What's new

LMAO Hindu right-wing Aryan theory completely destroyed in new research

.
How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India

By Tony Joseph
30 December 2018

New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India - and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph.

Who are the Indians? And where did they come from?

In the last few years, the debate over these questions has become more and more heated.

Hindu right-wingers believe the source of Indian civilisation are people who called themselves Aryans - a nomadic tribe of horse-riding, cattle-rearing warriors and herders who composed Hinduism's oldest religious texts, the Vedas.

The Aryans, they argue, originated from India and then spread across large parts of Asia and Europe, helping set up the family of Indo-European languages that Europeans and Indians still speak today.

As it happens, many 19th Century European ethnographers and, of course, most famously, Adolf Hitler, also considered Aryans the master race who had conquered Europe, although the German leader considered them to be of Nordic lineage.

_104870985_gettyimages-122317469.jpg

The Harappan civilisation thrived in north-western India and Pakistan

When scholars use the term Aryan, it refers to a group of people who spoke Indo-European languages and called themselves Aryans. And that is how I have used it in this article. It does not refer to a race, as Hitler used it or as some in the Hindu right wing use it.

Many Indian scholars have questioned the "out of India" thesis, arguing that these Indo-European language speakers - or Aryans - were possibly just one of many streams of prehistoric migrants who arrived in India after the decline of an earlier civilisation. This was the Harappan (or Indus Valley) civilisation, which thrived in what is now north-western India and Pakistan around the same time as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

However, Hindu right-wingers believe the Harappan civilisation was also an Aryan or Vedic civilisation.

Tensions between the two groups backing these opposing theories have only increased in the last few years, especially since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India in 2014.

Into this long-running dispute has now stepped the relatively new discipline of population genetics, which has started using ancient DNA to figure out when people moved where.

How ancient DNA is transforming our view of the past

Earliest evidence of humans outside Africa

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.

India's junior minister for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, was recently quoted in the media as saying: "Only Vedic education can nurture our children well and make them patriots who have mental discipline."

The idea of the mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as latter-day Muslim conquerors of India - such as the Mughals.

These are not just theoretical debates. The ruling BJP government in Haryana state, which neighbours the Indian capital Delhi, has demanded that the Harappan civilisation be renamed the Saraswati river civilisation.
Since the Saraswati is an important river that is mentioned in the earliest of the four Vedic texts, such a renaming would serve to emphasise the link between the civilisation and the Aryans.

The new study puts an end to these debates and it has thus come as a shock to the Hindu right-wing. In a tweet attacking its co-author Prof Reich, ruling party MP and former Harvard University professor Subramanian Swamy said: "There are lies, damned lies and (Harvard's 'Third' Reich and Co's) statistics."

However, the real message that the new research carries is an exciting and hopeful one: that Indians have created a long-lasting civilisation from a variety of heredities and histories.

The genius of the Indian civilisation during its best periods has been inclusion, not exclusion. Unity in diversity is, indeed, the central theme of India's genetic make-up.

Tony Joseph is the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, published by Juggernaut

Sir jee.. make a copy of this article with screenshots.. we will have to copy paste this on several future threads... lolllll

Look at most of the indians and tell me who has anything to do with aryans or persians or turks?
I wanted to write the same.. How on earth Aryans could father Indians? It's like Aryan females were raped by Africans somewhere in the past.. that too short ones..
 
.
Aryan theory is bogus.

Lmao no it's not. Face it, Hinduism is foreign to the region just like Islam.

but when you are a descendant of a people, you know it.

Thousands of years of assimilation means that one would look completely different to many of their ancestors. For example, Turkish people do not look like ancient Turks at all (other than the Khazars and a few others).

They don't buy Aryan migration theory.

The facts won't change whether they believe in it or not.

Aryans came from Kazakhstan and brought sanskrit to India .....Most idiotic observation considering Kazakhstan do not speak sanskrit or do not even have saskrit or Indo-european language literature.

You clearly don't understand the Aryan migrations.

What happened was people from the Caucasus (modern-day Georgia, Armenia, Chechnya, etc, you know the region I'm referring to) engaged in mass migrations across the world, and many of them ended up coming to South Asia. Once they came, they then formed what is known as Vedic culture (which includes things such as Sanskrit and Hinduism). This is why Vedic culture is only present throughout South Asia (and other places which South Asians then interacted with in the following centuries), but shares many similarities with other Indo-European cultures. There is no other logically coherent way to explain this fact.

There may be small groups of migrants migrated from C.Asia, Iran and Africa and settled here. But that do not mean they are Aryans.

You can call them whatever you like, but they did migrate here and Hinduism comes from them.

It is an accepted fact that ASI gene came to India 60000 years ago and ANI gene came to India 40000 years ago, India is a melting pot. The study shows that Majority of the people have the same DNA composition.

It isn't that simple. Most of the ANI component comes from the Aryans, but some of it also comes from the Iranic hordes of Afghanistan/Pakistan who invaded India in the following centuries (Hunas, Kushans and Scythians).

The first thing anyone has to do when narrating historic facts is to read what the saskrit literature is saying. Clearly the literature points to India as its birth place.

No it doesn't. It shares many similarities with other Indo-European cultures. Sanskrit itself is remarkably similar to Avestan, an old Iranic language that was spoken in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
 
.
Lmao no it's not. Face it, Hinduism is foreign to the region just like Islam.



Thousands of years of assimilation means that one would look completely different to many of their ancestors. For example, Turkish people do not look like ancient Turks at all (other than the Khazars and a few others).



The facts won't change whether they believe in it or not.



You clearly don't understand the Aryan migrations.

What happened was people from the Caucasus (modern-day Georgia, Armenia, Chechnya, etc, you know the region I'm referring to) engaged in mass migrations across the world, and many of them ended up coming to South Asia. Once they came, they then formed what is known as Vedic culture (which includes things such as Sanskrit and Hinduism). This is why Vedic culture is only present throughout South Asia (and other places which South Asians then interacted with in the following centuries), but shares many similarities with other Indo-European cultures. There is no other logically coherent way to explain this fact.



You can call them whatever you like, but they did migrate here and Hinduism comes from them.



It isn't that simple. Most of the ANI component comes from the Aryans, but some of it also comes from the Iranic hordes of Afghanistan/Pakistan who invaded India in the following centuries (Hunas, Kushans and Scythians).



No it doesn't. It shares many similarities with other Indo-European cultures. Sanskrit itself is remarkably similar to Avestan, an old Iranic language that was spoken in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

There is no vedic culture in caucasus nor there is a language which is similar to saskrit or any literature there.

Our texts clearly point to the fact that there are no major changes of genes in sub continent. There may be some migrations but they are like small rivers joining the ocean in Bharat.

Till now there is no such thing as Aryan gene pool to compare the DNA, so these are bogus theories. Arya means noble.
 
. .
There is no vedic culture in caucasus nor there is a language which is similar to saskrit or any literature there.

Obviously there wouldn't be any Vedic culture in the Caucasus. That's not what I said, I clearly said Vedic culture is derived from theirs. The evidence for this plentiful, there are too many similarities between different Indo-European languages and cultures. Unless you have another mechanism to explain this that is just as good (meaning it can explain things to the same degree and makes the same minimal number of plausible assumptions) or even better, Aryan migrations are here to stay. There's a reason just about every serious academic accepts the concept.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations

Our texts clearly point to the fact that there are no major changes of genes in sub continent. There may be some migrations but they are like small rivers joining the ocean in Bharat.

That is only true post-Aryan migrations.

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/...cent-lower-castes-of-asians-773932-2001-07-30

Till now there is no such thing as Aryan gene pool to compare the DNA

Yes there is. You simply look for Eurasian DNA.
 
.
There are trade routes between Europe and India, also silk routes are there to spread the language and culture.



Obviously there wouldn't be any Vedic culture in the Caucasus. That's not what I said, I clearly said Vedic culture is derived from theirs. The evidence for this plentiful, there are too many similarities between different Indo-European languages and cultures. Unless you have another mechanism to explain this that is just as good (meaning it can explain things to the same degree and makes the same minimal number of plausible assumptions) or even better, Aryan migrations are here to stay. There's a reason just about every serious academic accepts the concept.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations



That is only true post-Aryan migrations.

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/...cent-lower-castes-of-asians-773932-2001-07-30



Yes there is. You simply look for Eurasian DNA.
 
.
There are trade routes between Europe and India, also silk routes are there to spread the language and culture.

Those emerged long after and are not sufficient to explain the spread of culture. Mass migration is the only way such a significant influence could occur.
 
.
Sir jee.. make a copy of this article with screenshots.. we will have to copy paste this on several future threads... lolllll


I wanted to write the same.. How on earth Aryans could father Indians? It's like Aryan females were raped by Africans somewhere in the past.. that too short ones..

The Indians won't be discussing Aryan theory for a long long time to come. They'll avoid it LOL

Good suggestion. I have the screenshots LOL

Go chicken out kid if you can't reply to my point.:D

LOL Don't shoot the messenger. You need to shoot your own DNA LOL That's where the fault lies.
 
.
How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India

By Tony Joseph
30 December 2018

New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India - and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph.

Who are the Indians? And where did they come from?

In the last few years, the debate over these questions has become more and more heated.

Hindu right-wingers believe the source of Indian civilisation are people who called themselves Aryans - a nomadic tribe of horse-riding, cattle-rearing warriors and herders who composed Hinduism's oldest religious texts, the Vedas.

The Aryans, they argue, originated from India and then spread across large parts of Asia and Europe, helping set up the family of Indo-European languages that Europeans and Indians still speak today.

As it happens, many 19th Century European ethnographers and, of course, most famously, Adolf Hitler, also considered Aryans the master race who had conquered Europe, although the German leader considered them to be of Nordic lineage.

_104870985_gettyimages-122317469.jpg

The Harappan civilisation thrived in north-western India and Pakistan

When scholars use the term Aryan, it refers to a group of people who spoke Indo-European languages and called themselves Aryans. And that is how I have used it in this article. It does not refer to a race, as Hitler used it or as some in the Hindu right wing use it.

Many Indian scholars have questioned the "out of India" thesis, arguing that these Indo-European language speakers - or Aryans - were possibly just one of many streams of prehistoric migrants who arrived in India after the decline of an earlier civilisation. This was the Harappan (or Indus Valley) civilisation, which thrived in what is now north-western India and Pakistan around the same time as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

However, Hindu right-wingers believe the Harappan civilisation was also an Aryan or Vedic civilisation.

Tensions between the two groups backing these opposing theories have only increased in the last few years, especially since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India in 2014.

Into this long-running dispute has now stepped the relatively new discipline of population genetics, which has started using ancient DNA to figure out when people moved where.

How ancient DNA is transforming our view of the past

Earliest evidence of humans outside Africa

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.

India's junior minister for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, was recently quoted in the media as saying: "Only Vedic education can nurture our children well and make them patriots who have mental discipline."

The idea of the mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as latter-day Muslim conquerors of India - such as the Mughals.

These are not just theoretical debates. The ruling BJP government in Haryana state, which neighbours the Indian capital Delhi, has demanded that the Harappan civilisation be renamed the Saraswati river civilisation.
Since the Saraswati is an important river that is mentioned in the earliest of the four Vedic texts, such a renaming would serve to emphasise the link between the civilisation and the Aryans.

The new study puts an end to these debates and it has thus come as a shock to the Hindu right-wing. In a tweet attacking its co-author Prof Reich, ruling party MP and former Harvard University professor Subramanian Swamy said: "There are lies, damned lies and (Harvard's 'Third' Reich and Co's) statistics."

However, the real message that the new research carries is an exciting and hopeful one: that Indians have created a long-lasting civilisation from a variety of heredities and histories.

The genius of the Indian civilisation during its best periods has been inclusion, not exclusion. Unity in diversity is, indeed, the central theme of India's genetic make-up.

Tony Joseph is the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, published by Juggernaut




The above is concrete, reliable and genuine scientific evidence as to why modern-day Pakistanis are racially and genetically different to modern-day indians.
 
.

Pakistan Defence Latest Posts

Pakistan Affairs Latest Posts

Back
Top Bottom