Bharat Rakshak

ramana wrote:thanks a lot doc. happy new year for your book.

The origins and affinities of the ∼1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking people from West Eurasia entered India from the Northwest and diffused throughout the subcontinent. They purportedly admixed with or displaced indigenous Dravidic-speaking populations. Subsequently they may have established the Hindu caste system and placed themselves primarily in castes of higher rank.

Shared Indo-European languages (i.e., Hindi and most European languages) suggested to linguists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that contemporary Hindu Indians are descendants of primarily West Eurasians who migrated from Europe, the Near East, Anatolia, and the Caucasus 3000–8000 years ago (Poliakov 1974; Renfrew 1989a,b). These nomadic migrants may have consolidated their power by admixing with native Dravidic-speaking (e.g., Telugu) proto-Asian populations who controlled regional access to land, labor, and resources (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994), and subsequently established the Hindu caste hierarchy to legitimize and maintain this power (Poliakov 1974; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). It is plausible that these West Eurasian immigrants also appointed themselves to predominantly castes of higher rank.

About a fifth of the human gene pool belongs largely
either to Indo-European or Dravidic speaking people
inhabiting the Indian peninsula. The ‘Caucasoid share’
in their gene pool is thought to be related
predominantly to the Indo-European speakers.
A commonly held hypothesis, albeit not the only one,
suggests a massive Indo-Aryan invasion to India some
4,000 years ago [1]. Recent limited analysis of
maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of
Indian populations has been interpreted as supporting
this concept [2,3]. Here, this interpretation is questioned.
We found an extensive deep late Pleistocene genetic
link between contemporary Europeans and Indians,
provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which
encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both
populations. Our estimate for this split is close to the
suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first
expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia
[4–8] and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe. Only a
small fraction of the ‘Caucasoid-specific’ mtDNA
lineages found in Indian populations can be ascribed to
a relatively recent admixture

An extensive analysis of Y diversity within Greeks and three Pakistani populations ___ the Burusho, Kalash and Pathan ___ who claim descent from Greek soldiers allowed us to compare Y lineages within these populations and re-evaluate their suggested Greek origins. This study as a whole seems to exclude a large Greek contribution to any Pakistani population, confirming previous observations 7. However, it provides strong evidence in support of the Greek origins for a small proportion of Pathans, as demonstrated by the clade E network (Figure 2) and the low pairwise genetic distances between these two populations.

We found that most of the Indian Muslim populations received their major genetic input from geographically close non-Muslim populations. However, low levels of likely sub-Saharan African, Arabian and West Asian admixture were also observed among Indian Muslims

Importantly, the virtual absence of M458 chromosomes outside Europe speaks against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including to India, at least since the mid-Holocene.

johneeG wrote:When the papers say that there was no patrilineal gene flow from East Europe into Asia, does that also mean that there was no patrilineal gene flow into East Europe from Asia according to this paper?

shiv wrote:

johneeG wrote:When the papers say that there was no patrilineal gene flow from East Europe into Asia, does that also mean that there was no patrilineal gene flow into East Europe from Asia according to this paper?

This paper refers to M 458 that was discussed earlier along with M 17. M 17 was the one that occurs in India and all the way up to East Europe with the origin being in India, or at least the oldest variants are in India - age about 10-12000 years.

M 458 developed at or near Poland 6000 years ago. M 458 not found at all in India

Conclusion: There has been patrilineal (Y chromosome) from from India to East Europe starting 12000 years ago. There has been no flow of 6000 year old M 458 into India. Therefore no patrilineal flow from East Europe to India in the last 6000 years.

In my view this can be easily explained without resorting to any racist theories. Upto 10,000 years ago, Europe was iced up in the last ice age and populations moved out (or may have died). There was no "icing up" of India which remained warm and hospitable.

Repopulation of Europe started 10,000 years ago from population centers in the south so there was probably gene flow from India to East Europe at least. It is interesting that Sanskrit and the Eastern European language Slovenian are very similar. But there is no common word for metal axe. Since a metal axe has been found in East Europe 5200 years ago - the connection between Sanskrit and East Europe is probably more than 5,200 years old. But there has been little gene flow from east Europe to India in the last 6000 years

In the ice age (lasted until 10,000 years ago) sea levels may have fallen because of increased ice caps making land route off Dwaraka to Arabia easy. The sea all the way past Gujarat via Karachi to Arabia is hardly 10 meters deep near the coast. Need to remember (as Rajesh A had correctly pointed out) the reference to Horse in the Rig Veda had the same number of ribs as Arabian horse, not European horse. Harappan Camel bones are Arabian one hump camel, not Bactrian Central Asian camel. Alexander could not take horses and chariots across Hindu kush, but trade with Arabia along coast was possible. Chariots did not come across Hindu Kush

Plain common sense can explain and link up all these facts. It is when bullshit invasion and laungaue theories are cooked up that you get all sorts of nonsense that has no explanation

Prem Kumar wrote:He told me that he is convinced of AIT and nothing will change his mind. So, he goes into a silent mode when evidence against AIT is pointed out. But when something remotely supporting AIT comes out, he latches on to it.

All this being said, he is in the broad "Hindu, right-wing camp" and is a staunch critic of Abrahamic faiths. His non-AIT writings are very interesting (he wrote a couple of pieces for IndiaFacts). He has good scholarship

So, that's where we need to co-exist with him: in the broader camp with a common vision for Sanatana Dharma's survival, but not necessarily agreeing with everything

shiv wrote:

A_Gupta wrote:From the supplementary tables:

Code: Select all

South Asia                    Ntotal   R1a-all
Pakistan North                    85    14
Pakistan South                    91    30
India North                       98    19
India East                       124     5
India Northeast                   68    19
India Northwest                  127    31
India Central                     36     5
India South                       97     5
Mixed India                       40     5
Nepal Tharu                      170    14
Nepal Hindu                       25    17
India/Hindu/New Delhi             49    17
India/Tribal/Andhra Pradesh       29     8

There is a problem here:

The "Last defining Y-chr marker" in most South Asia people is M576. M576 does not even exist in any table or description.

Just remember that there is absolutely no indication of "Kurgan" expansion west of the Vistula, and that horses in general were useless and expensive and completely unimportant west of the Vistula until Roman times.

Horses require high-quality and high-protein fodder (like oats) that compete with humans, and need ~5 months of warm shelter and high-quality fodder during the winter in regions with significant snowfall - which at the time was not available nor affordable in northern central and NW central nor N Europe. Also, the wetlands and dense forests and lack of "roads" in Europe prevented any type of horse- or wagon-driven invasion. Even much later, Romans had a hard time moving about in what is now Germany, and more or less successfully used water ways and their banks to transport soldiers and goods, for the most part.

"Just remember that there is absolutely no indication of "Kurgan" expansion west of the Vistula..."

There are no kurgans south of the Oxus, either.

"Horses require high-quality and high-protein fodder (like oats) that compete with humans..."

My father, who grew up on a farm in the 1930s, claimed that you need about 10 acres (4 hectares) of farmland for every horse. They are indeed very resource-intensive.

In fact, there are multiple problems with the proposed horse-and-rider or horse-and-chariot models for I-E expansion. Chariots were apparently quite rare on the Eurasian steppe and there is little if any evidence that they served in some military capacity. Controlled horsemanship seems to have first appeared in Iran and on the steppe near the end of the 2nd millennium BCE and riders were not adapted to warfare in the Near East until the 8th century BCE.

An insight into the peopling of Europe has emerged from an unlikely source — the stomach contents of a 5,300-year-old body pulled from a thawing glacier in the eastern Italian Alps.Since his discovery in 1991, Ötzi the Iceman, as he was named, has provided a trove of information about the life of Europeans at that time. His long-frozen tissues have now yielded another surprise: Scientists have been able to recover from his stomach samples of Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that infects about half the human population and can occasionally cause stomach ulcers.The bacterium is transmitted only through intimate contact, and its distribution around the world matches almost perfectly the distribution of human populations. The bacterium’s genetic variations are therefore used by researchers as a supplement to human genetics in tracking ancient human migrations.Researchers led by Frank Maixner and Albert Zink of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, at the European Research Academy in Bolzano, Italy, reported on Thursday in Science that they had been able to reconstruct the entire DNA sequence of the ulcer bacterium from samples taken from the iceman’s stomach.Modern-day Europeans carry a type of H. pylori that is a hybrid of two ancient strains, one of which originated somewhere in Eurasia and the other in Africa, after modern humans first left that continent about 50,000 years ago.One theory is that this hybridization occurred in the Middle East before or during the Last Glacial Maximum, a catastrophically cold period during the last ice age when glaciers swept south and made much of Europe uninhabitable.After the glaciers began to retreat, about 20,000 years ago, people from the Middle East and other southern refuges moved north to recolonize Europe. It could have been these migrants who brought the hybridized ulcer bacterium to Europe.Yet the ulcer bacterium from Ötzi is related only to the Eurasian strain, the researchers found, implying that hybridization with the African strain must have occurred much later, within the last 5,000 years.The finding suggests that it may have been the first farmers, who brought the agricultural revolution to Europe from the Middle East starting about 8,000 years ago, who were the carriers of the African strain, said Yoshan Moodley of the University of Venda in South Africa, a co-author of the new report.Reconstructing the history of human pathogens, a new science made possible by the ability to decode DNA molecules many thousands of years old, can yield deep insights into both medicine and history. Last October a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen extracted Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, from human teeth up to 5,000 years old.mark Achtman, a leading expert on ancient pathogens at the University of Warwick in England, said that the authors of the Ötzi paper had done well to extract the ulcer bacterium from the iceman, but that it was difficult to infer from a single sample anything about the bacterium’s distribution in Europe 5,000 years ago.

Today, roughly half of all people worldwide are infected by H. pylori, which lives in the acidic human stomach and about 10% of the time causes ulcers. Varied strains of the bacteria are tied to populations across the world, with modern-day Europeans afflicted by a unique one that appears to be a mixture of older African and Asian ones.
But not Otzi, according to the new study, published in the journal Science. The complete genetic map, or genome, of the H. pylori bacteria found in his frozen stomach shows it belongs to an Asian strain of bacteria now largely confined to the guts of people living in northern India.
That suggests the north Indian strain once belonged to most prehistoric Europeans, prior to an influx of farmers from the Middle East into the continent more than 4,000 years ago. Those new arrivals likely carried the African H. pylori strain that mixed with the older Asian one to produce today’s signature European H. pylori bugs.

sivab wrote:http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/gut-of-the-iceman

Today, roughly half of all people worldwide are infected by H. pylori, which lives in the acidic human That suggests the north Indian strain once belonged to most prehistoric Europeans, prior to an influx of farmers from the Middle East into the continent more than 4,000 years ago. Those new arrivals likely carried the African H. pylori strain that mixed with the older Asian one to produce today’s signature European H. pylori bugsOIT: 1 AIT: 0

Pulikeshi wrote:Trite answers for trite questions:
1) Bacteria in gut of Indian ended up in gut of European - you can calculate direction of that in only one way. Food went into gut of Indian, it came out -> Food went into gut of European, it came out. Bacteria lives!2) Even if you worry about 12k years.... Lets say you leave India and go away to Europe and then later come back home - It is Ghar Wapsi OIT only!Someone else I am sure will provide a more serious response

Pulikeshi wrote:Trite answers for trite questions:

1) Bacteria in gut of Indian ended up in gut of European - you can calculate direction of that in only one way.
Food went into gut of Indian, it came out -> Food went into gut of European, it came out. Bacteria lives!

2) Even if you worry about 12k years.... Lets say you leave India and go away to Europe and then later come back home -
It is Ghar Wapsi OIT only!

Someone else I am sure will provide a more serious response

The scientists assume that there were originally two strain types of the bacterium, an African and an Asian one, which at some point recombined into today's European version. Since bacteria are usually transmitted within the family, the history of the world's population is closely linked to the history of bacteria.

The strain of Helicobacter pylori found in modern day Europe is a hybrid of two other strains, one from North Africa, and one that at the time stretched through Central Asia and Western Europe, but nowadays only resides in Northern India. Initially, scientists had guessed that this admixture probably occurred in Paleolithic times, anywhere from 10,000 to 52,000 years ago during migrations into Europe after the last ice age. Well, this finding in Ötzi’s gut suggests that's not the case.

Iceman's H. pylori is more similar to the Eurasian strain--the one that's now only found in Northern India--and the fact that it's not mixed with the North African strain implies that that massive waves of migration into Europe occurred sometime after Ötzi died 5,300 years ago. The ancestors of modern Europeans were still living in Europe during Ötzi's time, but their numbers were sparse.

"We had assumed that we would find the same strain of Helicobacter in Ötzi as is found in Europeans today," explains the computational biologist. "It turned out to be a strain that is mainly observed in Central and South Asia today."

Third wave

What we have found is that, in addition to the original European hunter-gatherers and a heavy dose of Near Eastern farmers, we can now add a third major population: steppe pastoralists. These nomads appear to have “invaded” central Europe in a previously unknown wave during the early Bronze Age (about 4,500 years ago).

This event saw the introduction of two very significant new technologies to western Europe: domestic horses and the wheel. It also reveals the mysterious source for the Indo-European languages.

Comparative whole-genome analyses (neighbor joining, STRUCTURE, and principle component analyses) with publicly available genomes (n = 45) confirmed the MLST result by showing that the Iceman’s ancient H. pylori genome has highest similarity to three hpAsia2 genomes from India (figs. S15 to S17). Although the Iceman’s H. pylori strain appears genetically similar to the extant strains from northern India, slight differences were observed along PC2 in both MLST (Fig. 3C) and genome PCAs (fig. S17) and in the neighbor joining tree (fig. S15). To further study genomic-scale introgression, we performed a high-resolution analysis of ancestral motifs using fineSTRUCTURE (24). The resulting linked co-ancestry matrix (Fig. 4) showed that the ancient H. pylori genome shares high levels of ancestry with Indian hpAsia2 strains (Fig. 4, green boxes), but even higher co-ancestry with most European hpEurope strains (Fig. 4, blue boxes). In contrast, the Iceman’s H. pylori shares low ancestry with the hpNEAfrica strain, a modern representative of AE2 (Fig. 4, black box), and with European strains originating from the Iberian Peninsula, where the proportion of AE2 ancestry is relatively high (Fig. 4, white box) (4). Our sample size (n = 1) does not allow further conclusions about the prevalence of AE1 in ancient Europe and the course or rate of AE2 introgression. However, the ancient H. pylori strain provides the first evidence that AE2 was already present in Central Europe during the Copper Age, albeit at a low level. If the Iceman H. pylori strain is representative of its time, the low level of AE2 admixture suggests that most of the AE2 ancestry observed in hpEurope today is a result of AE2 introgression into Europe after the Copper Age, which is later than previously proposed (4, 6). Furthermore, our co-ancestry results indicate that the Iceman’s strain belonged to a prehistoric European branch of hpAsia2 that is different from the modern hpAsia2 population from northern India. The high genetic similarity of the ancient strain to bacteria from Europe implies that much of the diversity present in Copper Age Europe is still retained within the extant hpEurope population, despite millennia of subsequent AE2 introgression.

A_Gupta wrote:^^^ What this means is that fresh H. pylori strains that might have entered India, with the supposed migrating/invading Aryans some 2000 years after Otzi did not change the make up of H. pylori in India as much as the subsequent incursions of humans into Europe changed H. pylori in Europe.

A_Gupta wrote:Shiv, need you to make head and tails of this:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/162.full

Comparative whole-genome analyses (neighbor joining, STRUCTURE, and principle component analyses) with publicly available genomes (n = 45) confirmed the MLST result by showing that the Iceman’s ancient H. pylori genome has highest similarity to three hpAsia2 genomes from India (figs. S15 to S17). Although the Iceman’s H. pylori strain appears genetically similar to the extant strains from northern India, slight differences were observed along PC2 in both MLST (Fig. 3C) and genome PCAs (fig. S17) and in the neighbor joining tree (fig. S15). To further study genomic-scale introgression, we performed a high-resolution analysis of ancestral motifs using fineSTRUCTURE (24). The resulting linked co-ancestry matrix (Fig. 4) showed that the ancient H. pylori genome shares high levels of ancestry with Indian hpAsia2 strains (Fig. 4, green boxes), but even higher co-ancestry with most European hpEurope strains (Fig. 4, blue boxes). In contrast, the Iceman’s H. pylori shares low ancestry with the hpNEAfrica strain, a modern representative of AE2 (Fig. 4, black box), and with European strains originating from the Iberian Peninsula, where the proportion of AE2 ancestry is relatively high (Fig. 4, white box) (4). Our sample size (n = 1) does not allow further conclusions about the prevalence of AE1 in ancient Europe and the course or rate of AE2 introgression. However, the ancient H. pylori strain provides the first evidence that AE2 was already present in Central Europe during the Copper Age, albeit at a low level. If the Iceman H. pylori strain is representative of its time, the low level of AE2 admixture suggests that most of the AE2 ancestry observed in hpEurope today is a result of AE2 introgression into Europe after the Copper Age, which is later than previously proposed (4, 6). Furthermore, our co-ancestry results indicate that the Iceman’s strain belonged to a prehistoric European branch of hpAsia2 that is different from the modern hpAsia2 population from northern India. The high genetic similarity of the ancient strain to bacteria from Europe implies that much of the diversity present in Copper Age Europe is still retained within the extant hpEurope population, despite millennia of subsequent AE2 introgression.