Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Harvard Genetics Study Finds Most Indians Are Not Indigenous

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."   Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar,  leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)  
Debunking the myth of "the purity of the Race" pushed by  Hindu Nationalist leader Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, a Harvard study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics has found that vast majority of Indians today have descended from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations--Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) who migrated from Central Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Europe,  and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent.

Source: World Values Survey and Washington Post

Geographically, Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) tend to be more concentrated in the northern and western parts of India closer to West Asia, while Ancestral South Indians are found mostly in southern and eastern parts of India.

The paper, titled "Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India" confirms that North Indians ancestors started migrating to India from outside thousands of years before the advent of Islam. ANIs and ASIs routinely intermarried between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago until the imposition of strict segregation by the Hindu caste system, according to the study.

Lactose Tolerance Map
With segregation strictly in place, the Indian society moved toward endogamy—the practice of avoiding intermarriage or close relationships between ethnic groups—which reached its most extreme form in the creation of the caste system which remains in force to this day. A 2011 report found that in “40 percent of the schools across sample districts in Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous state, with 199 million people—teachers and students refuse to partake of government-sponsored free midday meals because they are cooked by dalits (untouchables).”

The paper is based on the work of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the CSIR-Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. They conducted what they call the “most comprehensive sampling of Indian genetic variation to date,” using samples collected from 571 individuals belonging to 73 “well-defined ethno-linguistic groups.” The data allowed the authors to trace not just the genetic mixture between these groups but how long ago this mixture occurred.

World IQ (Intelligence Quotient) Map (Source: Richard Lynn)


Similar genetic studies of Pakistanis published in the American Journal of Human Genetics have found very diverse ancestral origins of the people in the country. These range from Balochis with origins in Aleppo (modern Syria) to Brahuis who are indigenous Dravidian, and Baltis of Sino-Tibetan ancestry to Pashtuns of Jewish or Central Asian origins.

These genetic studies offer strong rebuttal of Hindu Nationalists' claims of "racial purity" of Hindus. Genetics confirm that most Indians (and Pakistanis) are, in fact, people of mixed or foreign ancestry regardless of their faith.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

World Values Survey Finds Indians Most Racist

Indians Admire Israel and Hitler

Caste Apartheid in India

Religion, Caste and Politics in India by Christophe Jaffrelot

Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

Who Killed Karkare?

Procrastinating on Hindutva Terror

India's Guantanamos and Abu Ghraibs

Hindutva Government in Israeli Exile?

Growing US-India Military Ties Worry Pakistan

The 21st Century Challenges For Resurgent India


69 comments:

M said...

Excerpt from NY Times:

Mr. Dauwa is equally cautious when he speaks about Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat today and during the 2002 riots, who is the de facto prime ministerial candidate for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s national elections in 2014. “Putting 2002 aside, you can say that he is an efficient leader. Business is good. And that is good for us.” A few moments later, Mr. Dauwa added, “But this is putting 2002 aside.”

Muslims, who number about 9 percent of Gujarat’s population, are not the only meat eaters who are treated as outsiders in Gujarat. Low-caste Hindus and non-Gujarati Hindus are also often denied housing because of their diets. Mr. Desai said he has been denied accommodations because “many housing societies have strict by-laws against consuming meat or eggs.”

There are indications that the consumption of meat has increased in Gujarat. Yet eating meat still carries a stigma in the state. Asking whether someone eats meat is often a sly way to ascertain the person’s caste, and some in Gujarat see it not as a dietary choice but as a rejection of Hinduism and the Gujarati identity itself. In Gujarat, there is often a sense that meat eaters are an entirely distinct, and often lesser, category of people. “Maas khane wale logon ka vyavhar alag hota hai,” Mr. Modi once told a journalist from an Indian magazine – “Meat-eating people have a different temperament.”

In 2003, marking the 135th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth in Gujarat, Mr. Modi said, “Gujarat’s main strength lies in its vegetarianism.” Last year, when a reporter asked Mr. Modi to explain the high rates of malnourishment in Gujarat, he cited vegetarianism as a possible cause, adding, “Gujarat is by and large a vegetarian state.”

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/butter-chicken-in-ahmedabad/?_r=1

Anonymous said...

Basically a bad day for right wing loonies on both sides of the border!

Oh so you mean most Pakistanis aren't descendents of conquring Arabs,Persians and Turks!!

And Gasp! Genetically related to North Indian Hindus!!

Blasphemy!!!

Riaz Haq said...

Anon: "Oh so you mean most Pakistanis aren't descendents of conquring Arabs,Persians and Turks!!"

Some are.

And most share the same DNA as "conquring Arabs,Persians and Turks" as do North Indian Hindus.

Hopewins said...

Not one single person in India is indigenous.

The first human being set foot in India about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Everybody-- no exceptions-- is a foreigner.

Same is true of Pakistan.

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "Not one single person in India is indigenous."

If you go back far enough, about 50,000-100,000 BC, the only place which can claim indigenous population is Africa. Scientists believe humans fanned out into the world from their original home in Africa.

Hopewins said...

^^RH: "If you go back far enough, about 50,000-100,000 BC, the only place which can claim indigenous population is Africa"
-----

This is exactly what I meant.

The very idea of who is "indigenous" and who is a "foreigner" in Europe, Asia, Americas and Australia is merely a matter of time of arrival.

Is the first person to arrive "indigenous"? Or is he merely the first "foreigner"? It all depends on how you look at it.

In fact, if we use our eyes, we can see that there are 5 major races (not 2, as the study claims) in India that arrived in the regions over various periods. They are (loosely):

1) Caucasian
2) Dravidian
3) Australasian
4) Mongoloid
5) Negrito

And all Indians, one way or another, are a mixture of these 5 distinct human strains.

For example, the study talks about ANI and ASI. How would the study fit the firebrand Brahmin woman who brought down India's longest ruling communist party? Here she is:
http://alturl.com/anwjy

Is she ANI? Or is she ASI? Clearly, she does not fit into either of these two categories. Nor can she be explained by a mixture of these two categories. To explain her, we need to introduce more degrees of freedom into the model. This is why we need 5 race/strain model mentioned above.

Anonymous said...

nd most share the same DNA as "conquring Arabs,Persians and Turks" as do North Indian Hindus

Humans share 98% of DNA with chimpanzees. Thats not what i'm saying.


Certain genetic markers like R1a1 are found extensively in North India/Pakistan which is also found in Russia and Eastern Europe though largely absent in Arabs and Turks and western europeans.

This is probably proof of the krugan hypothesis of a distant ancestor common to Persians,Indians(and Pakistanis) and Russians/East Europeans. Infact remains of the Andronovo culture has been found in Merv in todays turkmenistan...

fascinating stuff!

Riaz Haq said...

Anon: "Certain genetic markers like R1a1 are found extensively in North India/Pakistan which is also found in Russia and Eastern Europe though largely absent in Arabs and Turks and western europeans."

The Harvard genetics study does not entirely agree with your statement. It has concluded that Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) also migrated from the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Europe.

In fact,majority of the Pakistanis are classified as Caucasoids, while there are sizable minorities of Capoids and Mongoloids... major ethnic groups in Pakistan are Punjabis (who are mixed), Pushtuns (who are majority Caucasians), Sindhis (who are mixed) and Baluch (who are majority Caucasians). Capoid groups include Brahui, while Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek groups are Mongoloids.

Hopewins said...

What the hell is this?

Your hero, S M Mushrif, who exposed India in his book 'Who killed Karakare', is now saying to the Milli Gazette:

"...the most safe place for Muslims today is Modi's Gujarat.."

http://alturl.com/7op7e

I thought Muslims were all living in fear in Gujarat? Please explain all this..

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "...the most safe place for Muslims today is Modi's Gujarat.."

That tells you how unsafe Muslims are in India when Mushrif believe "...the most safe place for Muslims today is Modi's Gujarat.."

That's a tragic commentary on the state of Muslims in India today.

Hopewins said...

What is that IQ map doing in this article? What has that got to do with whether Indians are indigenous or not?

Please explain yourself.

Riaz Haq said...

HWJ: "What is that IQ map doing in this article? What has that got to do with whether Indians are indigenous or not? Please explain yourself."

It's based on data from Richard Lynn whose data suggests there is correlation between race and intelligence.

As an example, his article, "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans," 2002, Population and Environment, concludes that lightness of skin color in African-Americans is positively correlated with IQ, which he claims derives from the higher proportion of Caucasian admixture.

Riaz Haq said...

Muslims have lowest living standard in India: Govt survey

Muslims in India continue to be the worst off. Indian Muslims are worse off than even the untouchables...they are the new untouchables

http://m.timesofindia.com/india/Muslims-have-lowest-living-standard-in-India-Govt-survey/articleshow/21936020.cms?intenttarget=no

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a TOI story on link between low IQ and poverty:

Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday.


The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes, researchers found.

"Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin," said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.

In a series of experiments, researchers from Harvard, Princeton and other universities in North America and from Britain's University of Warwick found that pressing financial worries had an immediate impact on poor people's ability to perform well in cognitive and logic tests.

Far from signalling that poor people are stupid, the results suggest those living on a tight budget have their effective brain power, or what the researchers called "mental bandwidth", dramatically limited by the stress of making ends meet.

On average, someone weighed down by money woes showed a drop in cognitive function in one part of the study that was comparable to a 13 point dip in IQ, and similar to the performance deficit expected from someone who has missed a whole night's sleep.

"Previous views of poverty have blamed (it) on personal failings, on an environment that is not conducive to success," said Jiaying Zhao, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

"We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function," she said. ...
---
The researchers studied two very different groups - shoppers at a mall in New Jersey in the United States, and sugar cane farmers in rural India.

In the mall study, they gathered dozens of low and middle-income shoppers and subjected them to a battery of tests to measure IQ and impulse control.

Half of the participants were first asked to think about what they would do if their car broke down and the repair cost $1,500 - designed to kick off worries about money. It was among these people that performance dipped significantly.

In India, the researchers found that farmers had diminished cognitive performance before getting paid for their harvest compared to afterwards, when their coffers have been replenished.

"One month after the harvest, they're pretty rich, but the month before - when the money has run out - they're pretty poor," Mullainathan said in a report of the research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

"What we see is that IQ goes up, (when they are rich)... errors go way down, and response times go way down."

He said the effect in India was about two-thirds the size of the effect in the mall study - equal to around nine or 10 IQ points difference from one month to the next.


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Poverty-reduces-brain-power-US-India-study/articleshow/22151485.cms

M. Alam said...

Abstract

Islam is the second most practiced religion in India, next to Hinduism. It is still unclear whether the spread of Islam in India has been only a cultural transformation or is associated with detectable levels of gene flow. To estimate the contribution of West Asian and Arabian admixture to Indian Muslims, we assessed genetic variation in mtDNA, Y-chromosomal and LCT/MCM6 markers in 472, 431 and 476 samples, respectively, representing six Muslim communities from different geographical regions of India. 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 in the form of L0a2a2 mtDNA and E1b1b1a and J*(xJ2) Y-chromosomal lineages. The distinction between Iranian and Arabian sources was difficult to make with mtDNA and the Y chromosome, as the estimates were highly correlated because of similar gene pool compositions in the sources. In contrast, the LCT/MCM6 locus, which shows a clear distinction between the two sources, enabled us to rule out significant gene flow from Arabia. Overall, our results support a model according to which the spread of Islam in India was predominantly cultural conversion associated with minor but still detectable levels of gene flow from outside, primarily from Iran and Central Asia, rather than directly from the Arabian Peninsula.

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n3/abs/ejhg2009168a.html

Riaz Haq said...

Study finds genetic links between South Asians and Mesopotamians:

The continuing debate regarding the origins of people inhabiting ancient Mesopotamia during the region’s long history led the authors of a new report published in the Open Access journal PLoS ONE to attempt an isolation and analysis of mtDNA sequences from the area.
Origins of populations
Ancient DNA methodology was applied to analyse sequences extracted from freshly unearthed remains (teeth) of 4 individuals deeply deposited in the slightly alkaline soil of Tell Ashara (ancient Terqa) and Tell Masaikh (ancient Kar-Assurnasirpal) – Syrian archaeological sites, both in the middle Euphrates valley.
Research was also carried out by another team (Sołtysiak et al 2013) examining fifty-nine dental non-metric traits on a sample of teeth from 350 human skeletons excavated at three sites in the lower middle Euphrates valley. This showed a stable population until after the Mongolian invasion which resulted in a large depopulation of northern Mesopotamia in the 13th century CE. The final major change occurred during the 17th century with Bedouin tribes arriving from the Arabian Peninsula.
Difficult procedure
Although it is not possible with DNA analysis to reconstruct the details of an individual’s life, it can provide insights into his/her ancestry. In ideal conditions, the fossil sequences are isolated from remains unearthed in permafrost or temperate regions and only in rare circumstances from skeletal material found in a subtropical arid climate, as it is suspected that the potential is highly limited in such cases.
Thus, only scarce datasets from the Mesopotamia region are available, but using ancient DNA methodology, the team were able to confirm the possibility of isolating amplifiable sequences from the skeletons under just such challenging conditions. In the case of one of the studied specimens the researchers analysed both mtDNA and nuDNA sequences.
Three others were analysed only to confirm their origin on the basis of HVR-I sequence. Studied remains were excavated at two archaeological sites in the middle Euphrates valley and dated between the Early Bronze Age and the Late Roman period (between 2500 BCE and 500 CE).
Origins in the Indian subcontinent
The studied individuals carried mtDNA haplotypes corresponding to the M4b1, M49 and/or M61 haplogroups, which are believed to have arisen in the area of the Indian subcontinent during the Upper Palaeolithic and are absent in people living today in Syria. However, these same haplogroups are present in people inhabiting today’s Tibet, Himalayas, India and Pakistan.

The suggestion is that these analysed remains from Mesopotamia belonged to people with a genetic affinity to the Indian subcontinent as the distribution of identified ancient haplotypes indicates a solid link with populations from the region of South Asia-Tibet (Trans-Himalaya).
This may represent either that the individuals are descendants of migrants from much earlier times (Palaeolithic), spreading the clades of the macrohaplogroup M throughout Eurasia and founding regional Mesopotamian groups like that of Terqa, or they are from merchants moving along trade routes passing near or through the region.
The obtained data has enriched the modest database of Mesopotamian ancient DNA and suggests a possible genetic link of the region with the Indian subcontinent in the past. There are no traces in the modern Syrian population, which is explainable as the dental study showed, by later depopulation and recolonisation, but opens up the possibilities of further work to examine the routes of both populations and civilisations.

http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/09/2013/genetic-link-shown-between-indian-subcontinent-and-mesopotamia

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a BBC report on genetic origins of Germans and Scandinavians:

DNA from ancient skeletons has revealed how a complex patchwork of prehistoric migrations fashioned the modern European gene pool.

The study appears to refute the picture of Europeans as a simple mixture of indigenous hunters and Near Eastern farmers who arrived 7,000 years ago.

The findings by an international team have been published in Science journal.

DNA was analysed from 364 skeletons unearthed in Germany - an important crossroads for prehistoric cultures.

"This is the largest and most detailed genetic time series of Europe yet created, allowing us to establish a complete genetic chronology," said co-author Dr Wolfgang Haak of the Australian Centre for DNA (ACAD) in Adelaide.

"Focusing on this small but highly important geographic region meant we could generate a gapless record, and directly observe genetic changes in 'real-time' from 7,500 to 3,500 years ago, from the earliest farmers to the early Bronze Age."

Dr Haak and his colleagues analysed DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of well-preserved remains from the Mittelelbe-Saale region of Germany. They focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - the genetic information in the cell's "batteries".

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns”

Dr Spencer Wells
Director, Genographic Project
MtDNA is passed down from a mother to her children, allowing geneticists to probe the maternal histories of populations. Geneticists recognise a variety of mitochondrial DNA "clans", or lineages, in human populations. And each of these lineages has its own distinct history.

The team's results show that indigenous hunter-gatherers in Central Europe were edged out by incomers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) some 7,500 years ago. A majority of the hunters belonged to the maternal clan known as haplogroup U, whilst the farmers carried a selection of genetic lineages characteristic of the Near East.

Around 6,100 years ago, farming was introduced to Scandinavia, which coincided with the appearance of Neolithic mtDNA lineages in that region too.

"In some ways agriculture was an obvious and easy way to go in the Fertile Crescent. But once you take it out of there, it involves an abrupt shift in lifestyle," said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, adding that early agricultural groups were living "on the edge".

"They were basically taking crops that had evolved over millions of years in the Middle East and were adapted to that dry-wet pattern of seasonality and moving them into an area that was recently de-glaciated.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a Dawn story on French scholars work in Pakistan:

...Gregoire Metais, a French paleontologist, talked about the investigation into biodiversity in the early Paleocene era. The fact that the Indian continent broke off from Africa and "drifted" in the ocean for eons allowed very specific groups of flora and fauna to develop in isolation – a great opportunity for paleontologists who want to test the “Indus Raft” theory first developed by Krause and Maas in 1990.

The French palaeontologists are studying those same flora and fauna that Henry Thomas Blanford, a 19th century British geologist, explored around Ranikot in the Kirthar Range of southern Sindh. Metais, who is also a part of the Jean-Loup Welcomme group that discovered the bones of the Baluchitherium in Dera Bugti, described the beauty of the Khadro Shale, dark grey and green in colour, with gypsum thinly intercalated between it, and Bara Sandstone, inlaid with clay and kaolinite and white sand. He shared the discovery of seven-meter long snakes, crocodile, fish, and snake vertebrae, and a huge turtle shell 63 million years old: all hard science that looked like art and sounded like poetry.

A paper by the eminent archeologist Jean-Francois Jarringe described the amazing civilisation of Mehrgarh in Balochistan from 8000 to 500 BCE and described 35 years of excavations conducted there and in Pirak. Mehrgarh was part of the Neolithic era when people lived in mud-brick houses, surrounded by pine, juniper, poplar, elm, oak, cereals, graminaceous, reeds and moss growing around them in a humid, dense forest. Skeletons lay in graves, legs flexed and frames oriented east to west, surrounded by pendants and jewellery made of lapis lazuli and turquoise, the skeletons of goats and sheep, as well as tools and pottery. Jarringe and his team also discovered traces of cotton and copper, the earliest use of both in the entire Indian subcontinent.

The later period of Mehgarh, saw the emergence of painted pottery, clay-fired and glazed, gold beads, lost-wax copper objects, and terracotta artifacts. Dr. Jarringe found links between Mehrgarh and the Indus Civilization based on their water installations for sanitation and drainage. But it was at Pirak that the agricultural revolution of the world's first irrigated agriculture system, as well as the first crops of rice and jhovar, were discovered, and figurines depicting camels, horses and horse riders.

Dr. Aurore Didier and Dr. Roland Besenal told us about 20 years of archeological work in Makran, on the Baloch coast, also called Gedrosia by the armies of Alexander the Great who crossed there on their way back to Greece after their defeat in India. In the excavations in Shahi Tump, archeologists discovered circular hut basements and quadrangular buildings, and decorated pottery that has also been found in south eastern Iran. Most fascinating was the emergence of a “cemetery culture” where bodies were coated in red ochre and wrapped in reed mats for burial.

The work of the French Archeological Mission in Sindh, led by Dr. Monique Kevran for 25 years, began in the Persian Gulf, where Dr. Kevran found ceramics from Sindh in Oman. She came to Sindh to investigate and has stayed here ever since, working in Bhanbore. Her team, co-lead by Dr. Paul Wormser, discovered six different ports in the sea, which were outer harbours to protect and tax boats as they came to trade in the Indus Delta. The main port at Bhanbore is better preserved and considered to be an exceptional site from which to study the Indian Ocean trade, which runs from China to India to Yemen to the Persian Gulf, Iran, and all points west.....


http://www.dawn.com/news/1085305/science-in-pakistan-the-french-connection

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a Dawn story on Sanskrit vs Dravidian:

The Rig Veda is the first document indicative of a turning point that subsequently changed the entire course of history in the subcontinent, paving the way for what the latter came to be known as the Indian civilization. Hindu fundamentalists beholden to Hindutva (Hinduness) spin a phony counter narrative claiming that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent spreading to Europe from here as their counterparts here propagate that the Muslims of Pakistan came from Arabia, Iran and Central Asia.

Hindu fundamentalists in their religion, driven by nationalistic zeal, try to illegitimately appropriate what was indigenous to the Indus valley prior to the arrival of the Arya, while the Muslims fundamentalists in their puritanical streak try to illegitimately own what is foreign. For ideological considerations the former take pride in proving themselves to be locals i.e., sons of the soil, while the latter boast of their self glory as foreigners i.e., successful invaders. Both distort history. Sense of history is what we lack in the subcontinent whatever faith we may belong to.

Let us begin with the word Sanskrit which means ‘composed’, ‘perfect’ or ‘synthesized’. The language was called Sanskrit because it was formulated in the grammar books by grammarians. In a contrast with it, other languages or dialects were called Prakrits which means the ‘naturals’. Sanskrit was not a natural language spoken by the people. It was also different from the Vedic used in the Vedas, the earliest version of the language of the Ayra.

Why did such a need arise to construct a language which was removed from the common speech of the masses? What were the historical conditions which compelled the Aryan elite to forge a linguistic edifice, artificial and detached? To put it simply, it was Aryan invasions which created a long-lasting atmosphere of hostility between the victors and the vanquished, forcing the former to carve out exclusive and sanitized spaces in the domains of religion, politics and culture.

Historical conditions in the wake of Aryan victory necessitated a new division of different sections of society to consolidate the gains of ascendancy to the advantage of the new settlers. What struck the newcomers as something quite different was the colour of the locals, their language and of course, their religion. That is why we hear the mentioning of ‘Varna’ the colour.

The Aryans were fair-complexioned while the Harappa people were dark-skinned. ‘Varna’ the colour initially formed the basis of new social division which created caste system pushing the local people down the social ladder to a point where they were reduced to a subhuman status. Some of the upper sections of Dravidians were accepted into the Ayran fold for political reasons as it was too difficult for the nomads to administer the organized and complex society of the Indus valley. Indra, the Aryan warlord

after having gained victory, invites the Asura chief (Asura was one of the main tribes of Indus valley) to jointly rule the territories. As to the language of the Dravidians, the well-known word ‘Malechha’ gives us a clue. ‘Malechha’ initially meant a foreign unintelligible speech. ‘Sata pathabrahmna’ narrates how the Dravidians were deprived of their speech. “...


http://www.dawn.com/news/784719/language-dravidian-versus-sanskrit

Mr PPSR said...

Who wants to read Dawn's crap on Sanskrit Vs Dravidian ??? This simple map tells the story of human migration from South Asia to other parts of the world ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haplogroup_R_%28Y-DNA%29.PNG

We all know why Ice age happens on earth every 11K years .. (due to oscillation of earth's axis from 23.8 to 21 degrees).

Ice age helped human migration from South Asia to Austrlia via indonesia/borneo .... from south asia to russia to americas to south americas .... because 10k years ago our ancestors were hunter gatherers .... In absense of Ice age (and contiguous land mass) indigenous races developed in their unique environment .... Human journey is actually due to slow change in weather over thousands of years cycle due to earth axis pendulum ...

turd said...

Actually, according to DNA test, Pashtuns have more Dravidian than Sindhis, and that Sindhis are exclusive to Sindh, and West Bengali Brahmins have R1a levels of over 72 percent, thats the highest on the planet for R1a levels.

turd said...

Actually North Indians are descendants of multiple Central Asian tribes themselves, depending on their location and caste, they descend from different haplogroups each R2, R1a1, J1, H, and other groups.

Anonymous said...

lots of rapes of invaders. 80% of Indians have Australoid blood, 20% have raped ancestors by turks. Majority of Indians are dark with round face and broad noses, weather has nothing to do with changing all that, pure genetics. If hot climate was responsible then Singapore or natives of brazil and Indonesia would be be black and look like Tamils. Indians due to their caste system don't want to accept their outside raped origins due to stigma attatched. hence this entire circus myth of hindu nationalism and Hindu gods creating hindus inside india.

Riaz Haq said...

Mani Shankar Aiyar: What #India's #Modi Has Not Recognised About #Pakistan: ITS RESILIENCE AND NATIONALISM http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/pakistans-resilience-beats-modis-56-inch-chest-771700 … via @ndtv

"unlike numerous other emerging nations, particularly in Africa, the Idea of Pakistan has repeatedly trumped fissiparous tendencies, especially since Pakistan assumed its present form in 1971. And its institutions have withstood repeated buffeting that almost anywhere elsewhere would have resulted in the State crumbling. Despite numerous dire forecasts of imminently proving to be a "failed state", Pakistan has survived, bouncing back every now and then as a recognizable democracy with a popularly elected civilian government, the military in the wings but politics very much centre-stage, linguistic and regional groups pulling and pushing, sectarian factions murdering each other, but the Government of Pakistan remaining in charge, and the military stepping in to rescue the nation from chaos every time Pakistan appeared on the knife's edge. The disintegration of Pakistan has been predicted often enough, most passionately now that internally-generated terrorism and externally sponsored religious extremism are consistently taking on the state to the point that the army is so engaged in full-time and full-scale operations in the north-west of the country bordering Afghanistan that some 40,000 lives have been lost in the battle against fanaticism and insurgency.

"And yet," as was said on a more famous occasion, "it works!" Pakistan and her people keep coming back, resolutely defeating sustained political, armed and terrorist attempts to break down the country and undermine its ideological foundations. That is what Jaffrelot calls its "resilience". That resilience is not recognized in Modi's India. That is what leads the Rathores and the Parrikars to make statements that find a certain resonance in anti-Pakistan circles in India but dangerously leverage the impact on Pakistani public opinion of anti-India circles in Pakistan. The Parrikars and the Saeeds feed on each other. It is essential that both be overcome.

But even as there are saner voices in India than Rathore's, so also are there saner - much saner - voices in Pakistan than Hafiz Saeed's. Many Indians would prefer a Pakistan overflowing with Saeeds to keep their bile flowing. So would many Pakistanis prefer an India with the Rathores overflowing to keep the bile flowing. At eight times Pakistan's size, we can flex our muscles like the bully on the school play field. But Pakistan's resilience ensures that all that emerges from Parrikar and Rathore are empty words. India is no more able than Pakistan is to destroy the other country"


http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/pakistans-resilience-beats-modis-56-inch-chest-771700

Riaz Haq said...

Origins of races in India:

The species known as Ramapithecus was found in the Siwalik foothills of the northwestern Himalayas. This species believed to be the first in the line of hominids lived some 14 million years ago. Researches have found that a species resembling the Australopithecus lived in India some 2 million years ago. Scientists have so far not been able to account for an evolutionary gap of as much as 12 million years since the appearance of Ramapithecus.

The people of India belong to different anthropological stocks. According to Dr. B. S. Guha, the population of India is derived from six main ethnic groups:

(1) Negritos: The Negritos or the brachycephalic (broad headed) from Africa were the earliest people to inhabit India. They are survived in their original habitat in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Jarewas, Onges, Sentelenese and Great Andamanis tribes are the examples. Studies have indicated that the Onges tribes have been living in the Andamans for the last 60,000 years. Some hill tribes like Irulas, Kodars, Paniyans and Kurumbas are found only in patches among the hills of south India on the mainland.

(2) Pro-Australoids or Austrics: This group was the next to come to India after the Negritos. They represent a race of people, with wavy hair plentifully distributed over their brown bodies, long heads with low foreheads and prominent eye ridges, noses with low and broad roots, thick jaws, large palates and teeth and small chins. Austrics tribes, which are spread over the whole of India, Myanmar and the islands of South East Asia, are said to "form the bedrock of the people". The Austrics were the main builders of the Indus Valley Civilisation. They cultivated rice and vegetables and made sugar from sugarcane. Their language has survived in the Kol or Munda (Mundari) in Eastern and Central India.

(3) Mongoloids: These people have features that are common to those of the people of Mongolia, China and Tibet. These tribal groups are located in the Northeastern part of India in states like Assam, Nagaland and Meghalya and also in Ladakh and Sikkim. Generally, they are people of yellow complexion, oblique eyes, high cheekbones, sparse hair and medium height.

(4) Mediterranean or Dravidian: This group came to India from the Southwest Asia and appear to be people of the same stock as the peoples of Asia Minor and Crete and the pre-Hellenic Aegeans of Greece. They are reputed to have built up the city civilization of the Indus Valley, whose remains have been found at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and other Indus cities. The Dravidians must have spread to the whole of India, supplanting Austrics and Negritos alike. Dravidians comprise all the three sub-types, Paleo-Mediterranean, the true Mediterranean and Oriental Mediterranean. This group constitutes the bulk of the scheduled castes in the North India. This group has a sub-type called Oriental group.

(5) Western Brachycephals: These include the Alpinoids, Dinaries and Armenois. The Coorgis and Parsis fall into this category.

(6) Nordics: Nordics or Indo-Aryans are the last immigrants into India. Nordic Aryans were a branch of Indo-Iranians, who had originally left their homes in Central Asia, some 5000 years ago, and had settled in Mesopotamia for some centuries. The Aryans must have come into India between 2000 and 1500 B.C. Their first home in India was western and northern Punjab, from where they spread to the Valley of the Ganga and beyond. These tribes are now mainly found in the Northwest and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). Many of these tribes belong to the "upper castes".

http://www.culturopedia.net/Tribes/tribesintro.html

kroy said...

@Riaz Haq
Hello
India is not about few % of Brahmins. We are a large group out side Brahmanism (>90%).
Our tradition is mixture of everything in world. Fall of India is fall of world and humanity.
Don't forget the fact that, there used to be large number of non-Muslims in Pakistan before partition. but Pakistan has <2% today. On other hand, Majority of India has been peaceful.
Only few north Indian states were violent. And those states were also brought under control by Indian leaders, large number of Muslims still leave there. And again In 1971, Pakistan throw out ~10 Million from east pakistan (http://oppenheimer.mcgill.ca/India-and-its-1971-Refugee-Problem). Again, Indians were been peaceful.
But still unlike Pakistan, Indians chose secular leaders till recently. Corruption in country lead to electing alternate government. If India develops in bjp rule and talks about peace/unity, it is possible that they will go much stronger. Indians are disparate for development. You can disagree and push Indians to hate pakistan more. that is what RSS want.

Bottom line: Indians don't want India to become like pakistan . I mean, blind religious country which labels people based on one or two books.

Sorry for my bad english.

Riaz Haq said...

Not all the #Hindus are Hindus! #India #Dalit #Adivasi #Jain #Caste #BJP #Modi http://www.dawn.com/news/1217795

...The Rig-Veda says that the self-destruction of Purush, the primal man, brought human society into existence. The whole society was divided into four Varnas; the Brahmins, the Kashatrias, the Vaishias and Shudras. The Brahmins came out of Purusha’s head, the Kashatrias from his arms, the Vaishias from his thighs and Shudras from his feet. Different organs of Purush determined the metaphysically sanctioned social status of different Varnas in an inflexible hierarchy. Thus the Brahmins were declared the religious/intellectual leaders, the Kashtrias the warriors/rulers, the Vaishias the farmers/artisans/craftsmen, and Shudras the labourers/menial workers. This stratification initially was an outcome of racial and ethnic discrimination that ensued from the fair-skinned Aryans’ victory over the dark-skinned Harappa people, the ancient inhabitants of the Indus valley. Varna (Varn) means colour. The social division was colour-based imposed by the victorious fair-skinned to their advantage. The victors became the masters and the vanquished the slaves. In the Punjabi language we still use ‘Van’ with letter R dropped for colour. ‘Vano Van’ means of different colours. ‘Van Savann’ means colour diversity, and ‘kanak Vanna’ means the one whose skin colour is like that of wheat.

Historical evidence suggests that not all the locals were branded as Shudras. Class factor also played a role in determining the status of local persons as to which Varna they would belong. The wealthy and powerful Dravidians could join the club of upper Varnas on certain conditions by offering high value presents and a share of their wealth. At the other end of spectrum Aryans who happened to live at socio-economic fringes were pushed into Shudras’ enclosure. It surprises you when you come across the dark-skinned Brahmins and Kashtrias (some of the Rajputs for example), and the fair-skinned sweepers among the descendants of Shudras. The myth of racial purity proves hollow if examined empirically and critically.

Then there were large groups which remained outside the Aryan fold. They were the wretched of the earth, lower than Shudras in status and were generally known as untouchables. Since the Brahmins had pathologically been obsessed with the idea of ritual cleanliness, they declared all those who did supposedly polluting jobs, untouchables. The untouchables of today are descendants of Shudras and pre-Aryan indigenous communities who after being subjugated were forced to adopt the so-called polluting professions. This was in fact a politico-religious ploy to retain the power of the dominant Varnas. Varna system was based on the distinctions of colour. But later on the Aryan elite, religious and secular, evolved caste system which stemmed from Varna division of society. Caste system (Jati Dharma) within the loose framework of Varnas gradually re-aligned different social groups along the lines of their supposed descent and professions. And most menial professions were assigned to the untouchables who were not allowed to touch the higher castes. They in fact were required to stand at a distance while talking to their upper caste overlords. Dalits and Adivasi, the perennial flotsam of Indian society, form the bulk of the untouchables in the present-day India. Though culturally Indians, they are not Hindus if viewed from the perspective of upper castes. Their ways of eating, dressing and worshiping are different from those of upper castes which set them apart as people with a distinct identity, older than Brahminic hocus-pocus flaunted as a marker of Indian identity.

Unknown said...

The ANI and ASI theory is correct, but your conclusion that the ANIs arrived from Central Asia and Caucasia, etc is absolutely incorrect. India (or South Asia, if you prefer that) has had no infusion of foreign genes for 60,000 years (American Journal of Human Genetics 2011). Further, American Journal of Human Genetics in 2006 published an article confirming that there has been no infusion of any major Central Asian genes for 10,000 years.

Whatever your ideological point to prove is, please don't bend data to suit it.

Riaz Haq said...

Fact check: #India wasn't the first place #Sanskrit was recorded – it was #Syria. #Modi #BJP

http://scroll.in/article/737715/fact-check-india-wasnt-the-first-place-sanskrit-was-recorded-it-was-syria … via @scroll_in


As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.

After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit. The Indian government is enthusiastically participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok. Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2. Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs. How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.

On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited. Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.

Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren't Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.

The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit

The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.

Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names include Purusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.

Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).

The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare. A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word "marya", meaning “young man”.

The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones). They signed a treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which names Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis. While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in the Rig Veda.

Anonymous said...

In your article about Sanskrit originating in Syria, you forget that Syria was part of India. There were many kings who rule the whole world like King Vikramaditya.

The King Vikramaditya inscription was found on a gold dish hung inside the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, proving beyond doubt that the Arabian Peninsula formed a part of his Indian Empire. (Ref: page 315 of a volume known as Sayar-ul-Okul treasured in the Makhtab-e-Sultania library in Istanbul, Turkey). King Vikrama's preachers had succeeded in spreading the Vedic Hindu sacred scriptures in Arabia and Arabs were once followers of the Indian Vedic way of life.

So there is no doubt that India was the first place where Sanskrit was recorded as Syria was part of India.

Riaz Haq said...

Secret #Harvard meeting on synthetic #human #genome incites #ethics debate, draws academics ire. #DNA

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/13/secret-harvard-meeting-on-synthetic-human-genomes-incites-ethics-debate/


About 150 scientists assembled at Harvard on Tuesday for an off-the-record, no-media-allowed discussion of how to create, from scratch, an intact genome, including the genetic code of a human being. The idea is to go beyond "reading" genetic material to actively "writing" it, George Church, a Harvard Medical School researcher who helped organized the event, told The Post in an interview Friday morning.

Scientists can synthesize DNA chemically, and these techniques could ultimately lead to complete genomes that could be implanted in cells for research purposes. No one should panic just yet about mad scientists running amok: The researchers are not talking about making synthetic human beings. But the gathering drew a rebuke from two academics who heard about the event and didn't think it should have been held behind closed doors.

Drew Endy, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, and Laurie Zoloth, a professor of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University, published an essay this week raising questions about whether the gathering at Harvard had gone too far. After citing the beneficial possibilities of such research, they raised the thornier ethical questions:

In a world where human reproduction has already become a competitive marketplace, with eggs, sperm and embryos carrying a price, it is easy to make up far stranger uses of human genome synthesis capacities. Would it be OK, for example, to sequence and then synthesize Einstein’s genome? If so how many Einstein genomes should be made and installed in cells, and who would get to make them? Taking a step back, just because something becomes possible, how should we approach determining if it is ethical to pursue?

Meanwhile, Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Genetics and Society, a politically progressive organization that has had a skeptical view of biotechnology, issued a statement Friday criticizing the Harvard gathering: "If these reports are accurate, the meeting looks like a move to privatize the current conversation about heritable genetic modification."

Church told The Post that the meeting was originally supposed to be open.

The organizers had planned to stream video of the event, and invite numerous journalists, he said. But they had also hoped to pair the event with an article, written by many scientists, that had submitted to a major scientific journal.

The article still hasn't been published and the organizers decided to keep the event private, Church said. He said the organizers wanted to avoid being accused of "science by press release" without a peer-reviewed article backing them up.

He said the video of the event will be released when the peer-reviewed article is published, likely in the very near future. "It wasn't secret. There was nothing secret or private about it," Church said. But he added: "Probably with 20-20 hindsight we shouldn't have tried to couple it with a peer-reviewed paper.”

Something tells us this isn't the last time we're going to be talking about synthetic humanoids.

Riaz Haq said...

In #India, #Black #Africans feel hounded by prejudice. #racism http://toi.in/tAmh-a via @timesofindia

f you are black , you are either a drug peddler or a prostitute. This is the reality that Africans live with in Delhi every day. A racist undertone in all interactions with people from Africa living and working in Delhi can often cloud perceptions about them. Aam Aadmi Party's Somnath Bharti was accused of racism last year after a midnight raid on an alleged drug and prostitution racket in Khirki village. Now, racism is one of the angles that the police are investigating in the killing of Oliver, a youth from Congo , in Vasant Kunj on Friday.
After last year's raid in Khirki, a large number of Africans relocated to other areas such as Sangam Vihar, Aya Nagar and Chhattarpur. Those left behind are confined to a few narrow alleys in Hauz Rani. Their businesses may be straddling a grey area, but the Africans continue to face discrimination due to the colour of their skin and the distorted presumptions about them.
Enjona from Nigeria runs a beauty salon called Marris Exotic Creations in Khirki. "Indians are racist," she says bluntly. "Someday we may face the same fate as the Congolese man. When I call home in Nigeria, I tell my family to treat Indians badly. They don't deserve to do business and live freely in Africa."
Antonia from Angola isn't quite so vehement and says she has some good Indian friends. But she still won't step out of the house after 9 pm "because men always think we are prostitutes".
Rohit Kochchar, who runs a grocery store near the salon, sums it for the locals: "We don't know what the African men do. Many probably deal in drugs. The women don't work either. Most of their visas have expired. They are still allowed to stay because they can pay higher rent."
The tension between the two sides is obvious. "The locals think Africans are evil because they are black," says Pooja Sood, director, Khoj International Artists Association, who adds that most Africans in the city are refugees. "The residents have strange ideas that Africans eat their own babies. It is a lack of education and I think it stems from a casteist approach to everything," explains Sood. "This is not to say that there are no bad people in their community. But that's there in every community. I think such discrimination only comes from the fear of the other." Several Somalian girls and boys work with Khoj, taking hip hop classes or taking up other projects, including an India-Africa project.

Ottar said...

"The paper, titled "Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India" confirms that North Indians ancestors started migrating to India from outside thousands of years before the advent of Islam."


You make definitive conclusions in your blog, conclusions that the original article does not make. The article is primarily rooted in genetics. While the authors discuss, social causes/implications behind the genetics they also, rather responsibly, state the limitations of their research. Towards the end of their paper, they explicitly state:

"It is also important to emphasize what our study has not
shown. Although we have documented evidence for
mixture in India between about 1,900 and 4,200 years
BP, this does not imply migration from West Eurasia into
India during this time. On the contrary, a recent study
that searched for West Eurasian groups most closely related
to the ANI ancestors of Indians failed to find any evidence
for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West
Eurasia within the past 12,500 years (although it is
possible that with further sampling and new methods
such relatedness might be detected)"

To conclude that this article proves migration is incorrect; this article is about genetic admixture rather than migration. After stating this caveat, the authors go on to discuss a number of other possibilities that may explain their findings. While the migration may have occurred several millennia earlier, that is not what this article is about.

Riaz Haq said...

35% of what #Indians eat today is of `foreign' origin. #India #food http://toi.in/AefC9b57 via @timesofindia

Most of us know exotic new veggies and grains like kale and quinoa are "imported" but even ordinary staples like potato, onion, tomato and chilli came from elsewhere, reports Subodh Varma.
A study of 177 countries by scientists from the International Center of Tropical Agriculture has found that in India, more than a third of all food items derived from plants -grains, vegetables, fruits, spices, oils, sugar etc. -originated and developed elsewhere, and came to this subcontinent by trade or migration over centuries.

In terms of calorific value, such `foreign' origin foods make up 45 per cent of the national food production. It's not just India. At the global level, 66 per cent of calories consumed are derived from foreign origin foods on an average as was 71 per cent of production.
Onions and wheat have their origins in West Asia, potatoes and tomatoes came from South America, while mustard seeds came from the Mediterranean. Likewise, chillies came to India from Central America, while garlic and apples found their way from Central Asia.
Stay updated on the go with Times of India News App. Click here to download it for your device.


Anonymous said...

@turd, you are literally an idiot if you believe that and his have more Dravidian than pashtuns do. Pashtuns barely have any Dravidian. They have 11% ANI, which is majority west asian component with little south indian in it. Most caucasoids are mixed with SI to a slight degree anyways.

vAsiSTha said...

Further studies prove that the commonality of north Indian and European genes have to have happened before 12000 years. Which means that the Vedic people were natural inhabitants of pak/india. No right wing agenda. This is the truth. Kindly also publish the advanced time research.

Riaz Haq said...

#Europe's Roma #Gypsy descended from #India's 'untouchables' or #Dalits , genetic study shows. #caste #migration

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9719058/European-Roma-descended-from-Indian-untouchables-genetic-study-shows.html

Roma gypsies in Britain and Europe are descended from "dalits" or low caste "untouchables" who migrated from the Indian sub-continent 1,400 years ago, a genetic study has suggested.

The study, which was published this month in the journal Nature, examined Y chromosomes in DNA samples to compare the genetic signatures of European Roma men with those of thousands of Indians from throughout the sub-continent.
Scientists from Hyderabad's Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology collaborated with colleagues in Estonia and Switzerland to compare more than 10,000 samples, including from members of 214 different Indian ethnic groups. They were analysed to match a South Asian Y chromosome type known as "haplogroup H1a1a-M82", which passes down male bloodlines, with samples from Roma men in Europe.

While there were matches with samples from men throughout the Indian sub-continent, the closest match and the least genetic variation occurred with those from north-west India.
When the researchers overlaid the closest matches onto a genetic map of India, the highest density was in areas dominated by India's "doma", "scheduled tribes and castes" – the low caste dalits or untouchables who suffer widespread and generational discrimination and usually do society's dirtiest jobs.
The researchers believe the descendants of today's Roma gypsies in Europe began their westward exodus first to fight in wars in what is today Punjab between 1001 and 1026 on the promise of a promotion in caste status.
Later, they left to flee the fall of Hindu kingdoms in what is today Pakistan, with many setting off from near Gilgit.
The exodus to North Africa and Europe suggested they may have been early refugees from the spread of Islam into the Indian sub-continent. Dr Kivisild said the study had provided "evidence for the further interpretation of history of what kind of processes were triggerimg these movements".
Gypsy groups in Britain trace their own roots back first to Egypt – where they believe the name "gypsy" comes from – and beyond that to India. Joseph Jones of the Gypsy Council said early photographs show British gypsies with Indian facial features and styles of dress until 100 years ago.
He said the new study was helpful because it had scientifically confirmed the Indian origin of Britain and Europe's Roma community and that their common heritage should be accepted now by newer Indian communities in Britain. "We're not outcasts here. I don't care if we are associated with dalits – I don't live in a community where caste exists. I do feel a bit Indian, I've always felt an affinity with Indians," he said.

Riaz Haq said...

#Aryan Invasion Destroyed #Indus Civilization,Changed #India's Bronze-Age Population #IVC #Pakistan https://shar.es/1BOV3b via @LiveScience

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population.

----
The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population. The same mysterious people — ancient livestock herders called the Yamnaya who rode wheeled chariots and spoke a proto-Indo-European language — also moved across Europe more than 1,000 years earlier. Somehow, they left their genetic signature with most European men, but not women, earlier studies suggest. The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]
---------
From the earliest days of colonial rule in India, linguists like William Jones and Jakob Grimm (who co-edited "Grimm's Fairy Tales") noticed that Sanskrit shared many similarities with languages as disparate as French, English, Farsi (or Persian) and Russian. Linguists eventually arrived at the conclusion that all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, which they dubbed Indo-European.

But while North Indian languages are predominantly Indo-European, South Indian languages mostly belong to the Dravidian language family. To explain this, scholars proposed the so-called Aryan invasion theory — that a group of people from outside India swept in and brought a proto-Sanskrit language to northern India. (The name "Aryans" came from a Sanskrit word for "noble" or "honorable.") In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan.

----

..... In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan.
-----------------

The team found evidence that people began colonizing India more than 50,000 years ago and that there were multiple waves of migration into India from the northwest over the last 20,000 years, including waves of people from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago.

But evidence for one migration was particularly striking: The genetic makeup of the Y chromosome dramatically shifted about 4,000 to 3,800 years ago, the study found. About 17.5 percent of Indian men carry a Y-chromosome subtype, or haplogroup, known as R1, with the haplogroup more dominant in men in the north compared to the south of India.

The team found evidence that people began colonizing India more than 50,000 years ago and that there were multiple waves of migration into India from the northwest over the last 20,000 years, including waves of people from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago. But evidence for one migration was particularly striking: The genetic makeup of the Y chromosome dramatically shifted about 4,000 to 3,800 years ago, the study found. About 17.5 percent of Indian men carry a Y-chromosome subtype, or haplogroup, known as R1, with the haplogroup more dominant in men in the north compared to the south of India.

Riaz Haq said...

Gujjar tribespeople in Kashmir. The group is among 14 others in South Asia that has over a million people but probably started with major genetic contributions from just 100 people or fewer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/health/india-south-asia-castes-genetics-diseases.html

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3917.html?foxtrotcallback=true

In certain states in southern India, anesthesiologists know to ask anyone undergoing surgery whether they belong to the Vysya, a regional group traditionally associated with traders and businesspeople.

Anecdotally, medical workers know that some people with Vysya ancestry — who live primarily in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — have had fatal responses to common muscle relaxants, so doctors will use a different combination of drugs.

The Vysya may have other medical predispositions that have yet to be characterized — as may hundreds of other subpopulations across South Asia, according to a study published in Nature Genetics on Monday. The researchers suspect that many such medical conditions are related to how these groups have stayed genetically separate while living side by side for thousands of years.

South Asians should be viewed not as a single population but as thousands of distinct groups reinforced by cultural practices that promote marrying within one’s community. Although recent changes to cultural norms have resulted in more marriages between members of different groups like castes or subcastes, especially in some urban areas, gene flow between populations was restricted for millenniums, the authors report.

Marriage within a limited group, or endogamy, has created millions of people who are susceptible to recessive diseases, which develop only when a child inherits a disease-carrying gene from both parents, said Kumarasamy Thangaraj, an author of the study and a senior scientist at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.

----------

Today, South Asia consists of around 5,000 anthropologically well-defined groups. Over 15 years, the researchers collected DNA from people belonging to a broad swath of these groups, resulting in a rich set of genetic data that pushes beyond the field’s focus on individuals of European ancestry, Dr. Reich said.

The scientists then looked at something called the founder effect. When a population originates from a small group of founders that bred only with each other, certain genetic variants can become amplified, more so than in a larger starting population with more gene exchange.


----------

The strongest of these founder groups most likely started with major genetic contributions from just 100 people or fewer. Today, 14 groups with these genetic profiles in South Asia have estimated census sizes of over one million. These include the Gujjar, from Jammu and Kashmir; the Baniyas, from Uttar Pradesh; and the Pattapu Kapu, from Andhra Pradesh. All of these groups have estimated founder effects about 10 times as strong as those of Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, which suggests the South Asian groups have “just as many, or more, recessive diseases,” said Dr. Reich, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage himself.

Riaz Haq said...

India, largely a country of immigrants

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/India-largely-a-country-of-immigrants/article15127444.ece

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India.

If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are an absolute imperative if we wish to keep India united. If it was believed at one time that Dravidians were the original inhabitants of India, that view has since been considerably modified. Now the generally accepted belief is that the pre-Dravidian aborigines, that is, the ancestors of the present tribals or Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes), were the original inhabitants. This is the thesis put forward in a judgment delivered on January 5, 2011 by a Supreme Court of India Bench comprising Justice Markandey Katju and Justice Gyan Sudha Misra . This historical disquisition came in Criminal Appeal No. 11 of 2011, arising out of Special Leave Petition No. 10367 of 2010 in Kailas & Others versus State of Maharashtra TR. Taluka P.S .

The appeal was filed against a judgment and order passed by the Aurangabad Bench of Bombay High Court. The Supreme Court Bench saw in the appeal a typical instance of how many Indians treat the Scheduled Tribes, or Adivasis. The case related to Nandabai, 25, belonging to the Bhil tribe, a Scheduled Tribe in Maharashtra. She was beaten, kicked and stripped, and then paraded naked on the village road, over an alleged illicit relationship with a man from an upper caste. The four accused were convicted by the Additional Sessions Judge, Ahmednagar, under different Sections of the Indian Penal Code and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for six months, one year and three months in three instances and to pay a fine in each. They were convicted under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for one year and a fine. But the High Court acquitted them of the charges under the SC/ST Act, while confirming the convictions under the IPC provisions. Each was directed to pay Rs. 5,000 to the victim.

Excerpts from the Supreme Court judgment (the full text is at www.thehindu.com).

The Bhils are probably the descendants of some of the original inhabitants of India known as the ‘aborigines' or Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis), who now comprise only about eight per cent of the population of India. The rest, 92 per cent, consists of descendants of immigrants. Thus India is broadly a country of immigrants, like North America.

While North America (USA and Canada) has new immigrants who came mainly from Europe over the last four or five centuries, India is a country of old immigrants in which people have been coming in over the last ten thousand years or so. Probably about 92 per cent of the people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, who came mainly from the North-West, and to a lesser extent from the North-East. Since this is a point of great importance for the understanding of our country, it is necessary to go into it in some detail.

Riaz Haq said...

Aryan Invasion May Have Transformed India's Bronze-Age Population
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer

https://www.livescience.com/59703-north-india-populated-by-central-asian-invaders.html

An influx of men from the steppe of Central Asia may have swept into India around 3,500 years ago and transformed the population.

The same mysterious people — ancient livestock herders called the Yamnaya who rode wheeled chariots and spoke a proto-Indo-European language — also moved across Europe more than 1,000 years earlier. Somehow, they left their genetic signature with most European men, but not women, earlier studies suggest.

The new data confirm a long-held but controversial theory that Sanskrit, the ancient language of Northern India, emerged from an earlier language spoken by an influx of people from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. [24 Amazing Archaeological Discoveries]

"People have been debating the arrival of the Indo-European languages in India for hundreds of years," said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England. "There's been a very long-running debate about whether the Indo-European languages were brought from migrations from outside, which is what most linguists would accept, or if they evolved indigenously."

Aryan invasion theory

From the earliest days of colonial rule in India, linguists like William Jones and Jakob Grimm (who co-edited "Grimm's Fairy Tales") noticed that Sanskrit shared many similarities with languages as disparate as French, English, Farsi (or Persian) and Russian. Linguists eventually arrived at the conclusion that all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, which they dubbed Indo-European.

But while North Indian languages are predominantly Indo-European, South Indian languages mostly belong to the Dravidian language family. To explain this, scholars proposed the so-called Aryan invasion theory — that a group of people from outside India swept in and brought a proto-Sanskrit language to northern India. (The name "Aryans" came from a Sanskrit word for "noble" or "honorable.") In the early 1900s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed that these Aryan people may have conquered, and caused the collapse of, the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in what is now India and Pakistan.

The Aryan migration theory eventually became controversial because it was used to justify claims of superiority for different Indian subgroups; was claimed as the basis for the caste system; and in a bastardized form, was incorporated into Nazi ideology that the Aryans were the "master race."

What's more, earlier genetic data did not seem to corroborate the notion of a dramatic Aryan influx into India during the Bronze Age, according to a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Riaz Haq said...

Aryan Invasion May Have Transformed India's Bronze-Age Population
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer

https://www.livescience.com/59703-north-india-populated-by-central-asian-invaders.html

Contd....

But past genetic analyses were based on either DNA from mitochondria, which is passed from mothers to daughters, or from genetic mutations found in nuclear DNA, which are inherited from both parents but can be difficult to date.
In the current study, which was reported in March in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, Richards and colleagues analyzed modern genetic data from mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome DNA — which is passed only from father to son — and nuclear DNA. By tying all these pieces of data together, the team was able to tie patterns of migration to specific points in time.
The team found evidence that people began colonizing India more than 50,000 years ago and that there were multiple waves of migration into India from the northwest over the last 20,000 years, including waves of people from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago.
But evidence for one migration was particularly striking: The genetic makeup of the Y chromosome dramatically shifted about 4,000 to 3,800 years ago, the study found. About 17.5 percent of Indian men carry a Y-chromosome subtype, or haplogroup, known as R1, with the haplogroup more dominant in men in the north compared to the south of India.
This new finding points to an ancient group of people who inhabited the grassland between the Caspian and Black seas from about 5,000 to 2,300 years ago, known broadly as the Yamnaya people. The Yamnaya (and its later subgroup, the Andronovo culture) typically buried their dead in pit graves, drove wheeled horse chariots, herded livestock and spoke an early precursor Indo-European language. About 5,000 years ago, people from this culture almost completely transformed the genetic landscape of Europe, a 2015 Science study suggests.
The genetic signature of the Yamnaya people shows up strongly in the male lineage, but hardly at all in the female lineage, the study found.
One possibility is that a group of horse-riding warriors swept across India, murdered the men and raped or took local women as wives, but not all explanations are that martial, Richards said. For instance, it's possible that whole family units from the Yamnaya migrated to India, but that the men were either able to acquire (or started out with) higher status than local males and thus sired more children with local women, Richards said.
"It's very easy for Y-chromosome composition to change very quickly," Richards told Live Science. "Just because individual men can have a lot more children than women can."
The shift wasn't as dramatic as the genetic transformation of Europe; while up to 90 percent of European men from some countries carry a version of R1, only a minority of men from the Indian subcontinent do, Richards said.
"It's not like a complete wipeout by any means," Richards said.
Remaining questions
The study has a limitation: Because the very hot conditions in India don't preserve DNA well, the group lacks ancient DNA to prove that ancient migrants to the region carried the R1 haplogroup, said James Mallory, an archaeologist at Queen's University Belfast in Ireland,
o was not involved in the study.
"They're trying to read the history of a people through its modern DNA," Mallory told Live Science. In the past, similarly well-grounded theories have been disproven once people sampled ancient skeletal remains, Mallory added.
The other problem is that there is very little archaeological evidence for a dramatic cultural transformation in India at that time, he added. The Andronovo left behind distinctive artifacts and evidence of their culture in other places, such as their pit burials and unique pottery.
\

Riaz Haq said...

Southern Europeans More African Than Thought
By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | June 3, 2013 03:00pm ET
https://www.livescience.com/37092-southern-europeans-have-african-genes.html


Southern Europeans get a significant portion of their genetic ancestry from North Africa, new research suggests.

The findings are perhaps not surprising, given that the Romans occupied North Africa and set up extensive trade routes in the region, and the Moors, a North African people, ruled a medieval territory called El-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula.

But the findings, published today (June 3) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest the impact of these connections went beyond culture and architecture, and may explain why Southern Europeans have more genetic diversity than their northern counterparts.

"The higher level of genetic variation in Southern Europeans reflects gene flow from North Africa during historical times. We're talking about the last 2,000 years, really from the Middle Ages during which there was occupation in Spain," said study co-author Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University.

More diverse

Past studies had shown that Southern Europeans such as Spaniards, Greeks and Italians had more genetic variability than people from Northern Europe; other studies showed they had a small percentage of what looked like sub-Saharan ancestry. [The 10 Things That Make Humans Unique]

Some argued that this genetic diversity came from the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe or the Roman contact with North African civilizations such as Carthage around 2,000 years ago.

But because researchers didn't have DNA samples from people in North Africa, the link was difficult to prove.

Substantial mixing

To untangle European ancestry, Bustamante and his colleagues compared existing DNA samples of 2,099 individuals from 43 different populations in Europe and Africa. Crucially, they included new genetic samples from North Africa and Spain.

The team found that for Southwestern Europeans (those from Italy, Spain and Greece), between 4 and 20 percent of their genomes came from North Africa, compared to less than 2 percent in Southeastern Europe.

The study also found that the apparent sub-Saharan ancestry in these populations was actually the result of North African lineage.

Many contacts

The findings suggest contacts between the two continents left traces in the genetics of people of the Iberian Peninsula.

"Studies such as this are key to improving our understanding of the impact of historical events and migration patterns in recent human history," Graham Coop, a population geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. "There had been evidence of this contribution before, but the magnitude of the genome-wide contribution had been underestimated, in part due to the lack of dense sampling of Northern African populations."

Though the findings are fascinating, the study researchers weren't able to resolve how much of this North African genetic component emerged during Roman times versus during the more modern Moorish occupation, said Priya Moorjani, a geneticist from Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.

"It would be really exciting to look at all these events, but with modern DNA it can be quite hard to do that."

Instead, looking at ancient DNA from fossil skeletons of Romans and Moors could help to answer those more detailed questions, Moorjani said.


Ahmad F. said...

There is no Indian race or Pakistani race for that matter. It is a diverse collection of ethnicities but the particular combination that results is uniquely Indian in culture and dress and sports and movies and cuisine.


Viewed against that backdrop, Pakistanis are almost identical to Indians, especially the offspring of those who migrated west.

We should all get DNA tested. I intend to do that one of these days! I suspect they will find some heavy dose of Mongolian genes.

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmad: "There is no Indian race or Pakistani race for that matter. It is a diverse collection of ethnicities but the particular combination that results is uniquely Indian in culture and dress and sports and movies and cuisine. "


Northern Indians and Pakistanis have much in common. Their culture is often described as Indo-Persian with string Persian influence.

However, Pakistanis also have a lot in common with West Asians.

There are several distinct differences between Indians and Pakistanis that give clues about their genetic makeup:

1. Unlike most Indians, most Pakistanis are not lactose intolerant. It's seen in about 3X per capita milk consumption in Pakistan than in India.

2. Pakistanis' trophic level is among the highest in the world. A measure of where people and animals sit in the food chain, Pakistani's trophic level is comparable to that of Northern Europeans.

3. Pakistanis' wheat consumption is 2X higher than Indians....Indians eat a lot more rice instead in most of the eastern and southern parts of India.

4. Pakistanis' IQ levels are several points higher than Indians, according to data published in top peer-reviewed psychology journals.

Riaz Haq said...

How We, The Indians, Came to Be
Tony JosephTony JosephUpdated: 02.04.18


https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/genomic-study-vedic-aryan-migration-dravidian-languages-sanskrit

So what does the study say?
One doesn’t know if it was designed that way, but the study addresses the three fundamental questions that have bedevilled Indian archaeologists, anthropologists and historians for decades. These are also the questions that hold the key to understanding how the Indian population is put together, what its basic components are, and how migrations at different points of time may have shaped it.

Question One: Were the beginnings of agriculture in north-western India helped along by the spread of agriculturists from western Asia, or did western Asian crops such as barley and wheat spread to south Asia without the accompaniment of migration?

Question Two: Who built and populated the Indus Valley civilisation? Were they migrants from western Asia? Or were they indigenous hunter-gatherers who had transitioned to agriculture and then urban settlements? Or were they Vedic Aryans?
Question Three: Was there a significant migration of pastoralists from the central Asian Steppe to south Asia who brought with them Indo-European language and culture and who called themselves Aryans? If there was, when did that happen?


The ‘Aryan’ Migration
The study’s response to each question is reasoned and clear in a manner that none of those questions have ever been answered before.

Let’s start with the last question first, about the ‘Aryan’ migration.

According to the study, there was indeed southward migration of pastoralists from the south-eastern Steppe – first towards southern central Asian regions of today’s Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan between 2,300 and 1,500 BCE, and then towards South Asia throughout the second millennium BCE (2,000 to 1,000 BCE). On their route, they impacted the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) that thrived between 2,300 and 1,700 BCE, but mostly bypassed it to move further down towards South Asia. There they mixed with the existing people of the Indus Valley, thus creating one of the two main sources of population in India today: Ancestral North Indians or ANI, the other being Ancestral South Indians, or ASI.

The study arrived at these conclusions after detecting the signals of the migration in the ancient DNA. To quote: “Outlier analysis shows no evidence of Steppe pastoralist ancestry in groups surrounding BMAC sites prior to 2,100 BCE, but suggests that between 2,100-1,700 BCE, the BMAC communities were surrounded by peoples carrying such ancestry.”


Among the ancient DNA from BMAC sites – as well as among the DNA from the eastern Iranian site of Shahr-i-Sokhta – there were some surprising finds with major consequences: Three outlier individuals dated to between 3,100 to 2,200 BC, with an ancestry profile similar to ancient DNA samples from the Swat Prehistoric Grave Culture of Pakistan almost a thousand years later (1,200 to 800 BCE). The BMAC, Shahr-i-Sokhta and the Swat Valley samples were all distinctive in having 14 to 42 percent ancestry from South Asian hunter-gatherers. The Indus Valley civilisation was known to have had contacts with both BMAC and Shahr-i-Sokhta, so the authors of the study suggest that these outlier individuals were recent immigrants from the Indus Valley Civilisation who later migrated to BMAC.


But the story is not over yet.

The scientists compared the Swat Valley samples from 1200 BCE to 1 CE with the outliers from BMAC and Shahr-i-Sokhta and what they found was revealing. While the Swat Valley samples were genetically very similar to the ancient outlier individuals, they also differed significantly in harbouring Steppe ancestry of about 22 percent. “This provides direct evidence for Steppe ancestry being integrated into South Asian groups in the 2nd millennium BCE, and is also consistent with the evidence of southward expansions of the Steppe groups through Turan at this time,” says the study.

Riaz Haq said...

#India deputy rep at #UN: #Indian civilization built on "waves of #migration". "Science confirms that all of us are migrants. The deep and the more recent history of our migration and mixed ancestry is, in fact, recorded in our genes," http://toi.in/7i9GCa49/a24gk via @timesofindia

India has acknowledged here at an international forum that its civilization was built upon successive waves of migration like most countries and it was a scientific fact.
"The Indian civilization has been built upon successive waves of migration throughout history comprising traders, soldiers, missionaries, communities escaping persecution, artists and academics and artisans seeking better opportunities," India's Deputy Permanent Representative Tanmaya Lal said on Monday.
"This mega diversity of our peoples is among our greatest strength," he said at a session of the intergovernmental negotiations on a global compact on migration.
The statement comes amid heated debates in India about historic migrations, some that happened eons ago.
Lal did not get into the debate or into the specific theories or peoples, but made a general statement, which mentioned "soldiers" among the wave of migrants.
He pointed out that migrations were a global phenomenon throughout history and nations have emerged through this inter-mingling.
"Most nation states and societies have been built upon waves of migration over the past several centuries," he said.
"Science confirms that all of us are migrants. The deep and the more recent history of our migration and mixed ancestry is, in fact, recorded in our genes," Lal added.
"Migration has continued to expand and is now aided by the integration of economies over the last few decades," he said.
Speaking of the benefits to the world through migration, he cited the example of Mahatma Gandhi, who studied in England and worked in South Africa, saying he is "among the most well-known international migrants who contributed hugely to our collective progress."
Lal also mentioned the many Nobel Prize-winners of Indian descent "who made seminal contribution to science" as well as foreign-born scientists, inventors, businesspersons, artistes, sportspersons, authors, academics, doctors and political leaders "who have made an indelible mark not only on societies where they lived but globally."

Negotiations are taking place for a global agreement to facilitate safe, orderly and regular international migration that is to be concluded in December in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Lal tried to dispel what he considered two widely held misconceptions about India and migrations

While India is considered to be among the top countries of origin for migrants globally, the rate of emigration from India is less than half of the world's average, he said.
"It is much lesser known and appreciated that India is also among the major countries of destination, as also a transit country, for migrants largely from our neighbourhood," he added.

Husayn said...

In the last centuries BCE the coast became important to the Greeks and Romans for its spices, especially black pepper. The Cheras had trading links with China, West Asia, Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In foreign-trade circles the region was known as Male or Malabar.[22] Muziris, Berkarai, and Nelcynda were among the principal ports at that time.[23] The value of Rome's annual trade with the region was estimated at around 50,000,000 sesterces;[24] contemporary Sangam literature describes Roman ships coming to Muziris in Kerala, laden with gold to exchange for pepper. One of the earliest western traders to use the monsoon winds to reach Kerala was Eudoxus of Cyzicus, around 118 or 166 BCE, under the patronage of Ptolemy VIII, king of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Roman establishments in the port cities of the region, such as a temple of Augustus and barracks for garrisoned Roman soldiers, are marked in the Tabula Peutingeriana; the only surviving map of the Roman cursus publicus.

Merchants from West Asia and Southern Europe established coastal posts and settlements in Kerala

Husayn said...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pandian-dynasty-roman-greek-connections-pmp-pmi-acp-itilv3

Husayn said...

Hs Ancestor is HIJK

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_H_(Y-DNA)

And there is more j dna in south india

Riaz Haq said...

How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India
By Tony Joseph
Tony Joseph is the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, published by Juggernaut

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46616574

Studies using ancient DNA have been rewriting prehistory all over the world in the last few years and in India, there has been one fascinating discovery after another.

The most recent study on this subject, led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, was published in March 2018 and co-authored by 92 scholars from all over the world - many of them leading names in disciplines as diverse as genetics, history, archaeology and anthropology.

Underneath its staid title - The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia - lay some volcanic arguments.

The study showed that there were two major migrations into India in the last 10,000 years.

The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world's first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India.

This would have been between 7,000 and 3,000BCE. These Zagrosian herders mixed with the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent - the First Indians, descendants of the Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who had reached India around 65,000 years ago - and together, they went on to create the Harappan civilisation.

Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation
In the centuries after 2000 BCE came the second set of immigrants (the Aryans) from the Eurasian Steppe, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan. They likely brought with them an early version of Sanskrit, mastery over horses and a range of new cultural practices such as sacrificial rituals, all of which formed the basis of early Hindu/Vedic culture. (A thousand years before, people from the Steppe had also moved into Europe, replacing and mixing with agriculturists there, spawning new cultures and spreading Indo-European languages).

Other genetic studies have brought to light more migrations into India, such as that of the speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages who came from south-eastern Asia.

As I write in my book, the best way to understand the Indian population is to imagine it as a pizza, with the first Indians forming its base. Though the base of this rather irregular pizza is thin in some places and thick in others, it still serves as the support that the rest of the pizza is built upon because studies show that 50% to 65% of the genetic ancestry of Indians derives from the First Indians.

On top of the base comes the sauce that is spread over the pizza - the Harappans. And then come the toppings and the cheese - the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European language speakers or Aryans, all of whom found their way into the subcontinent later.

To many in the Hindu right wing, these findings are unpalatable. They have been campaigning to change school curricula and remove any mention of Aryan immigration from textbooks. And on Twitter, several hugely popular right-wing "history" handles have long been attacking India's leading historians who have defended the theory of Aryan migrations and continue to do so.

For Hindu nationalists, there is a cost to admitting that the Aryans were not the first inhabitants of India and that the Harappan civilisation existed long before their arrival. It would mean acknowledging that Aryans or their Vedic culture were not the singular fountainhead of Indian civilisation and that its earliest sources lay elsewhere.

Riaz Haq said...

Two new genetic studies upheld Indo-Aryan migration. So why did Indian media report the opposite?
Science is proving India's incredible diversity. But this clashes directly with Hindutva’s racially nativist understanding of the subcontinent.

https://scroll.in/article/936872/two-new-genetic-studies-upheld-aryan-migration-theory-so-why-did-indian-media-report-the-opposite?fbclid=IwAR16ToJRC150jsfNfIp5k4m5mEqDbxDAseV2X3RcFT7Tw8eDTxpC_vZj_0Q

“Can we now prove the historical existence of Bhagwan Ram?” rang out a question at a press conference in Delhi on Friday to explain the findings of two much-awaited studies on the genetic origin of modern South Asia.

On the podium to explain the two new papers of which they are among the co-authors were Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice-chancellor of Deccan College, and Niraj Rai, head of the Ancient DNA lab at the Birbal Sahni Institute for Palaeosciences.

Taken together, the studies – one in Cell, the other in Science – painted a fascinating genetic picture of how groups as diverse as local hunter gatherers, Iranian farmers and pastoralists from the Pontic steppe grasslands in Eastern Europe mixed to form most of the modern South Asian population.

----

As a consequence, though the genetic studies themselves were rather clear, many in the media misrepresented the results to suit this political narrative. In fact, even the co-authors of the papers themselves seemed to disagree on the conclusions that can be drawn from the research.

Media confusion
The Economic Times reported that the research raises doubts over the “long-held theory of Aryan invasion or migration into South Asia”. Amar Ujala, one of India’s largest Hindi newspapers, was more emphatic: “The Aryan invasion theory proved completely false; India is the guru of South Asia.”

The theory of the Aryan invasion (or migration) was first put forward by Western scholars during the colonial age. It maintained that a race of European or Central Asian “Aryans” swept into the subcontinent displacing the indigenous Indus Valley Civilisation. These Aryans were said to have introduced key elements of Indian culture such as the Sanskrit language – which gave rise to the Indo-Aryan branch of languages spoken all across north, west and east India today – as well as the Vedas, the foundational texts of Hinduism.

This went against Hindutva’s own imagination of India, in which all significant cultural development was held to be indigenous.

Some of what the term “Aryan” once referred to has been proved to be scientifically inaccurate. The Nazis, for example, mistook what is a language grouping to be a racial one. However, much of the Indian media did not bother to explain that the new research actually upheld the theory that people with European Steppe ancestry had brought the Indo-Aryan language branch to India – not overturned it.

In contrast, the media in the West (with no political dog in this fight) communicated this fact rather well. People of Steppe-pastoralist ancestry likely “brought horses and the Indo-European languages now spoken on the subcontinent,” reported the Atlantic. The Smithsonian.com website of the American museum group wrote, “Indo-European languages may have reached South Asia via Central Asia and Eastern Europe during the first half of the 1000s BC.”

--------------------

To Reich’s cultural argument, there is also a political layer. India is today dominated by the politics of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, an ideology which is fiercely nativist. Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva and a foundational thinker for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, based his nationalism on nativism arguing that for a true Indian, India had to be both his pitribhumi (ancestral land) and punyabhumi (the land of his religion).

“A Hindu therefore could not be descended from alien invaders,” said historian Romila Thapar, explaining how Hindutva saw the world. “Since Hindus sought a lineal descent from the Aryans, and a cultural heritage, the Aryans had to be indigenous.”

Riaz Haq said...

What’s “Indian culture”? sitar? tabla? nan? nihari? biryani, tandoori? Even the words Hindi and Hindu are from Arabic/Persian “Hind”. The word “Urdu” is from #Turkish.

#Hindus are no more indigenous than #Muslims in #SouthAsia. Our #DNA shows #India and #Pakistan are lands of immigrants: traders, soldiers, missionaries, communities escaping persecution, artists, academics and artisans from Central Asia and Middle East

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan is a glorious smorgasbord of cultures. One of them is Turkish. Others are Arab, Persian, Indian and Khorasani.

The most recent addition: Anglophone Western.

None are particularly better (or worse) than another.

Your problem with Ertugul is yours, not Pakistan’s.

https://twitter.com/mosharrafzaidi/status/1259565907996815362?s=20

Riaz Haq said...

“Our selves” are not Indian or Turkish but rich with multiple roots. “Indian”, Turkish, Arab, Persian, Mongol, own dharti…

Denying any specific root destroys the beauty that is our legacy

Real game here is political use of these issues. Let’s not fall for that fitna

https://twitter.com/iFaqeer/status/1259645820648845312?s=20

Riaz Haq said...

ایک طنزیہ کالم - “سعودی عرب نے پاکستان سے 1400 سال کی مستعار تاریخ واپس مانگ لی” پاکستان نے 700 سال ترکی سے لے لئے ہیں باقی کی تلاش جاری ہے



@HarrisRichard77
Replying to
@husainhaqqani
Of course, you will find anything that ridicules or disparages Pakistan and it’s people amusing.

Ever commented on why the Americans & the British eulogise Greek and Roman history, culture & literature!

I guess not, because then u would have to learn perspective.

https://twitter.com/HarrisRichard77/status/1340338989295923200?s=20

Riaz Haq said...

How did the present-day population structure emerge from the one that existed in the deep past? We and other ancient DNA laboratories found in 2016 that the formation of the present-day West Eurasian population was propelled by the spread of food producers. Farming began between twelve and eleven thousand years ago in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, where local hunter-gatherers began domesticating most of the plants and animals many West Eurasians still depend upon today, including wheat, barley, rye, peas, cows, pigs, and sheep. After around nine thousand years ago, farming began spreading west to present-day Greece and roughly at the same time began spreading east, reaching the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan. Within Europe, farming spread west along the Mediterranean coast to Spain, and northwest to Germany through the Danube River valley, until it reached Scandinavia in the north and the British Isles in the west—the most extreme places where this type of economy was practical.


Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (p. 118). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

The great Himalayas were formed around ten million years ago by the collision of the Indian continental plate, moving northward through the Indian Ocean, with Eurasia. India today is also the product of collisions of cultures and people. Consider farming. The Indian subcontinent is one of the breadbaskets of the world—today it feeds a quarter of the world’s population—and it has been one of the great population centers ever since modern humans expanded across Eurasia after fifty thousand years ago. Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia. The Near Eastern winter rainfall crops, wheat and barley, reached the Indus Valley Valley sometime after nine thousand years ago according to archaeological evidence—as attested, for example, in ancient Mehrgarh on the western edge of the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan.13 Around five thousand years ago, local farmers succeeded in breeding these crops to adapt to monsoon summer rainfall patterns, and the crops spread into peninsular India.14 The Chinese monsoon summer rainfall crops of rice and millet also reached peninsular India around five thousand years ago. India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided. Language is another blend. The Indo-European languages of the north of India are related to the languages of Iran and Europe. The Dravidian languages, spoken mostly by southern Indians, are not closely related to languages outside South Asia. There are also Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by groups living in the mountains fringing the north of India, and small


pockets of tribal groups in the east and center that speak Austroasiatic languages related to Cambodian and Vietnamese, and that are thought to descend from the languages spoken by the peoples who first brought rice farming to South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. Words borrowed from ancient Dravidian and Austroasiatic languages, which linguists can detect as they are not typical of Indo-European languages, are present in the Rig Veda, implying that these languages have been in contact in India for at least three or four thousand years.15

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 151-152). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

The discrepancy between the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA patterns (in India) initially confused historians.26 But a possible explanation is that most of the ANI *ancestral north India) genetic input into India came from males. This pattern of sex-asymmetric population mixture is disturbingly familiar. Consider African Americans. The approximately 20 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans derives in an almost four-to-one ratio from the male side.27 Consider Latinos from Colombia. The approximately 80 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans is derived in an even more unbalanced way from males (a fifty-to-one ratio).28 I explore in part III what this means for the relationships among populations, and between males and females, but the common thread is that males from populations with more power tend to pair with females from populations with less. It is amazing that genetic data can reveal such profound information about the social nature of past events.

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (p. 162). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

Although experts have developed this popular narrative (from Eurasian Steppes) using archaeological, linguistic, zoological, botanical, geographical and theological evidence, some others have also been promoting a revisionist explanation called ‘Out of India’.



https://thewire.in/the-sciences/rakhigarhi-indus-valley-civilisation-aryan-steppe-migration-vasant-shinde

The proponents of this alternate theory argue that the Harappan civilisation never collapsed but temporarily declined and was then revived in the form of a new cultural offshoot peopled by those who called themselves ‘Aryan’. This society was dominated by a sacerdotal class adept at chanting Sanskrit verses encoded in the much-revered Vedas. This view propagated the idea that this ‘indigenously developed’ culture, along with Sanskrit, also spread westwards at the same time.

How valid is this ‘Out of India’ argument? Is there any evidence to substantiate its theory of outward migration?

Subclade R1a1a

Older studies based on mitochondrial DNA studies tell a different story: that outward migration did not happen. Instead, they indicate that some of the social groups distributed in various parts of India share a common genetic ancestral lineage (designated haplogroup R1a1a) with eastern Europeans. The new archeogenetic papers suggest that haplogroup R1a1a mutated out of haplogroup R1a in the Eurasian Steppe about 14,000 years ago. Thus, these studies support the ‘Out of the East European Steppes’ theory. It follows from this that the original form of Indo-European languages was first spoken in eastern Europe, the ‘original’ homeland.

About 10,000 years ago, a portion of the people that shared the genomic subclade R1a1a left their homeland and moved east towards the Caspian grasslands, where they tamed horses, goats and dogs and learned to build horse-drawn chariots, essential for a nomadic life. Around 1,900 BC, these people broke up into three groups. One group proceeded westward, to Anatolia, part of the fertile crescent. The second moved into what is now western Mongolia. The third group migrated southwards, into a region known to the Greeks as Bacteria.

Subsequently, the third group divided into two subgroups: one moved into what is now Iran, and the other into India. Those who entered India, around 1,500 BC, established the dominant civilisation in western Punjab. By then, much of the older Harappan settlers had either become marginalised or had moved to the south and central India, and even to parts of Balochistan. The newly settled people, the so-called ‘Aryans’ themselves, were not builders like the Harappans but are likelier to have been better story-tellers.

Riaz Haq said...

They (Indian researchers Singh and Thangaraj) did not want to be part of a study that suggested a major West Eurasian incursion into India without being absolutely certain as to how the whole-genome data could be reconciled with their mitochondrial DNA findings. They also implied that the suggestion of a migration migration from West Eurasia would be politically explosive. They did not explicitly say this, but it had obvious overtones of the idea that migration from outside India had a transformative effect on the subcontinent. Singh and Thangaraj suggested the term “genetic sharing” to describe the relationship between West Eurasians and Indians, a formulation that could imply common descent from an ancestral population. However, we knew from our genetic studies that a real and profound mixture between two different populations had occurred and made a contribution to the ancestry of almost every Indian living today, while their suggestion left open the possibility that no mixture had happened. We came to a standstill. At the time I felt that we were being prevented by political considerations from revealing what we had found.

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 159-160). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

Structure and gene organisation of mtDNA is highly conserved among mammals [22]. The mammalian mitochondrial genome is a closed-circular, double-stranded DNA molecule of about 16.6 kb. ... The genes lack introns and, except for one regulatory region, intergenetic sequences are absent or limited to a few bases.

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Mitochondrial DNA is the small circular chromosome found inside mitochondria. The mitochondria are organelles found in cells that are the sites of energy production. The mitochondria, and thus mitochondrial DNA, are passed from mother to offspring.

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Last year, researchers estimated that the half-life of DNA — the point at which half the bonds in a DNA molecule backbone would be broken — is 521 years. That means that, under ideal conditions, DNA would last about 6.8 million years, after which all the bonds would be broken.

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They point out that although all humans alive today have mitochondrial DNA passed on from a common ancestor—a so-called Mitochondrial Eve—this is just a tiny fraction of our total genetic material.

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Riaz Haq said...

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appointed a committee of scholars to prove that Hindus are descended from India's first inhabitants. Members of the country's Muslim minority worry the government wants to make them second-class citizens.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/

In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule, that modern-day India is a tapestry born of migrations, invasions and conversions. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.

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Hindu nationalists and senior figures in Modi’s party reject the idea that India was forged from a mass migration. They believe that today’s Hindu population is directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants. Historian Romila Thapar said the question of who first stood on the soil was important to nationalists because “if the Hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a Hindu Rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one.” To assert that primacy, nationalists need to claim descent from ancestors and a religion that were indigenous, said Thapar, 86, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for decades and has authored books on ancient Indian history.

The theory of an influx of people from central Asia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was embraced during British rule.


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India’s first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promoted a secular state and tolerance of India’s Muslims, said it was “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture.” That outlook informed the way India was governed by Nehru and then by his Congress party for more than half a century. The rights of minorities - including the prohibition of discrimination based on religion - are enshrined in India’s constitution, of which Nehru was a signatory in 1950.

Shashi Tharoor, a prominent member of the Congress party, said right wing Hindus are “leading a political campaign over Indian history that seeks to reinvent the idea of India itself.”

“For seven decades after independence, Indianness rested on faith in the country’s pluralism,” Tharoor said, but the rise of Hindu nationalism had brought with it a “sense of cultural superiority.”

Riaz Haq said...

The first genetic work in India gave seemingly contradictory results. Researchers studying mitochondrial DNA, always passed down from mothers, found that the vast majority of mitochondrial DNA in Indians was unique to the subcontinent, and they estimated that the Indian mitochondrial DNA types only shared common ancestry with ones predominant outside South Asia many tens of thousands of years ago.16 This suggested that on the maternal line, Indian ancestors had been largely isolated within the subcontinent for a long time, without mixing with neighboring populations to the west, east, or north. In contrast, a good fraction of Y chromosomes in India, passed from father to son, showed closer relatedness to West Eurasians

Europeans, central Asians, and Near Easterners—suggesting mixture.

Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 152-153). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

Since the original excavations at Harappa, the “Aryan invasion theory” has been seized on by nationalists in both Europe and India, which makes the idea difficult to discuss in an objective way. European racists, including the Nazis, were drawn to the idea of an invasion of India in which the dark-skinned inhabitants were subdued by light-skinned warriors related to northern Europeans, who imposed on them a hierarchical caste system that forbade intermarriage across groups. To the Nazis and others, the distribution of the Indo-European language family, linking Europe to India and having little impact on the Near East with its Jews, spoke of an ancient conquest moving out of an ancestral homeland, displacing and subjugating the peoples of the conquered territories, an event that they wished to emulate.9 Some placed the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Aryans in northeast Europe, including Germany. They also adopted features of Vedic mythology as their own, calling themselves Aryans after the term in the Rig Veda, and appropriating the swastika, a traditional Hindu symbol of good fortune.10 The Nazis’ interest in migrations and the spread of Indo-European languages has made it difficult for serious scholars in Europe to discuss the possibility of migrations spreading Indo-European languages.11 In India, the possibility that the Indus Valley Civilization fell at the hands of migrating Indo-European speakers coming from the north is also fraught, as it suggests that important elements of South Asian culture might have been influenced from the outside. The idea of a mass migration from the north has fallen out of favor among scholars not only because it has become so politicized, but also because archaeologists archaeologists have realized that major cultural shifts in the archaeological record do not always imply major migrations. And, in fact, there is scant archaeological evidence for such a population movement. There are no obvious layers of ash and destruction around thirty-eight hundred years ago suggesting the burning and sacking of the Indus towns. If anything, there is evidence that the Indus Valley Civilization’s decline played out over a long period, with emigration away from the towns and environmental degradation taking place over decades. But the lack of archaeological evidence does not mean that there were no major incursions from the outside. Between sixteen hundred and fifteen hundred years ago, the western Roman Empire collapsed under the pressure of the German expansions, with great political and economic blows dealt to the western Roman Empire when the Visigoths and the Vandals each sacked Rome and took political control of Roman provinces. However, there so far seems to be little archaeological evidence for destruction of Roman cities in this time, and if not for the detailed historical accounts, we might not know these pivotal events occurred.12 It is possible that in the apparent depopulation of the Indus Valley, too, we might be limited by the difficulty archaeologists have in detecting sudden change. The patterns evident from archaeology may be obscuring more sudden triggering events. What can genetics add? It cannot tell us what happened at the end of the Indus Valley Civilization, but it can tell us if there was a collision of peoples with very different ancestries. Although mixture is not by itself proof of migration, the genetic evidence of mixture proves that dramatic demographic change and thus opportunity for cultural exchange occurred close to the time of the fall of Harappa.


Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here (pp. 150-151). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Riaz Haq said...

Proponents of Indigenous Aryanism believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation was Aryan and Vedic.[7] There are two common objections against such a correlation: "the Rg Vedicculture was pastoral and horse-centered, while the Harappan culture was neither horse-centered nor pastoral";[note 1][3] and "the complete absence of the horse (equus caballus)."[note 2] Support for the idea of an indigenous Indo-Aryan origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation mostly exists among Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India,[8][9][10][11] and has no support in mainstream scholarship.[note 3]

The paucity of horse remains in pre-Vedic times could be explained by India's climatic factors which lead to decay of horse bones. Horse bones may also be rare because horses were probably not eaten or used in burials by the Harappans.[12][13] Remains and artifacts ascribed to domesticated horses are limited to Late Harappan times[14][3][note 10] indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times,[1] "when the Vedic people had settled in the north-west part of the subcintinent."[3] It can therefor not be concluded that the horse was regularly used, or played a significant role, in the Harappan society.[2]

Horse remains from the Harappan site Surkotada (dated to 2400-1700 BC) have been identified by A.K. Sharma as Equus ferus caballus.[subnote 3] The horse specialist Sandor Bökönyi (1997) later confirmed these conclusions, and stated the excavated tooth specimens could "in all probability be considered remnants of true horses [i.e. Equus ferus caballus]".[subnote 4] Bökönyi, as cited by B.B. Lal, stated that "The occurrence of true horse (Equus caballus L.) was evidenced by the enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form of incisors and phalanges (toe bones)."[subnote 5] However, archaeologists like Meadow (1997) disagree, on the grounds that the remains of the Equus ferus caballus horse are difficult to distinguish from other equid species such as Equus asinus (donkeys) or Equus hemionus (onagers).[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_horse_in_the_Indian_subcontinent

Ahmed said...


Dear Sir Riaz

You said:
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Similar genetic studies of Pakistanis published in the American Journal of Human Genetics have found very diverse ancestral origins of the people in the country. These range from Balochis with origins in Aleppo (modern Syria) to Brahuis who are indigenous Dravidian, and Baltis of Sino-Tibetan ancestry to Pashtuns of Jewish or Central Asian origins.
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Comment:

Sir, I have an important question, is it true that pathans(pashtuns) are basically decendandents of one of the lost tribes of Isreal? Their are some pathans who claim that they have Jewish heritage ,but how far is it true?

Thanks

Riaz Haq said...

India's Culture ministry to study ‘racial purity’ of Indians - The New Indian Express



https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2022/may/28/culture-ministry-to-study-racial-purity-of-indians-2458899.html


NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Culture is in the process of acquiring an array of DNA profiling kits and associated state-of-the-art machines for establishing the genetic history and “trace the purity of races in India”. Highly placed government sources said the acquisition process began recently following a meeting that Ministry of Culture Secretary Govind Mohan held with well-known archaeologist Professor Vasant S Shinde and senior scientists and scholars of the Lucknow-based Birbal Sahani Institute of Paleosciences (BSIP) in Hyderabad two months ago.

Shinde is adjunct professor at the Bangalore-based National Institute of Advanced Study and director of the Rakhigarhi Research Project. Founder of the Society of South Asian Archaeology, Prof Shinde’s research contribution includes “DNA analysis and craniofacial reconstruction of Harappan People”.

When contacted over phone, Prof Shinde admitted that the gadgets were in the process of being acquired. He said, “We want to see how mutation and mixing of genes in the Indian population has happened in the last 10,000 years. Genetic mutation depends on the intensity of contact among populations and the time that this process takes. We will then have a clear-cut idea of the genetic history. You may even say that this will be an effort to trace the purity of races in India.”

The Kolkata-based Anthropological Survey of India (ANSI), which has, “of late”, expressed “disinclination” to proceed with the exercise to trace the genetic origins of early Indians because the issue is “politically loaded”, is also part of this project which was initially conceived in 2019. A budget of `10 crore has been earmarked for procuring the DNA profilers and the other related scientific gadgets, sources said. The aim, according to the ANSI, is to “develop a resource of cell lines and DNA samples that can be used to study DNA sequence polymorphism in contemporary Indian populations”

More importantly, the ANSI seeks to “establish (the) Indian role in the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa” because “modern humans could have taken the ‘southern route of dispersal’, utilising the coastlines to travel from Africa, through Arabia, across the Indian subcontinent and then into South-East Asia and finally into Australia”.

Secondly, the ANSI wants to understand the genetic diversity of Indian populations among various ethnic groups in different regions of India based on direct re-sequencing of haploid genomes. By its own admission, under this project, the ANSI has studied 75 communities comprising 7,807 blood samples from different parts of the country. These communities include the Jarawa, Nicobarese, Andh, Kathodi, Madia, Malpaharia, Munda, Bhoi Khasi, Nihal, Toto, Dirang Monpa,

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed your summation of the Indian/Pakistani perpetual enigma.
As Modi reiterated like Ghandi from Gujarati both
With tragic events of 2002
“India needs more toilets than temples”.
You also suggest practical solutions to intractable historical problems for both Ind.& Pak.
Pick a combined cricket team and Australia would tremble!
I lived in Delphi in the last century and had a Pakistani business partner in Sydney how was a good friend of Imran Khan