Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[member_22872]

Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent.

The paper has not been published yet. If ANI-ASI admixture took place 1200-3500 years ago, AIT/AMT cannot be ruled out.
We need more studies on the date of mixture.

I am interested to know how the jump is being made regarding ANI-ASI admixture to the coming of aryans? just because they put forth AIT, this admixture is being construed as 'Dravidians'(should we be calling them present south Indians) being uprooted because of AI/AM. How is this link being made? the admixture is to be expected with a continuous land mass of Indian subcontinent, I would be surprised if there is no admixture.

[Supratik]

I am interested to know how the jump is being made regarding ANI-ASI admixture to the coming of aryans? just because they put forth AIT, this admixture is being construed as 'Dravidians'(should we be calling them present south Indians) being uprooted because of AI/AM. How is this link being made? the admixture is to be expected with a continuous land mass of Indian subcontinent, I would be surprised if there is no admixture.

The mixing of ANI-ASI would give you the least possible date of arrival of ANI from the perspective of AIT/AMT theory.
1200-3500 YBP falls in the zone where the migration is supposed to occur according to AIT/AMT proponents. Dravidian is a language family not a genetic group.

[Virendra]

Atleast till now, all the gurus who have contributed should bring out a book or paper and circulate it around. We have discussed so much, it will be good if some stuff comes out as pdf book form. Few read printed books. We should produce web based books which even a 5 year old can understand, mass following can kill AIT. Even a Youtube documentary with gripping narrative would be great.

I second the motion. All the gurus here can pitch in. At least the points where they more or less agree, can be assimilated. It would be a great outcome.

[member_22872]

The mixing of ANI-ASI would give you the least possible date of arrival of ANI from the perspective of AIT/AMT theory.
1200-3500 YBP falls in the zone where the migration is supposed to occur according to AIT/AMT proponents. Dravidian is a language family not a genetic group.

Sure, one can have all sorts of perspectives, but a perspective doesnt make it a truth. There is mixing, which is expected which also means all this segregation of [sic] castes is a modern construct and there was no such thing in the past, that's good. That's all it means. IVC/SSC people knew trade, they spoke sanskrit, they followed the same vedic devatas as the south, hence it is but natural for admixing to happen. But no idea how this means Aryan invasion? when there are no European marker genes in Indian gene pool, any such conclusion as above can't be made.

[fanne]

My 3 cents on Genology. It is based on set of assumptions and facts, the three most prominent assumptions (from AIT POV) are being mentioned
1.Y chromosome in men and Mitochondrial DNA in women are pass intact from Father to Son and Mother to daughter respectively. However, overtime it mutates. So if same gene sequence is found in two groups, except that the second group has a mutation (that the first one does not have) - It is to be inferred that second group came from first. (Alternative logic can be formed to negate this assumption, but it is sound in logic)
2. Seldom two groups will be such that you can find everyone with a mutation or no one with a mutation. Then you look for diversity (standard deviation from stat). If a group of human was to be sent to Mars, and then after 1000 years, someone did a study, one would find more variation on Earth then Mars. It could be inferred that group with more variation (for same kind of mutations) is the earlier (or mother civilization). Again you could construct scenario where this logic may not hold but again, very logical argument. The sample size of Indian population has been limited; even then the variation is highest. However, if more representative sample is taken, we will end up skewing the data more in favor of Indian Gene pool being more diverse and hence the mother group (and hence OIT)
3.THE THIRD IMPORTANT ASSUMPTION (AND UNSOUND IN LOGIC, I believe only accepted because it makes the mathematical modeling easy) is that all the mutations happened at a constant rate. Not only that they fixed few mutations to some historical event (like last ICE Age, whose dating is itself controversial), but from that assigned arbitrary age of mutations. - This assumption is easy to rubbish and this is where the dates that North and South Admixture happened x000 years ago etc. should be challenged.
rgds,
fanne

[shiv]

Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent.

The paper has not been published yet. If ANI-ASI admixture took place 1200-3500 years ago, AIT/AMT cannot be ruled out.
We need more studies on the date of mixture.

No sir it means nothing of the sort. It can mean that only if
1. It is true that there are separate North Indian and South Indian genes
2. The North Indian genes came from outside India
3. The admixture too place less than 2000 years ago (after the end of the Indus-Saraswati civilization)

Since I have taken the trouble of reading all such papers linked here for the last 4 months I would be grateful if you could point me to the papers that identify "North Indian genes".

If you followed the reasoning, R1a1 was thought to be the marker for Ancestral North Indian.
That has collapsed completely. R1A1 M17 occurs in India and East Europe, but not Western Europe. It occurs with the greatest frequency and diversity in India, and among highest and lowest castes. An associated marker called M548 occurs in Europe but not in India. Indians genes could have gone to Europe 6000 or more years ago. But those European genes did not come to India in the last 6000 years.

I eagerly wait for someone to point me to a paper that tells me about North Indian genes.

[shiv]

Somehow I am beginning to discover a deep down fear that AIT will somehow be proved and I find SDREs overly anxious to be "fair" and say "Hey maybe it happened. we can't celebrate yet".

Well you can call me out when it is proven but the evidence against AIT is overwhelming. Not sure why people are anxious to be "fair" and think that it might yet be proven. It won't.

[fanne]

The genetics proves that OIT it was and not AIT. And it is pure science (no linguistic manipulatable 'science'). Not the whole world would have 7 days in a week (named after same grah), same 12 months (dwadash as Sun is called in Ramayana), Same astrology (though western one lacks the south Node, the divisional chart and the dasha system) or the language. All had the same origin. And the earliest mention of all these is in Indian literature. It was here that it started, we seeded the whole world!!
rgds,
fanne

[shiv]

What did India give to the world?
From:
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
by
J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams

the Sanskrit (or Devana¯garı¯) alphabet which unlike the Phoenician and
Greek alphabets (and their descendants, Latin and Cyrillic) would appear to
have been systematically created and arranged on the basis of a thoroughgoing
analysis of the phonetics of the language for which it was intended.
<snip>
This same exemplary rigour was applied to the analysis of words and their
constituent elements. Sanskrit grammarians described in detail the root, stems,
and endings of verbs or nouns and both the internal and external changes that
might alter their meaning or grammatical function. When western scholars
began their study of Sanskrit, they not only acquired a new language but also
learned a good deal about how to undertake grammatical analysis.

[ramana]

Note English got a good grammar only after the Indian encounter. Fowler's grammar was written in 1880s.

[shiv]

What did India give to the world?
From:
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
by
J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams

the Sanskrit (or Devana¯garı¯) alphabet which unlike the Phoenician and
Greek alphabets (and their descendants, Latin and Cyrillic) would appear to
have been systematically created and arranged on the basis of a thoroughgoing
analysis of the phonetics of the language for which it was intended.
<snip>
This same exemplary rigour was applied to the analysis of words and their
constituent elements. Sanskrit grammarians described in detail the root, stems,
and endings of verbs or nouns and both the internal and external changes that
might alter their meaning or grammatical function. When western scholars
began their study of Sanskrit, they not only acquired a new language but also
learned a good deal about how to undertake grammatical analysis.

This very same book has a section on comparative linguistics and exactly how it is done. Google for the book - pdfs are available.

The very first example of how comparative linguistics is done uses the following languages. I list them along with the dates for the languages given in the same book

Sanskrit 1000 BC
Greek 800 BC
Latin 600 BC
Tocharian B 500 AD
Old Irish 600 AD
Old English 800 AD
Old Church Slavonic 860 AD
Lithuanian 1700 AD

Cognate words are taken from these languages and comparisons are done to figure out a proto language.

I made this list to show the fallacy here. They take sounds form languages that are attested 1000, 2000, or 2500 years apart and treat them like sister languages. So in a "vote" that is done for sound changes, if 4 out of 6 languages have a particular sound and Sanskrit has a different sound, it is judged that the original sound before Sanskrit was the sound that occurs in 4 out of 6, even if those 4 languages have attestation 1000 or 2000 years after Sanskrit. For a bunch of scholars who insist that sound changes are inevitable, they are curiously unconcerned about what might have happened in the 1000 or 2000 years that separated Sanskrit from the other language used for comparison.

This entire business of comparative linguistics and reconstruction of PIE has been based on using languages of widely different ages for comparison.Absolutely no explanation is given to the question of what Proto Old English (Old Eng is from 800 AD) might have sounded like 1800 years previously in 1000 BC when the Sanskrit word they are comparing was in use. They simply take one word from OE and one word from Sanskrit and compare for sound change. Equal Equal.

What if Sanskrit really was the Proto language? What if Sanskrit dates from 3000 BC and all other languages are attested only after 1000 BC. Heck 2000 years is enough time to make all the different corrupted sounds of Sanskrit to create Latin and Greek. You may not be able to prove or disprove this hypothesis. But of you don't even consider this possibility AT ALL, then you are hiding from some possibilities and clinging on to others.

[Vayutuvan]

The paper has not been published yet. If ANI-ASI admixture took place 1200-3500 years ago, AIT/AMT cannot be ruled out.
We need more studies on the date of mixture.

Supratik ji, this could be just coincidental. AIT may not be ruled out but it is not ruled in either unless causality is established.

[member_22872]

Rajesh garu, sorry I didn't see your message earlier, here:
Jacobi paper1
Jacobi paper2

[RajeshA]

What did India give to the world?
From:
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
by
J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams

the Sanskrit (or Devana¯garı¯) alphabet which unlike the Phoenician and
Greek alphabets (and their descendants, Latin and Cyrillic) would appear to
have been systematically created and arranged on the basis of a thoroughgoing
analysis of the phonetics of the language for which it was intended.
<snip>
This same exemplary rigour was applied to the analysis of words and their
constituent elements. Sanskrit grammarians described in detail the root, stems,
and endings of verbs or nouns and both the internal and external changes that
might alter their meaning or grammatical function. When western scholars
began their study of Sanskrit, they not only acquired a new language but also
learned a good deal about how to undertake grammatical analysis.

This very same book has a section on comparative linguistics and exactly how it is done. Google for the book - pdfs are available.

The book has been linked here.

[RajeshA]

venug ji,

thanks a lot! I had read somewhere that Hermann Jacobi was not very happy about AIT and protested. So I wanted to have a look.

[peter]

[..]

I made this list to show the fallacy here. They take sounds form languages that are attested 1000, 2000, or 2500 years apart and treat them like sister languages. [..]

This is a very important point and have struggled with/for an explanation. A language cannot evolve from nowhere at any point in time. It has to evolve/mutate from some other language. So the PIE camp would argue that even if language blah is attested at 600 AD BUT the one it descends from is much older and hence can give a cognate.

And if they can't find a real language from which the descent happened then they will happily invent a proto language because they believe that proto constructions based on sound changes are valid.

So in either case they win. Though if one could falsify the proto construct then their wiggle room decreases exponentially.

[peter]

[..]

there will be differences in the Anti-AIT (Indigenist) camp, and these differences can be worked on. The trick is to resolve these differences in an effective manner. That means
[..]

You are fixated on keeping the debate in anti AIT camp under wraps. I am curious to find out the reason.

Open Shastrarth was invented by us way back when. Think Shankracharya and Mandan Mishra .

[A_Gupta]

Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent.

The paper has not been published yet. If ANI-ASI admixture took place 1200-3500 years ago, AIT/AMT cannot be ruled out.
We need more studies on the date of mixture.

1. ASI and ANI are in India since 50,000 years ago.
2. As the other papers quoted on this thread show, there was no significant male inflow into India from the west since the mid-Holocene (7000 to 5000 years ago)

[peter]

Although this distinction by geography is not directly informative about the internal divisions of these separate language families, it might bear some significance for assessing dispersal models that have been proposed to explain the spread of Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia as it would exclude any significant patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, at least since the mid-Holocene period.

You can be quite sure that AIT is more or less dead based on this alone. I do not want to dance on the corpse of AIT

[..]
Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia [Download]
Authors: Mait Metspalu¹⁺²⁺¹³, Irene Gallego Romero³⁺¹³⁺¹⁴, Bayazit Yunusbayev¹⁺⁴⁺¹³, Gyaneshwer Chaubey¹, Chandana Basu Mallick¹⁺², Georgi Hudjashov¹⁺², Mari Nelis⁵⁺⁶, Reedik Mägi⁷⁺⁸, Ene Metspalu², Maido Remm⁷, Ramasamy Pitchappan⁹, Lalji Singh¹⁰⁺¹¹, Kumarasamy Thangaraj¹⁰, Richard Villems¹⁺²⁺¹², Toomas Kivisild¹⁺²⁺³[..]

If one looks at Mait's paper:

This is in contrast with the results from mtDNA studies, where the percentage of West Eurasian maternal lineages is substantial (up to 50%) in Indus Valley populations but marginal (<10%) in the south of the subcontinent.

What could be the reasons for this?

Importantly, the Pakistani (Indus Valley) populations differ substantially from most of the Indian populations and show comparably low genetic differentiation (within the FST range of 0.008–0.020) from European, Near Eastern, Caucasian, and Indian pop- ulations (Figure 1 and Figures S1 and S11). In agreement with previous Y-chromosome studies,41,42 the Brahmin and Kshatriya from Uttar Pradesh stand out by being closer to Pakistani (FST 1⁄4 0.006 on average) and West Eurasian populations (FST 1⁄4 0.030) than to other Indian populations (average FSTs 0.017 and 0.046, respectively) from the same geographic area (Figures S1 and S11).

How does one interpret the above?

[member_22872]

You are fixated on keeping the debate in anti AIT camp under wraps. I am curious to find out the reason.

peter ji, I know this is not directed at me, but suddenly I remembered one of Rajiv Malhotra's lectures on his book. One of this audience too asks what he thinks about debates between intra-Hindu faith dharma debates as opposed to debates between Christianity and Hindusim. He says that the inter-Hindu debates will exists and will not go away, and is no danger to dharmic India, but the greater danger to Dharmic India is from abrahamic religions. If you draw a parallel I think you will agree with Rajiv Malhotra. The debates you want to have is very similar to this intra hindu debates.

[A_Gupta]

^^^ Mait's paper reference [5] is
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/5/26

Conclusions

Since the initial peopling of South and West Asia by anatomically modern humans, when this region may well have provided the initial settlers who colonized much of the rest of Eurasia, the gene flow in and out of India of the maternally transmitted mtDNA has been surprisingly limited. Specifically, our analysis of the mtDNA haplogroups, which are shared between Indian and Iranian populations and exhibit coalescence ages corresponding to around the early Upper Paleolithic, indicates that they are present in India largely as Indian-specific sub-lineages. In contrast, other ancient Indian-specific variants of M and R are very rare outside the sub-continent.

and

India congregates four linguistic domains (Indo-European, Dravidic, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman) that occupy non-random spheres of the geographic distribution of its populations. The majority of the recent studies based on mtDNA variation have, in contrast to some [21], provided evidence that linguistic groups of India do not represent genetically homogeneous units and are not, therefore, traceable to different immigration waves from distinct sources [8,13,19]. The complexity that arises in defining populations and groups of populations in India based on genetic and cultural criteria has been recently demonstrated in South Indian tribal and caste populations. The combined data from mtDNA, Y-chromosome and autosomal genes indicated that the tribes and castes derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Late Pleistocene southern and southwestern Asians, and have received limited gene flow from external sources since the Holocene [15].

Also, as I expected before looking at it, all these show is geographic gradients.

Approximately one tenth of the Indian haplogroup M mtDNAs fall into its major sub-clade M2, which is defined by the motif 477G-1780-8502-16319 [15]. M2 can be further subdivided into haplogroups M2a (transitions at nps 5252 and 8369) and M2b [15]. Haplogroup M2 and its two major sub-clades reveal coalescence times of 50 to 70 thousand years (Table 3). Due to the increased frequency towards the southern part of India (Figure 1, panel M2, SAA p < 0.05 Figure 4), M2 is significantly (p < 0.05) more frequent among the Dravidic speakers than among the Indo-European speakers who are spread mostly in the northern regions of India (Table 2). It is more plausible that geography rather than linguistics is behind this pattern, because the frequency of M2 amongst the Indo-European speaking populations in southern India is significantly higher than that in the north, while there is no significant difference between Dravidic and Indo-European speaking populations from the same geographic region (Table 2). It is also notable that the frequency of M2 among the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas of Andhra Pradesh (CR 3.3 – 19.2%) is not significantly (p > 0.05) different from that among the other castes or the tribal populations of the region (CR: 5–12.9%, 11.2–18.3%, respectively). On the other hand, none of the 159 Brahmins and Kshatriyas from the northern states of India (Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) belong to M2 while the frequency reaches nearly 3% (CR: 1.6–4.6%) among the other castes and tribal populations of the region.

Their reference 22 has an abstract:

The southwestern and Central Asian corridor has played a pivotal role in the history of humankind, witnessing numerous waves of migration of different peoples at different times. To evaluate the effects of these population movements on the current genetic landscape of the Iranian plateau, the Indus Valley, and Central Asia, we have analyzed 910 mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) from 23 populations of the region. This study has allowed a refinement of the phylogenetic relationships of some lineages and the identification of new haplogroups in the southwestern and Central Asian mtDNA tree. Both lineage geographical distribution and spatial analysis of molecular variance showed that populations located west of the Indus Valley mainly harbor mtDNAs of western Eurasian origin, whereas those inhabiting the Indo-Gangetic region and Central Asia present substantial proportions
of lineages that can be allocated to three different genetic components of western Eurasian, eastern Eurasian, and south Asian origin. In addition to the overall composite picture of lineage clusters of different origin, we observed a number of deep-rooting lineages, whose relative clustering and coalescent ages suggest an autochthonous origin in the southwestern Asian corridor during the Pleistocene. The comparison with Y-chromosome data revealed a highly complex genetic and demographic history of the region, which includes sexually asymmetrical mating patterns, founder effects, and female-specific traces of the East African slave trade.

Their findings are explained by looking at their figure 1 where their samples were taken from.
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0002929707643523 ... 20c6699247

[RajeshA]

[..]

there will be differences in the Anti-AIT (Indigenist) camp, and these differences can be worked on. The trick is to resolve these differences in an effective manner. That means
[..]

You are fixated on keeping the debate in anti AIT camp under wraps.

Nothing like that. This thread is hardly the only place in the world where one can discuss Mahabharata dating or Talageri's less than airtight proposals. It's hardly the case that I'll be exploding a world-wide EMP that would paralyze all communications in the world! You may be reading too much into it.

So there is enough scope to discuss all aspects of differences at appropriate venues.

I am curious to find out the reason.

The reason is simple. This thread has a different focus.

[Anantha]

Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent.

The Kashyap and Kivisild paper conclusively shows that NI and SI have similar genetic distances between each other and to tribals of India. This paper's link is in the previous page and I had also linked this in the early part of the thread. Coupled with Oppenheimer's work, one can safely conclude AIT is dead and OIT it is (poetic justice, African and then Indian heritage for goras)

[ramana]

Guys who proclaim that AIT is dead on grounds of genetic evidence could you all please collborate and give white paper with refs and proper conclusions and we can then close that chapter?

The linguistic one also has to be tackeld in similar manner eventually.

Peter, Did you read Kota Venkatchalam's "Age of Mahabharata"? Send me a note if you did.

[peter]

I don't think this is accurate. The non-AIT camp has not delievered the knock out punch yet. As an example if it can be shown that fundamental premises of PIE are wrong, which is different from saying PIE is wrong or Sanskrit is oldest, then that would be good punch.

My personal opinion, which I will repeat: knock-out punches can only come from epigraphy (proof of IVC = SSVC), genetics (unambiguous proof of R1a1a clade from India) or archeology (discovery of horse bones, or other proof that IVC = SSVC).

On the horse bones did'nt Sandor Bakonyi (sp?) "prove" that horse existed in India in Indus civilzation? There were bit chewing marks on the teeth of these horses that were discovered. This happens only in domesticated horses. He and Meadow at Harvard had a spat and BB Lal supported Bakonyi while, as expected, the AIT crowd supported Meadow who claimed these were not horse bones.

[..]

I think there already is evidence. The fragmentation of non AIT camp may have something to with it still being in a shroud.

Please share more details on this.

Take Mahbharata as an example. Why don't we converge on it. Since we don't it remains shrouded and does'nt help the anti AIT camp.

I posted a picture of Vedic rishis and their creation of Mandalas as claimed by Talageri. Did you see that? Are you convinced that Talageri is right? If so please do tell us why. And why do you have to compare him with Witzel? Can't we discuss him standalone?

Your question requires time to be devoted to it - maybe over the weekend, but no promises.

It absolutely has to be compared to Witzel. Witzel also came up with a chronological listing of Mandalas. Are you saying that you agree with the Witzel chronology, but not with Talageri? Do let me know.

I do not agree with Witzel's chronology because I don't understand how he came up with it. He mentions his source is Oldenberg but Oldenberg wrote in german which I don't understand. Though I heard that Oldenberg's book was translated into English and published by an Indian publisher. Could be a rumour maybe someone knows more about it on this board.

[peter]

[..]

Peter, Did you read Kota Venkatchalam's "Age of Mahabharata"? Send me a note if you did.

No I did not. I have heard of it. What does he say about the war?

[shiv]

[..]

I made this list to show the fallacy here. They take sounds form languages that are attested 1000, 2000, or 2500 years apart and treat them like sister languages. [..]

This is a very important point and have struggled with/for an explanation.

I agree that it is difficult to express the objection.

If you try and reconstruct a proto word using one word from language A and say three other words from languages B,C and D attested 1000 to 2000 years after Sanskrit and you might get the following example (let me use fake words as examples_

Language A "khad"
Language B "Sed"
Language C "qued"
Language D "ched"

The reconstructed proto word will have the second letter as vowel "e" rather than "a" because three languages A, B and C have "e" and only one language has "a".

But language A is 1000 to 2000 years older. The form that has the second letter as the vowel "e" might itself have come from an intermediate proto language that changed the original "a" to "e". And after that this intermediate proto language may have given rise to the three languages that retained the "e".

In fact the possibility of errors in this method gets compounded by errors of dating. For example Vedic Sanskrit is arbitraril dated as 1200 BC by AIT techniques, and that dating makes it approximately the same age as Mycenaean Greek. But there is plenty of information that suggests that Sanskrit is much older - perhaps 5000 years old. That would put it 2000 years older than Mycenaean Greek and 2500 years older than Greek, 3000 years older than Latin.

Linguists who make these reconstructions use a circular self referential argument to claim the truth of their methods. They say:

We have interpreted the Rig Veda to be from a horse burying pastoral society. We have found just such a society in Central Asian graves from 3000 BC. We have decided that these people moved to India over 1500 to 2000 years. Therefore we have decided that Sanskrit dates from about 1500 to 1000 BC. So we can assume Sanskrit to be about the same age as the oldest European lagauges (give or take 1000 year) and we shall proceed to reconstruct PIE from that and assume that there was only one PIE

There are a series of little bluffs here and these little bluffs are accepted and propagated uniformly and across the board by a community of western linguists, archaeologists and historians who feed off each other because of their control of academia and "pir reviewed" publications.

What makes it worse is that a whole lot of Indian academia who have been brought up to admire the former group as the last word in gyan get all anxious and worried when they find something amiss with AIT and keep worrying that they might be wrong and that the oh so upright western academics may be correct. Like Jack Spratt and his alter ego wife, a bluff and confident western academia get support from an anxious nail biting Indian academia who are afraid of being laughed at and criticized and whose opinions may not be published by pir review so GoI promotion will not occur from lecturer to Assistant prof.

[shiv]

On the horse bones did'nt Sandor Bakonyi (sp?) "prove" that horse existed in India in Indus civilzation? There were bit chewing marks on the teeth of these horses that were discovered. This happens only in domesticated horses. He and Meadow at Harvard had a spat and BB Lal supported Bakonyi while, as expected, the AIT crowd supported Meadow who claimed these were not horse bones.

BB Lal did not support Bokonyi. Bokonyi supported BB Lal's findings of caballus No one from the AIT group cared a fig about BB Lal until westerner Bokonyi agreed. Also -with regard to the Surkotada horse that BB Lal described, it was not about teeth marks. It was said that the bones were not true horse caballus at all, but an ass or some stupid inferior Indian thing.

The goalpost shifting game played by AIT nazis has to be described to be understood. Even this thread has seen arguments like this

SDRE: I found horse bones in Notyourpur and dated them to 2000 BC
AIT Nazi (AITN) - Rubbish, your dating is all balls
SDRE: No your colleague helped with the excavation and the dating was done in your country
AITN: Those aren't horse bones. That's an ass. It is very difficult to distinguish horse from ass. Only I can
SDRE: No. One of your peers agrees that it is horse. I have shown him the bones
AITN: It may be horse but is it "caballus"?
SDRE: Yes it is
AITN: I doubt it, In any case it wasn't domesticated. What is the evidence of domestication?
SDRE: er - I haven't found any teeth, but wait - I just found several teeth and they've got bit-wear
AITN: Nonsense. That is not bit wear, it's ordinary wear and tear from chewing on gravel along with grass
SDRE: No no we have several examples
AITN: Where are the metal bits then? Are you telling me they have corroded or mysteriously disappeared?
SDRE: Leather and wooden bits are possible
AITN: You are bluffing. Your paper is rejected. I will bring this to the attention of your boss in Delhi Dr Ramesh Hesucksmyass and ask him how his research fellow can put up such nonsense

[A_Gupta]

Shiv, someone like Bokonyi has studied of the order of a few thousand fossil horse remains. Meanwhile, a 2008 survey of Indian paleontology and archaeological records shows barely a couple dozen of Equis sivalensis and Equus namadicus unearthed so far, in total. So looking for outside expertise is quite a reasonable thing to do. The key thing is what were Bokonyi's arguments that surkotada had horses, and Meadows arguments against, and IMO, meadows is not able to refute Bokonyi.

Btw, I got hold of Konow's work, which Paul Theime cited, re Mitanni treaty, and he too argues that the deities mentioned in the treaty are Indian.

[A_Gupta]

"The Aryan Gods of the Mitanni People" by Sten Konow, concludes thusly:

I hope to have made it probable that these gods were Indian and not Aryan {the term used for pre-Indians} or even Iranian. If the conception of the Ashvins as groomsmen belongs to the later phases of the Rgveda period, as it seems to do, we must further draw the conclusion that the extension of Indo-Aryan civilization into Mesopotamia took place after the bulk of the Rgveda had come into existence. The oldest portions of the collection would consequently have to be considered as considerably older than the Mitani treaty.

We have no means for judging the character of the expansion of Indian civilization into Mesopotamia in these early times. It may have been the consequence of warlike expeditions or of peaceful penetration. And such scanty information as is available, is in favour of the latter alternative. We know that Indian numerals occur in ancient Hittite texts, and it is probable that they have been transmitted through trade and not in consequence of war. So far as we can see, numerals and names of gods are the only Indian words that can be traced in ancient Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and we shall not probably go wrong in assuming that the pre-historic expansion of Indian civilization into these distant countries was a peaceful propaganda. It is a well-known fact that a similar state of things meets us at all stages of Indian history. India has won its great victories in the world, not in wars or by means of armies, but peacefully through its high ideals and advanced civilization.

[A_Gupta]

Shiv,
Worth a read.
http://www.continuitas.org/texts/alinei_problem.pdf
Mario Alinei, The Problem of Dating in Linguistic, "Quaderni di semantica" 25, 2004, pp. 211-232.


http://www.continuitas.org/texts/balles ... ibrium.pdf
Xaverio Ballester, Linguistic Equilibrium In The Palaeolithic: The Case Of Indo–European, in M. Alinei (ed.), Intrusive Farmers or Indigenous Foragers: The New Debate about Ethnolinguistic Origins of Europe". Actes du XIVème Congrès UISPP, Université de Liège, Belgique, 2-8 septembre 2001, BAR International Series 1302, 2004, pp. 85-91.

[shiv]

If one looks at Mait's paper:

This is in contrast with the results from mtDNA studies, where the percentage of West Eurasian maternal lineages is substantial (up to 50%) in Indus Valley populations but marginal (<10%) in the south of the subcontinent.

What could be the reasons for this?

Peterji - it appears that you have not followed the meaning. The wording is not reader friendly but the author is still in his introduction to his paper and is talking about contradictory findings in previous studies. Just prior to the sentence you have quoted he mentions the opposite finding of great mixing of ANI and ASI. You did not quote that or the context in which those statements were made. the context is relevant to this paper that seeks to resolve such contradictions

Importantly, the Pakistani (Indus Valley) populations differ substantially from most of the Indian populations and show comparably low genetic differentiation (within the FST range of 0.008–0.020) from European, Near Eastern, Caucasian, and Indian pop- ulations (Figure 1 and Figures S1 and S11). In agreement with previous Y-chromosome studies,41,42 the Brahmin and Kshatriya from Uttar Pradesh stand out by being closer to Pakistani (FST 1⁄4 0.006 on average) and West Eurasian populations (FST 1⁄4 0.030) than to other Indian populations (average FSTs 0.017 and 0.046, respectively) from the same geographic area (Figures S1 and S11).

How does one interpret the above?

Please see page 10 of results

tour current results indicate that the often debated episode of South Asian prehistory, the putative Indo-Aryan migra-tion 3,500 years ago (see e.g., Abdulla) falls well within the limits of our haplotype-based approach. We found no regional diversity differences associated with k5 at K 8. Thus, regardless of where this component was from (the Caucasus, Near East, Indus Valley, or Central Asia), its spread to other regions must have occurred well before our detection limits at 12,500 years. Accordingly,the intro-duction of k5 to South Asia cannot be explained by recent gene flow, such as the hypothetical Indo-Aryan migration. The admixture of the k5 and k6 components within India,however, could have happened more recently—our haplo-type diversity estimates are not informative about the timing of local admixture.Both k5 and k6 ancestry components that dominate genetic variation in South Asia at K8 demonstrate much greater haplotype diversity than those that predom-inate in West Eurasia. This pattern is indicative of a more ancient demographic history and/or a higher long-term effective population size underlying South Asian genome variation compared to that of West Eurasia.Given the close genetic relationships between South Asian and West Eurasian populations, as evidenced by both shared ancestry and shared selection signals, this raises the question of whether such a relationship can be explained by a (possibility number 1) deep common evolutionary history or (possibility number 2)secondary contacts between two distinct populations. Namely, (possibility number 2a)did genetic variation in West Eurasia and South Asia accumu-late separately after the out-of-Africa migration; (possibility number 2b)do the observed instances of shared ancestry component and selection signals reflect secondary gene flow between two regions, or (possibility number 2c)do the populations living in these two regions have a common population history, in which case it is likely that West Eurasian diversity is derived from the more diverse South Asian gene pool.

[KLP Dubey]

Dubeyji, on the topic of language corruption...

Sir, it greatly pains me to end my otherwise good day by spending time refuting these half-wits. But I must, as I have been asked to do so by many on this thread.

Sanskrit does have some very old phonemes. But a lot are missing which he neglects to mention.

1) We all know that Vedic is "very old". We do not need ManishH to tell us that. The real question is: what is "older" than Vedic ? Nothing but a hypothetical PIE which does not exist, nobody has a single recorded word of it. "A lot of phonemes are missing". Missing from what ? What is the older language in relation to which they are "missing" ? What proof exists of this older language ?

2) The so-called "missing phonemes" are some harsh sounds which are produced in the throat. These are associated more with apes and monkeys:

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/SR/SR013/SR013_05.pdf

It is possible some primitive humans (such as Hittites, Anatolians) may have still been practising such sounds at the time of Vedic language being developed from the RV sounds in India. So what ? How does this prove that such languages are "older" than Vedic ?

These linguistics guys presume that all humans have to dumbly and passively follow the same "sound change laws" at the same speed (as a scientist, I find the idea that these nonsensical speculations are called "laws", to be abominable). Even if it is assumed that Vedic is an "evolved" language, what prevented humans in India from being smarter than Hittites and Anatolians? Couldn't they have not only started speaking much earlier, but also refined their speech much earlier?

The linguist argument is like saying: "Today I visited the Jhumritalaiya College which has very primitive facilities, hence it must be older than Cambridge and Harvard which have much more modern facilities".

The Vedic language as seen in the RV alone, despite much obvious attrition and several innovations, has preserved many more features from the putative PIE language and wider culture. This was due to its well attested and incomparable system of oral tradition

More nonsense from Kazanas. Maybe the old Yavana is smoking something really strong that allows him to see "obvious attritions" and "innovations". Obvious attritions from fawking what ? Obvious innovations from fawking what ? In comparison to the "immaculate conception", all childbirths are going to appear sinful and corrupted to the nutjobs who believe in such nonsense. That is what these fellows are all going on about. PIE is some sort of "immaculate conception" which we are supposed to just believe even though there is absolutely not a shred of testimony that supports it.

He's not aware of metrical anomalies in Rg which point to several instances where original disyllabic sounds were lost and became unisyllabic. If he has bothered to actually listen to samhita pāṭha, he would have noticed the hiatus.

I thought I had addressed this bull$hit already in my previous exchange with ManishH. We are dealing with a very dishonest individual. On one hand, he wants us to believe that there was some unknown PIE language from which Vedic descended, and on the other hand he wants us to believe that *well known* and *well preserved* sounds in the Rgveda have actually been lost.

O prize idiot, just because there are some people who are currently practising the wrong pronunciation, does not mean that the Rgvedic sounds have "lost" their correct pronunciation. The correct pronunciation, as clearly given in the Rgveda pratishakhya, describes how to get all the "disyllablic" features and they can easily be reproduced by somebody who is conversant with it. There is no question of it being "lost" because there is a permanant record of it and it can regained by anybody who wants to do so, with a minimal effort.

Instead of realizing this great heritage and the great efforts of the Vedic grammarians and phoneticians to preserve the primeval sounds of the Rgveda, these third-class fellows waste their time filling up entire books and websites with utter nonsense, conjuring up their own fantasies and fake theories, and at the same time trying to destroy the integrity of the Vedic heritage. It's a damned shame.

KL

[shiv]

Shiv, someone like Bokonyi has studied of the order of a few thousand fossil horse remains. Meanwhile, a 2008 survey of Indian paleontology and archaeological records shows barely a couple dozen of Equis sivalensis and Equus namadicus unearthed so far, in total. So looking for outside expertise is quite a reasonable thing to do. The key thing is what were Bokonyi's arguments that surkotada had horses, and Meadows arguments against, and IMO, meadows is not able to refute Bokonyi.

No disagreement with this. But tell me, all the horse findings in Central Asia, were they all discovered by people who had the skills and experience of Bokonyi. If not can they be accepted as better evidence than BB Lal? There is a clear double standard at work that demands that BB Lal needs a Bokonyi to validate his work. Every other guy gets away with the same kind of crapola that AIT seems to fill itself with

[shiv]

"The Aryan Gods of the Mitanni People" by Sten Konow, concludes thusly:

I hope to have made it probable that these gods were Indian and not Aryan {the term used for pre-Indians} or even Iranian. If the conception of the Ashvins as groomsmen belongs to the later phases of the Rgveda period, as it seems to do, we must further draw the conclusion that the extension of Indo-Aryan civilization into Mesopotamia took place after the bulk of the Rgveda had come into existence. The oldest portions of the collection would consequently have to be considered as considerably older than the Mitani treaty.

We have no means for judging the character of the expansion of Indian civilization into Mesopotamia in these early times. It may have been the consequence of warlike expeditions or of peaceful penetration. And such scanty information as is available, is in favour of the latter alternative. We know that Indian numerals occur in ancient Hittite texts, and it is probable that they have been transmitted through trade and not in consequence of war. So far as we can see, numerals and names of gods are the only Indian words that can be traced in ancient Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and we shall not probably go wrong in assuming that the pre-historic expansion of Indian civilization into these distant countries was a peaceful propaganda. It is a well-known fact that a similar state of things meets us at all stages of Indian history. India has won its great victories in the world, not in wars or by means of armies, but peacefully through its high ideals and advanced civilization.

Thanks

I would love to archive the original article for personal reference. People like Thieme, Mayhrofer (sp?) and Konow are just brushed aside summarily in a heady enthusiasm to ride the AIT horse.

[shiv]

these third-class fellows waste their time filling up entire books and websites with utter nonsense, conjuring up their own fantasies and fake theories, and at the same time trying to destroy the integrity of the Vedic heritage. It's a damned shame.

KL

+1

[Virendra]

Dubey ji, I have sent you an email. Just so I could keep in touch going forward.

[RajeshA]

One good paper to understand available genetic evidence is that of Premendra Priyadarshi.



Understanding Reich et al

One can in fact understand the paper by the following graph:



Something to take home from all this is that Tamils have ANI component and Pushtun have ASI component. Nobody is pure ANI or pure ASI, ignoring the Onge from Andaman, who may be pure ASI. Neither the Tamil can get rid of ANI, nor the Pushtun can get rid of ASI.

Also one should not consider Europeans to be solely the progeny of CEU which split off from ANI, but can be a mixture of several streams. Even the stream coming from ANI may have migrated at different times.

Our analyses suggest that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred in the ancestors of both northern and southern Indians 1,200-3,500 years ago, overlapping the time when Indo-European languages first began to be spoken in the subcontinent. These results suggest that this formative period of Indian history was accompanied by mixtures between two highly diverged populations, although our results do not rule other, older ANI-ASI admixture events. A cultural shift subsequently led to widespread endogamy, which decreased the rate of additional population mixtures.

The information as to Indo-European languages is actually just a bone they have thrown to the linguists, but the conclusions on genetics is a different matter.

So what does the above imply:

a) Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians could have mixed to some extent much earlier than 3,500 years, but considering both were big populations, all this cross-Vindhyachal love may not have been enough to cause genetic tremors.

b) Possibly when the Saraswati-Sindhu Civilization came to an end, and these riverside dwellers moved further inland into the Gangetic Valley and across the Vindhyachal mountains, that there was a lot more love-making destroying the purity of both ASI and ANI.

c) This late major mixing of ANI and ASI in fact shows that the Out-of-India migrations that took place taking Sanskrit and para-Sanskrit languages and culture outside the Indian Subcontinent earlier than 3500 years, did not take Ancestral South Indian genetic markers to Central Asia and beyond to Europe! This scenario gives a good explanation for Europeans not wearing any genes made in South India.

[Virendra]

There is a huge thread on dissecting AIT via genetics, at India forum discussions.

[Supratik]

No sir it means nothing of the sort. It can mean that only if
1. It is true that there are separate North Indian and South Indian genes
2. The North Indian genes came from outside India
3. The admixture too place less than 2000 years ago (after the end of the Indus-Saraswati civilization)

Since I have taken the trouble of reading all such papers linked here for the last 4 months I would be grateful if you could point me to the papers that identify "North Indian genes".

If you followed the reasoning, R1a1 was thought to be the marker for Ancestral North Indian.
That has collapsed completely. R1A1 M17 occurs in India and East Europe, but not Western Europe. It occurs with the greatest frequency and diversity in India, and among highest and lowest castes. An associated marker called M548 occurs in Europe but not in India. Indians genes could have gone to Europe 6000 or more years ago. But those European genes did not come to India in the last 6000 years.

I eagerly wait for someone to point me to a paper that tells me about North Indian genes.

I haven't followed the R1a1 debate so can't comment on that. There is no North Indian or South Indian genes. North Indians and South Indians are a mixture of two founder populations ANI and ASI (the term north and south strictly used on the basis of geographical preponderance). I do not belong to the AIT camp. However, the AIT camp may use the date of mixture to say that the mixture happened with the concurrent appearance of Indo-European languages (whose date according to them falls in the same zone) and so suggests a mass migration of people into the Indian subcontinent.

We should be careful on the dates of mixing. It is just one paper presented at a conference. Let there be multiple papers published on the subject so that we can conclusively give a period for mixing.

It is quite possible that the ANI appeared in the subcontinent much earlier than when the mixing occurred.