AIT and a sneak attack

Many of you must be familiar with how the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is now all but dead

We probably don’t need another nail in its coffin but here is one that I came across late last year (buried deep under my “TO DO” list): “India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says”

What is really interesting about the article though is not its mention of AIT being disputed but the surreptitious (and easily overlooked) mention of “technology” amongst things that do not appear to be indigenous and may have come from outside the region (excerpt: “If steppe-dwelling Central Asians did lend language and technology, but not many genes”)

Oddly though, nowehere in the article is there any evidence of “technology” being borrowed from Central Asia.

I wonder if this is just a bad copy or a subtle attempt at undermining the “scientific and technological achievements in ancient India? (Please read: “Does no one remember the Indian contribution to Technology?“)

Brief Excerpts:

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports.

The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years.

Vijendra Kashyap’s (Director of India’s National Institute of Biologicals in Noida) findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, stand at odds with those results.

The data reveal that the large majority of modern Indians descended from South Asian ancestors who lived on the Indian subcontinent before an influx of agricultural techniques from the north and west arrived some 10,000 years ago.”

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

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6 Responses

  1. Pramod says:

    I Feel those who follow history can’t creat one, one needs to think with open mind with field of all possibilities & creat history

  2. Incognito says:

    Shrikant G Talageri proves that Indians are indigenous to India from pre-Vedic times. And that some of them expanded outwards to Afghanistan, Iran and Europe in primarily two different waves. The first wave forming Greeks, Celtics, Baltics etc and the second, Iranians. He analyses archeological and linguistic theories apart from Rig Veda, Avesta and the traditions of the above mentioned groups in his book “The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis” that can be read online at http://voi.org/books/rig/

  3. Bharat says:

    Even the proponents of AIT were of the view (at least till 1885) that “The parent language was spoken in a remote prehistoric time by a people living somewhere about the five rivers of the Punjaub. By migrations of that people westward there were afterwards established all the nations of the Iranian, Slavonic, Celtic, Teutonic and Classical stocks.”

  4. Mod Prakash says:

    Shantanu,

    Aryan Invasion theory is disputed and there are ample evidence against this theory now so much so that it can be discarded. At the same time however, it can not completely ruled out that the people have regularly sneaked in to Indian sub-continent through the available passses and crossed the big rivers to move shouthern fertile and tropical regions.

    We should be looking at the AIT in two parts – one the fact that there was a mass migration of groups from central Asia towards south and into the sub-continent – and two – the fact that they brought civilization to this sub-continent which was living in a completely un-civilized condition.

    The immigration of people from central Asia in to the sub-continent can not be ruled out. It happened through out the history and it can not be ruled out tat it happened during the period which is before the known history begins. I will say that the whole of AIT is based on the evidence of one such big migration and the rest of the AIT is assumption, i.e, these people were civilized and they brought civilization to the sub-continent is a complete imagination.

    While stating this, I would also like to say that it is high time that Indian intelligentia and academecians should start putting pressure on our government to corrrect the academic syllabus so that the AIT is taught to our young ones in correct perspective and remove them from a complex that all of their glorious civilization is nothing but borrowed from the people who, till today, claim civilizational superiority. This is extremly important to create a generation which believes in the inherent superiority of our civilization.

  5. Manas says:

    The Aryan invasion theory was a concoction of European colonial supremacists to prove their imagined racial superiority of white skinned people. Both the racist AIT and its modern cousin the Aryan migration theory are based on philology. On the other hand, hard DNA and archaeological evidence has actually discredit and debunked without any doubt the supremacist and racist theory of white skinned Aryan invasion/migration.
    Kivisild et al. 2003 emphasize that the combined results from mtDNA, Y-chromosome and autosomal markers suggest that “Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions.
    Several recent studies of the distribution of alleles on the Y chromosome,microsatellite DNA,and mitochondrial DNA in India by Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology scientists in collaboration with researchers at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have trashed the idea of a biological Dravidian “race” distinct from non-Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent. [Reich, David; Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Nick Patterson, Alkes L. Price, and Lalji Singh (24 September 2009). “Reconstructing Indian population history”. Nature 461: 489-494].

    The farce of the Aryan invasion/migration theory serves only vested interests like
    1. Missionaries and supremacists seeking to harvest “lost” Hindu souls by discrediting Hinduism as the vestige of supremacist marauding colonists. Quite ironical!!
    2. Muslims seeking to whitewash the bloody invasion of the Indian subcontinent, and its accompanying forced conversions under Jehad and Jizya, not to mention the heinous massacre of millions of Hindus, by bracketing with “invading Aryans”.
    3. So called Indologists who have built their entire career upon this hoax and now have to stick to it or have their life’s work (sic) discredited.
    4. Sepoys looking to please the sheikhs and the sahibs.
    5. Marxists. Enough said!
    Not surprisingly, the avid proponents of the concocted Aryan theories are virulently anti-Hindu and have alleged ulterior agendas.

    One of the most (in)famous of them all M. Witzel’s allegedly prejudiced and racist (among other similar adjectives) unspeakables about Hindus and Hindu culture has been well documented [http://www.indicstudies.us/Dossier_on_Witzel.pdf; http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2005/12/harvard-don-denigrates-hindus.html%5D. Witzel runs a “Indo-Eurasian” yahoo group which is primarily made up of “scholars” who make scholarly statements such as, “…the three Aryan castes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas and the Negroid Sudras…” [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/13585]. “Scholars” who eagerly consign Hindu culture to the funereal pyre of social evils [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/13585].

    Witzel’s supporters in the California textbook battle included two evangelical bodies: Dalit Freedom Network and Dalit Solidarity Forum in the USA. DFN president Joseph D’Souza also headed the All-India Christian Council; he appealed to a US Congressional Committee to get ‘Scheduled Caste’ status for India’s ‘Dalit’ Christians [http://ontogenyphylogenyepigenetcs.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/the-third-conference-of-michael-witzel-at-pondicherry/]. Witzel et. al. shamelessly and wrongly advertised these evangelical organizations (with HQ in Colorado, USA) whose main purpose is conversions to Christianity, as oppressed Dalit organizations. Such is his agenda.

    Witzel had previously translated post-vedic Bhaudhyana Sulva Sutra verse to show that Aryans moved from west to east to fit into his pet theory that some Indoaryans emigrated from the N-W (Afghanistan, Bactria, etc) into a south-eastern location while others stayed behind. But, his mis-translation was caught and found to be exactly opposite. i.e. movement to the east as well as west from a region which can only be in the northern or north-western part of India, or eastern part of what is now Pakistan. This was confirmed by various other Sanskrit scholars. When in due course Witzel was notified of his mistranslation, he declared his innocence and said the editors or publishers were to blame for distorting his (correct) text! [http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/pdf/en/indology/Open_Letter_to_Prof_M_Witzel.pdf; http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/pdf/en/indology/An_Explanation.pdf%5D. While Witzel’s knowledge of the Sanskrit language may or may not be questionable, given how the mistranslation suits his theories, there are incontrovertible questions about the intentions and veneer of inadvertence. Such is his scholarship.

    Given these facts, it is easy to understand why “scholars” such as these are such aggressive proponents of the Aryan invasion/migration theories which has roots in racist colonial supremacy, when actually recent genetic and archaeological evidence goes to the contrary.

  6. B Shantanu says:

    Courtesy Sanjay, concluding lines from The Story of Our Origins by Hartosh Singh Bal..

    The conclusions bear restatement. The first thing that the evidence suggests is that the origins of Hartosh’s R1a1 haplogroup lie in India. Thus, a large part of Central Asia, Southern Russia, Ukraine onwards to the Czech Republic may well be populated by a 15,000-year-old migration from India. Given the timeframe of the origins of the R1a1 haplogroup in India, it is important to note that this does not rule out a subsequent re-entry of people from Central Asia bearing this marker into India at a much later date. As further sub-lineages of Hartosh’s R1a1 are studied, it may well be possible to answer even this question.

    The second part of their conclusions rests on the fact that the proportion of R1a1 in some Brahmin groups such as those of West Bengal is as high as 72 per cent. This indicates that the origins of Brahmins as a caste may well lie in the R1a1 haplogroup. But since the antiquity of the Ra1a haplogroup in tribals such as Central India’s Sahariyas is older than it is among Brahmins, it is reasonable to believe that Brahmins may not be entrants from outside but may have originated as a caste from the tribal population of this country.

    It is a strong claim, one that hints at possible discoveries that may lie ahead as the genetics of the Indian population is studied in greater detail. The one conclusion, though, that is unlikely to change is the one Bamezai emphasises over and over: “Groups we seem to see as distinct have overlapping genetic signatures. In fact, two castes that may have great hostility towards each other may carry the same signatures. Caste, tribe and religion in India do not have any genetic basis.” Trite as it may sound, the conclusion is inescapable, there is unity in this diversity.

    As Sanjay mentioned, the “Aryan Invasion Theory” gets buried deeper…