoon had a major weakening effect over the zone where the civilisation flourished. A drought-like situation developed, forcing residents to abandon their settlements in search of greener pastures,” said Anil Kumar Gupta, the lead researcher and a senior faculty of geology at the institute.

These displaced people gradually migrated towards the Ganga-Yamuna valley towards eastern and central UP; Bihar and Bengal in the east; MP, south of Vindhyachal and south Gujarat in the south, Gupta added.

[shiv]

Worldwide Patterns of Ancestry, Divergence, and Admixture in Domesticated Cattle

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a ... en.1004254

Bos taurus taurus was domesticated in the Middle East while Bos taurus indicus was domesticated in India.

It is likely is that a hypothetical Punjab_N population from even before agriculture would have been related to the Iran_N people, somewhere along a cline between Iran_N in Iran (whose aDNA has been found) and peoples in India's interior.

If Iran_N(eolithic) ingressed into India with a demic diffusion of agriculture, they didn't bring their cattle along.

2000 BC dates for bos indicus going out of India correlates well with Mitanni text dates

[shiv]

Jusht for debate

[peter]

Worldwide Patterns of Ancestry, Divergence, and Admixture in Domesticated Cattle

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a ... en.1004254

Bos taurus taurus was domesticated in the Middle East while Bos taurus indicus was domesticated in India.

It is likely is that a hypothetical Punjab_N population from even before agriculture would have been related to the Iran_N people, somewhere along a cline between Iran_N in Iran (whose aDNA has been found) and peoples in India's interior.

If Iran_N(eolithic) ingressed into India with a demic diffusion of agriculture, they didn't bring their cattle along.

Would you be aware of milk digesting gene? Apparently this gene's date of origin can be calculated and two places were the contenders: India and northern europe.

I stopped following that debate many years back. But am wondering if anything new has happened on that front?

If India is the origin of this gene then europeans are our bacchas and so are their languages.

[A_Gupta]

It will be supremely fitting if Gau Maata saves our history!

[A_Gupta]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... ccess=true
The complete mitochondrial genome of Indian cattle (Bos indicus)
Abstract:
India has 40 distinct zebuine cattle breeds with different adaptability and production traits. In the present study, we report the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of Indian cattle for the first time. The mitogenome contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, two ribosomal RNA genes and a control region (D-loop region). The phylogenetic analysis showed close genetic relationship among the Indian cattle breeds studied, where as, distinct genetic differences were observed between Bos indicus and Bos taurus cattle. Our results will expand genomic information for further studies on evolution, domestication and conservation of indigenous cattle breeds in India.

Mitochondrial DNA sequence of studied breeds was compared with published mitochondrial genomes of Bos indicus and Bos taurus cattle breeds from NCBI database. Maximum likelihood based phylogenetic analysis performed with consensus sequence of each breed (Tamura and Nei 1993 Tamura K, Nei M. 1993. Estimation of the number of nucleotide substitutions in the control region of mitochondrial DNA in humans and chimpanzees. Mol Biol Evol. 10:512–526.[PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). In the phylogenetic tree, Bos indicus and Bos taurus cattle were present in two separate main clades (Figure 1). The analysis divided Bos indicus clade into subclades containing North Indian and South Indian cattle breeds. The South Indian breed, Ongole, was found to be close to North Indian breeds. Interestingly, the reference, European dwarf zebu cattle (Zwergzebu) was placed in the South Indian group.

[A_Gupta]

(PDF)
http://www.arccjournals.com/uploads/articles/1B3239.pdf
Y-chromosome variation in Indian native cattle breeds and crossbred population

[peter]

It will be supremely fitting if Gau Maata saves our history!

Indeed. Though the milk digesting gene is in humans. Sorry if that was clear. This topic is a bit arcane for me.

[A_Gupta]

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/129a/4 ... 336abb.pdf
Estimation of Genetic Divergence of Indian Zebu Cattle in Association with Molecular Genetic Approach and its Implication in Livestock Improvement: A Review
Sanjoy Datta1*, Nirmal Kumar Tudu2, Chittapriya Ghosh3 and Shyam Sundar Kesh

However, the magnitude of estimates of the divergence between Bos indicus and Bos taurus are consistently of the order of hundreds of thousands of years BP and constitute a strong argument for the domestication, less than 10,000 years BP, of two biologically separate strains of aurochsen. These data are simply not consistent with a view that all cattle developed from a single wild ancestral strain domesticated in the Near East (circa 9,000 BP), with an Eastern derivative strain later giving rise to zebu through breeding and selection. The biological distinction of the modern zebu strongly supports a separate domestic origin.

But watch out, they cite a paper from 1998. The allergy to Indian origin of anything in the literature should be taken into account.

Remains of the Asian variant of the wild ox, Bos primigenius namadicus, which are represented in early agricultural sites in Shar-i-Sokhta, Sistan, provide a putative progenitor for Bos indicus.

Genetics and domestic cattle origins*
Daniel G. Bradley
Ronan T. Loftus
Patrick Cunningham
David E. MacHugh
First published: 7 December 1998
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:3<79::AID-EVAN2>3.0.CO;2-R

[A_Gupta]

It will be supremely fitting if Gau Maata saves our history!

Indeed. Though the milk digesting gene is in humans. Sorry if that was clear. This topic is a bit arcane for me.

Wasn't replying to that in particular; but will find out what is known about the origin of adult lactose tolerance.

[A_Gupta]

The 85 MB description of Shahr-i-Sokhta submitted to the UN for declaration of it as a World Heritage Site:
http://whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1456.pdf

The link is available via here: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1456/documents/

The archaeological site of Shahr-i Sokhta (the ‘Burnt City’) is located in southeast Iran in Sistan-o Baluchistan Province. It was founded around 3200 BCE and was populated during four main periods stretching from 3200 to 1800 BCE.

The Eastern Residential Area (ERA) occupies the eastern part of the mound. It is in the shape of a long, narrow ribbon adjoining the pit no. 1 to the west. It was being used as a settlement area from the first days of settlement in Sistan Plain, that is, the first settlement period of Shahr-i Sokhta around 3200 B.C., to the latest settlement period, that is, the fourth settlement period around 1800 B.C.

I don't see any statement of pre-urban phase settlement from before 3200 BC. Not saying it doesn't exist, but it doesn't seem to be mentioned. Unlike sites in India, this is in the desert and won't have the "excavations hit the water table and couldn't proceed deeper".

IMO, folks here should study this as an outlier of the Saraswati-Sindhu civilization. Also, it may provide further evidence of climate change in that era.

---
Mehrgarh had cattle 7000 years before present, and Shahr-i-Sokhta dates to 5200 years before present, and yet Zebu originated in Shahr-i-Sokhta????

[A_Gupta]

The UNESCO description of Mehrgarh:
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/1876/

[A_Gupta]

We need to chase down references to their origin. B**tards.
E.g., I start with
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17127-1

Towards the beginning of the Holocene, B. taurus and B. indicus were independently domesticated in the Fertile Crescent (~10,500 yBP) and in the Indus Valley (~8,500 yBP), respectively

One of the citations is
Bruford, M. W., Bradley, D. G. & Luikart, G. DNA markers reveal the complexity of livestock domestication. Nat Rev Genet. 4, 900–910 (2003).

I go to that.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mi ... cation.pdf

Molecular markers were used to investigate the intriguing origins of these cattle. Taurine cattle from Europe and Africa and zebu cattle from India and Africa were compared at the molecular level. Surprisingly, Indian zebu cattle were found to have profoundly different whole mtDNA RESTRICTION FRAGMENT LENGTH POLYMORPHISM (RFLP) profiles39 and control-region sequences, when compared with both European and African taurine cattle and African zebu cattle — which all shared similar sequences. The level of sequence divergence between the two mtDNA lineages was consistent with a most recent common ancestor dating to hundreds of thousands of years BP. However, cattle domestication was known to have occurred much later than this, within the last 10,000 years [40]. So, the most probable explanation for this high level of molecular divergence
was that genetically differentiated subspecies of the ancestral wild cattle Bos primigenius (also known as aurochs) had been domesticated in different regions of Eurasia.

I chased down reference [40] above (I've removed other references in the quote above).

Perkins, D., Jr. Fauna of Çatal Hüyük: evidence for early cattle domestication in Anatolia. Science 164, 177–178 (1969).
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/164/3876/177

Abstract

Analysis of the remains of cattle from Çatal Hüyük indicates that cattle were domesticated in Anatolia by 5800 B.C., and strongly suggests that they were probably domestic at least 500 years earlier. This is the earliest known evidence for the domestication of cattle in the Near East.

So if cattle were domestic around 6300 BC in Anatolia; i.e., 8300 ybp - notice how that became ~10,500 ybp in the first citation.

Earliest Mehrgarh dates to is ~6500 BC. When are domesticated cattle found there?

For Mehrgarh, need to find this report:
R. Meadow, Notes on Faunal Remains from Mehrgarh, with a Focus on Cattle (Bos). In South Asian Archaeology

Haven't found it yet, but found this in the meantime:
Zebu Cattle Are an Exclusive Legacy of the South Asia Neolithic
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e189/9 ... 1a323e.pdf

[A_Gupta]

Details on Mehrgarh
Paper presented in the International Seminar on the "First Farmers in Global Perspective', Lucknow, India, 18-20 January, 2006
Mehrgarh Neolithic
Jean-Francois Jarrige
http://archaeology.up.nic.in/doc/mn_jfj.pdf

Osteological studies as well as clay figurines indicate that zebu cattle (Bos indicus) is well attested in Period I and became most
probably the dominant form (Fig. 12). Mehrgarh provides us therefore with a clear evidence of an indigenous domestication of the South Asian zebu.
We know today that Bos indicus and Bos Taurus, the non-humped bull from the Middle-East, have a different genetic origin. Therefore the assumption that farming economy was introduced full-fledged from Near-East to South Asia needs to be questioned.

Note that Period I is the "aceramic period". Period IIB is has a radio carbon date to 6000 BC, period I start has various dates

In some of our previous publications we have already pointed out that several radiocarbon dates were not in accordance with the stratigraphy of the site.22 But we have also indicated that, for Period I, a series of dates are as early as 7928+/173 BP, 9385+/120 BP, 7115+/290 BP, 8440+/250 BP. Such dates when calibrated are therefore for some of them well before 7000 BC or for some others around 7000 BC.

IMO, we need to master this material, we need to chase every citation back to its original; someone like Dr Shiv perhaps can write a paper, using the original citations. The only reason not to use an original citation is when recent evidence overrules it -- which is not the case in the references I chased down. IMO, it can put paid to much of the speculation in the Vagheesh Narasimhan et. al. pre-print.

PS: that speculation is probably because they rely on David W. Anthony. Not disputing the genetic findings as such, but the spin that is given to them.