Read Before Writing: Aryan invasion

» pseudoerasmus - Aryan invasion

In response to message posted by shwin:

the Aryan Invasion theory has been refuted, and has been for some time. Any professor of history at any prestigious university now knows this

Nonsense. Nonsense. You don't know what you're talking about.

As I've already said, the Aryans might not have come to India for invasion and conquest -- they might have come just to settle peacefully -- but the Aryans were most assuredly not native to India. Moreover, this view is absolutely standard among academics in archaeology, history, linguistics and geneticists. Anybody who thinks otherwise is either a crank or an Indian.

You can consult the following books to confirm what I just said:

J P Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans
Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, The History and Geography of Human Genes
Colin Renfew, Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins

Mallory is a British linguist, Cavalli-Sforza an Italian geneticist at Stanford, and Renfrew a British archaeologist. All of these books will tell you that the Aryans, or the people who originally introduced the languages which are today spoken in northern India, were not native to India.

You also apparently did not even read the article cited above. http://www.indian-express.com/news/may15...

New genetic studies have revealed that the higher ranking castes in India may have come from Europe.

According to a study in this month's Genome research Journal, scientists said that while India's higher ranking castes are genetically more similar to Europeans, the lower castes are more similar to Asians. The study, done by an international team led by Michael Bamshad (University of Utah), is believed to be the most comprehensive attempt so far to explore the impact of ancient western migrations on people in India.

According to the study, the origins of people living in India are under debate. Some 5000 years ago, Indo-European speaking people from West Eurasia entered India and purportedly mixed with native Proto-Asian population in the region. Historians believe these West Eurasian immigrants established the present Hindu caste system, while appointing themselves to higher rank castes.

Since inter-caste marriage was a taboo, the genetic material has been intact for quite a long some time. In this scenario, members of higher rank castes have shown closer genetic relationship to Europeans than lower rank castes.

The study compares maternally inherited DNA variations, paternally inherited variations, and bi-parentally inherited variations between 265 Indian males of different castes and 750 African, European, Asian and other Indian males.

The detailed comparison revealed that genetic similarities between Indians and Europeans tend to increase with caste rank.

The scientists found different trends when comparing maternally inherited variations and paternally inherited variations. Maternally inherited DNA in Indian populations was overall more similar to Asians than to Europeans, though similarity to Europeans increased with rank. Paternally inherited DNA, on the other hand, was overall more similar to Europeans than to Asians.

These results support the notion that the West Eurasian immigrants mixing with native populations were mostly male, and that they tended to insert themselves into high ranking positions in the developing Hindu Indian caste system. (PTI)

And here is the abstract of the actual academic genetical study:

The origins and affinities of the ~1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking people from West Eurasia entered India from the Northwest and diffused throughout the subcontinent. They purportedly admixed with or displaced indigenous Dravidic-speaking populations. Subsequently they may have established the Hindu caste system and placed themselves primarily in castes of higher rank. To explore the impact of West Eurasians on contemporary Indian caste populations, we compared mtDNA (400 bp of hypervariable region 1 and 14 restriction site polymorphisms) and Y-chromosome (20 biallelic polymorphisms and 5 short tandem repeats) variation in ~265 males from eight castes of different rank to ~750 Africans, Asians, Europeans, and other Indians. For maternally inherited mtDNA, each caste is most similar to Asians. However, 20%-30% of Indian mtDNA haplotypes belong to West Eurasian haplogroups, and the frequency of these haplotypes is proportional to caste rank, the highest frequency of West Eurasian haplotypes being found in the upper castes. In contrast, for paternally inherited Y-chromosome variation each caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians. Moreover, the affinity to Europeans is proportionate to caste rank, the upper castes being most similar to Europeans, particularly East Europeans. These findings are consistent with greater West Eurasian male admixture with castes of higher rank. Nevertheless, the mitochondrial genome and the Y chromosome each represents only a single haploid locus and is more susceptible to large stochastic variation, bottlenecks, and selective sweeps. Thus, to increase the power of our analysis, we assayed 40 independent, biparentally inherited autosomal loci (1 LINE-1 and 39 Alu elements) in all of the caste and continental populations (~600 individuals). Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians. We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans.

http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/abstra...

-- posted by pseudoerasmus