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Indo-Aryan migrations

The Indo-Aryan migrations[note 1] were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indo-Aryan population movements into the region from Central Asia are considered to have started after 2000 BCE, as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period, which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent. Several hundred years later, the Iranian languages were brought into the Iranian plateau by the Iranians, who were closely related to the Indo-Aryans.

The Proto-Indo-Iranian culture, which gave rise to the Indo-Aryans and Iranians, developed on the Central Asian steppes north of the Caspian Sea as the Sintashta culture (2050[2]–1800 BCE)[3][4][5][6] in present-day Russia and Kazakhstan, and developed further as the Andronovo culture (2000–1450 BCE).[7][8]

The Indo-Aryans split off sometime between 2000 BCE and 1600 BCE from the Indo-Iranians,[9] and migrated southwards to the Bactria–Margiana culture (BMAC), from which they borrowed some of their distinctive religious beliefs and practices.[10] From the BMAC, the Indo-Aryans migrated into northern Syria and, possibly in multiple waves, into the Punjab (northern Pakistan and India), while the Iranians could have reached western Iran before 1300 BCE,[11] both bringing with them the Indo-Iranian languages.

Migration by an Indo-European people was first hypothesized in the late 18th century, following the discovery of the Indo-European language family, when similarities between western and Indian languages had been noted. Given these similarities, a single source or origin was proposed, which was diffused by migrations from some original homeland.

This linguistic argument of this theory is supported by archaeological, anthropological, genetic, literary and ecological research. Genetic research reveals that those migrations form part of a complex genetic puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population. Literary research reveals similarities between various, geographically distinct, Indo-Aryan historical cultures. Ecological studies reveal that in the second millennium BCE widespread aridization led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and the Indian subcontinent,[web 1] causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, and triggering large-scale migrations, resulting in the merger of migrating peoples with the post-urban cultures.[web 1]

The Indo-Aryan migrations started sometime in the period from approximately 2000 to 1600 BCE,[9] after the invention of the war chariot, and also brought Indo-Aryan languages into the Levant and possibly Inner Asia. It was part of the diffusion of Indo-European languages from the proto-Indo-European homeland at the Pontic–Caspian steppe, a large area of grasslands in far Eastern Europe, which started in the 5th to 4th millennia BCE, and the Indo-European migrations out of the Eurasian Steppes, which started approximately in 2000 BCE.[1][12]

These Indo-Aryan speaking people were united by shared cultural norms and language, referred to as ārya, "noble". Diffusion of this culture and language took place by patron-client systems, which allowed for the absorption and acculturation of other groups into this culture, and explains the strong influence on other cultures with which it interacted.

Fundamentals

 
Scheme of Indo-European language dispersals from c. 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis.
– Center: Steppe cultures
1 (black): Anatolian languages (archaic PIE)
2 (black): Afanasievo culture (early PIE)
3 (black) Yamnaya culture expansion (Pontic-Caspian steppe, Danube Valley) (late PIE)
4A (black): Western Corded Ware
4B-C (blue & dark blue): Bell Beaker; adopted by Indo-European speakers
5A-B (red): Eastern Corded ware
5C (red): Sintashta (proto-Indo-Iranian)
6 (magenta): Andronovo
7A (purple): Indo-Aryans (Mittani)
7B (purple): Indo-Aryans (India)
[NN] (dark yellow): proto-Balto-Slavic
8 (grey): Greek
9 (yellow):Iranians
– [not drawn]: Armenian, expanding from western steppe

The Indo-Aryan migration theory is part of a larger theoretical framework. This framework explains the similarities between a wide range of contemporary and ancient languages. It combines linguistic, archaeological and anthropological research.[13][14] This provides an overview of the development of Indo-European languages, and the spread of these Indo-European languages by migration and acculturation.[14]

Linguistics: relationships between languages

The linguistic part traces the connections between the various Indo-European languages, and reconstructs the proto-Indo-European language. This is possible because the processes that change languages are not random, but follow strict patterns. Sound shifts, the changing of vowels and consonants, are especially important, although grammar (especially morphology) and the lexicon (vocabulary) may also be significant. Historical-comparative linguistics thus makes it possible to see great similarities between related languages which at first sight might seem very different.[14][15] Various characteristics of the Indo-European languages argue against an Indian origin of these languages, and point to a steppe origin.[15]

Archaeology: migrations from the steppe Urheimat

The archaeological part posits an "Urheimat" on the Pontic steppes, which developed after the introduction of cattle on the steppes around 5,200 BCE.[14] This introduction marked the change from foragist to pastoralist cultures, and the development of a hierarchical social system with chieftains, patron-client systems, and the exchange of goods and gifts.[14] The oldest nucleus may have been the Samara culture (late 6th and early 5th millennium BCE), at a bend in the Volga.

A wider "horizon" developed, called the Kurgan culture by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s. She included several cultures in this "Kurgan Culture", including the Samara culture and the Yamna culture, although the Yamna culture (36th–23rd centuries BCE), also called "Pit Grave Culture", may more aptly be called the "nucleus" of the proto-Indo-European language.[14] From this area, which already included various subcultures, Indo-European languages spread west, south and east starting around 4,000 BCE.[16] These languages may have been carried by small groups of males, with patron-client systems which allowed for the inclusion of other groups into their cultural system.[14]

Eastward emerged the Sintashta culture (2050–1900 BCE), where common Indo-Iranian was spoken.[17] Out of the Sintashta culture developed the Andronovo culture (2000–1450 BCE), which interacted with the Bactria-Margiana culture (2250–1700 BCE). This interaction further shaped the Indo-Iranians, which split at sometime between 2000 and 1600 BCE into the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians.[9] The Indo-Aryans migrated to the Levant and South Asia.[18] The migration into northern India was not a large-scale immigration, but may have consisted of small groups[19][note 2] which were genetically diverse.[clarification needed] Their culture and language spread by the same mechanisms of acculturalisation, and the absorption of other groups into their patron-client system.[14]

Anthropology: elite recruitment and language shift

Indo-European languages probably spread through language shifts.[21][22][23] Small groups can change a larger cultural area,[24][14] and elite male dominance by small groups may have led to a language shift in northern India.[25][26][27]

David Anthony, in his "revised Steppe hypothesis"[28] notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which were emulated by large groups of people,[29][note 3] a process which he calls "elite recruitment".[30]

According to Parpola, local elites joined "small but powerful groups" of Indo-European speaking migrants.[21] These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons, and luxury goods which marked their status and power. Joining these groups was attractive for local leaders, since it strengthened their position, and gave them additional advantages.[31] These new members were further incorporated by matrimonial alliances.[32][22]

According to Joseph Salmons, language shift is facilitated by "dislocation" of language communities, in which the elite is taken over.[33] According to Salmons, this change is facilitated by "systematic changes in community structure", in which a local community becomes incorporated in a larger social structure.[33][note 4]

Genetics: ancient ancestry and multiple gene flows

The Indo-Aryan migrations form part of a complex genetic puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population, including various waves of admixture and language shift. Studies indicate north and south Indians share a common maternal ancestry.[34][35][36][37] A series of studies show that the Indian subcontinent harbours two major ancestral components,[38][39][40] namely the Ancestral North Indians (ANI) which is "genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans", and the Ancestral South Indians (ASI) which is clearly distinct from ANI.[38][note 5] These two groups mixed in India between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago (2200 BCE – 100 CE), after which a shift to endogamy took place,[40] possibly by the enforcement of "social values and norms" during the Gupta Empire.[42][when?]

Moorjani et al. (2013) describe three scenarios regarding the bringing together of the two groups: migrations before the development of agriculture before 8,000–9,000 years before present (BP); migration of western Asian[note 6] people together with the spread of agriculture, maybe up to 4,600 years BP; migrations of western Eurasians from 3,000 to 4,000 years BP.[43]

 
Percentage of adults that can digest lactose[44]

While Reich notes that the onset of admixture coincides with the arrival of Indo-European language,[web 2] according to Moorjani et al. (2013) these groups were present "unmixed" in India before the Indo-Aryan migrations.[40] Gallego Romero et al. (2011) propose that the ANI component came from Iran and the Middle East,[45] less than 10,000 years ago,[web 3][note 7] while according to Lazaridis et al. (2016) ANI is a mix of "early farmers of western Iran" and "people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe".[46] Several studies also show traces of later influxes of maternal genetic material[34][web 4] and of paternal genetic material related to ANI and possibly the Indo-Europeans.[38][47][48] While others have analysed the herditary distribution of Lactose intolerance, and specifically the presence of the -13910T Lactase persistence mutation, found in Europe and Central Asia, across South Asia.[49][50][44]

Literary research: similarities, geography, and references to migration

The oldest known inscribed Indo-Iranian words, and particularly invocations of the Indo-Aryan deities, date to mid second millenia BCE, as loan words in Hurrian treaties of the Mitanni kingdom, of present day northern Syria.[51][52]

The religious practices depicted in the Rigveda and those depicted in the Avesta, the central religious text of Zoroastrianism, show similarities.[52] Some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra River,[53] while the Afghan river Haraxvaiti/Harauvati Helmand is sometimes quoted as the locus of the early Rigvedic river.[54][needs context] The Rigveda does not explicitly refer to an external homeland[55] or to a migration,[56] but later Vedic and Puranic texts do show the movement into the Gangetic plains. A number of Indologists and historians offering the Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra, verse 18.44:397.9, as explicit recorded evidence of a migration,[57][58][59][60] while others have criticised their interpretations, or the general reliability of Vedic texts, discounting the like of:[58]

Then, there is the following direct statement contained in (the admittedly much later) BSS [Baudhāyana Śrauta Sūtra] 18.44:397.9 sqq which has once again been overlooked, not having been translated yet: "Ayu went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru Panchala and the Kasi-Videha. This is the Ayava (migration). (His other people) stayed at home. His people are the Gandhari, Parsu and Aratta. This is the Amavasava (group)" (Witzel 1989: 235).[61]

Ecological studies: widespread drought, urban collapse, and pastoral migrations

Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers, and the migration of Indo-Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India.[62][63]

Around 4200–4100 BCE a climate change occurred, manifesting in colder winters in Europe.[64] Steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.[65]

The Yamna horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE, in which the steppes became drier and cooler. Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently, and the use of wagons and horse-back riding made this possible, leading to "a new, more mobile form of pastoralism".[66]

In the third millennium BCE widespread aridification led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and the Indian subcontinent.[web 1][63] On the steppes, humidification led to a change of vegetation, triggering "higher mobility and transition to nomadic cattle breeding".[63][note 8][66][note 9] Water shortage also had a strong impact in the Indian subcontinent, "causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, and triggering large-scale migrations".[web 1]

Development of the theory

Similarities between Sanskrit, Persian, Greek

In the 16th century, European visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages[67] and as early as 1653 Van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic and Iranian.[68]

In a memoir sent to the French Academy of Sciences in 1767 Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the existing analogy between Sanskrit and European languages.[69][note 10]

In 1786 William Jones, a judge in the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William, Calcutta, linguist, and classics scholar, on studying Sanskrit, postulated, in his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society, a proto-language uniting Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages, but in many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindustani[68] and Slavic:[70][71]

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.[72][web 5]

Jones concluded that all these languages originated from the same source.[72]

Homeland

Scholars assume a homeland either in central Asia or in Western Asia, and Sanskrit must in this case have reached India by a language transfer from west to east.[73][74] In 19th century Indo-European studies, the language of the Rigveda was the most archaic Indo-European language known to scholars, indeed the only records of Indo-European that could reasonably claim to date to the Bronze Age. This primacy of Sanskrit inspired scholars such as Friedrich Schlegel, to assume that the locus of the proto-Indo-European homeland had been in India, with the other dialects spread to the west by historical migration. [73][74]

With the 20th-century discovery of Bronze-Age attestations of Indo-European (Anatolian, Mycenaean Greek), Vedic Sanskrit lost its special status as the most archaic Indo-European language known.[73][74]

Aryan "race"

 
A 1910 depiction of Aryans entering India, from Hutchinson's History of the Nations

In the 1850s Max Müller introduced the notion of two Aryan races, a western and an eastern one, who migrated from the Caucasus into Europe and India respectively. Müller dichotomized the two groups, ascribing greater prominence and value to the western branch. Nevertheless, this "eastern branch of the Aryan race was more powerful than the indigenous eastern natives, who were easy to conquer".[75]

Herbert Hope Risley expanded on Müller's two-race Indo-European speaking Aryan invasion theory, concluding that the caste system was a remnant of the Indo-Aryans domination of the native Dravidians, with observable variations in phenotypes between hereditary, race based, castes.[76][77] Thomas Trautmann explains that Risley "found a direct relation between the proportion of Aryan blood and the nasal index, along a gradient from the highest castes to the lowest. This assimilation of caste to race proved very influential."[78]

Müller's work contributed to the developing interest in Aryan culture, which often set Indo-European ('Aryan') traditions in opposition to Semitic religions. He was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms", as this was far from his intention.[79][note 11] For Müller the discovery of common Indian and European ancestry was a powerful argument against racism, arguing that "an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar" and that "the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians".[80] In his later work, Max Müller took great care to limit the use of the term "Aryan" to a strictly linguistic one.[81]

"Aryan invasion"

The excavation of the Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Lothal sites of the Indus Valley civilisation (IVC) in the 1920,[82] showed that northern India already had an advanced culture when the Indo-Aryans migrated into the area. The theory changed from a migration of advanced Aryans towards a primitive aboriginal population, to a migration of nomadic people into an advanced urban civilization, comparable to the Germanic migrations during the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, or the Kassite invasion of Babylonia.[83]

This possibility was for a short time seen as a hostile invasion into northern India. The decline of the Indus Valley civilisation at precisely the period in history in which the Indo-Aryan migrations probably took place, seemed to provide independent support of such an invasion. This argument was proposed by the mid-20th century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-daro as the victims of conquest wars, and who famously stated that the god "Indra stands accused" of the destruction of the Civilisation.[83]

This position was discarded after finding no evidence of wars. The skeletons were found to be hasty interments, not massacred victims.[83] Wheeler himself also nuanced this interpretation in later publications, stating "This is a possibility, but it can't be proven, and it may not be correct."[84] Wheeler further notes that the unburied corpses may indicate an event in the final phase of human occupation of Mohenjo-Daro, and that thereafter the place was uninhabited, but that the decay of Mohenjo-Daro has to be ascribed to structural causes such as salinisation.[85]

Nevertheless, although 'invasion' was discredited, critics of the Indo-Aryan Migration theory continue to present the theory as an "Aryan Invasion Theory",[1][86][note 12] presenting it as a racist and colonialist discourse:

The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.[1]

Aryan migration

 
An early 20th century depiction of Aryans settling in agricultural villages in India

In the later 20th century, ideas were refined along with data accrual, and migration and acculturation were seen as the methods whereby Indo-Aryans and their language and culture spread into northwest India around 1500 BCE. The term "invasion" is only being used nowadays by opponents[who?] of the Indo-Aryan Migration theory.[1][86] Michael Witzel:

...it has been supplanted by much more sophisticated models over the past few decades [...] philologists first, and archaeologists somewhat later, noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory and tried to find new explanations, a new version of the immigration theories.[1][note 13]

The changed approach was in line with newly developed thinking about language transfer in general, such as the migration of the Greeks into Greece (between 2100 and 1600 BCE) and their adoption of a syllabic script, Linear B, from the pre-existing Linear A, with the purpose of writing Mycenaean Greek, or the Indo-Europeanization of Western Europe (in stages between 2200 and 1300 BCE).

Future directions

Mallory notes that with the development and the growing sophistication of the knowledge on the Indo-European migrations and their purported homeland, new questions arise, and that "it is evident that we still have a very long way to go."[87] One of those questions is the origin of the shared agricultural vocabulary, and the earliest dates for agriculturalism in areas settled by the Indo-Europeans. Those dates seem to be too late to account for the shared vocabulary, and raise the question what their origin is.[88]

Linguistics: relationships between languages

Linguistic research traces the connections between the various Indo-European languages, and reconstructs proto-Indo-European. Accumulated linguistic evidence points to the Indo-Aryan languages as intrusive into the Indian subcontinent, some time in the 2nd millennium BCE.[89][90][91][92] The language of the Rigveda, the earliest stratum of Vedic Sanskrit, is assigned to about 1500–1200 BCE.[51]

Comparative method

Connections between languages can be traced because the processes that change languages are not random, but follow strict patterns. Especially sound shifts, the changing of vowels and consonants, are important, although grammar (especially morphology) and the lexicon (vocabulary) may also be significant. Historical-comparative linguistics thus makes it possible to see great similarities between languages which at first sight might seem very different.[14]

Linguistics use the comparative method to study the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyses the internal development of a single language over time.[93] Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages, to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language, to discover the development of phonological, morphological, and other linguistic systems, and to confirm or refute hypothesized relationships between languages.

The comparative method aims to prove that two or more historically attested languages are descended from a single proto-language by comparing lists of cognate terms. From them, regular sound correspondences between the languages are established, and a sequence of regular sound changes can then be postulated, which allows the proto-language to be reconstructed. Relation is deemed certain only if at least a partial reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible, and if regular sound correspondences can be established with chance similarities ruled out.

The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language was August Schleicher, in his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, originally published in 1861.[94]

Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. August Schleicher's 1861 reconstruction of PIE was the first proposed proto-language to be accepted by modern linguists.[95] More work has gone into reconstructing it than any other proto-language, and it is by far the best understood among all proto-languages of its age. During the 19th century, the vast majority of linguistic work was devoted to reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European or its daughter proto-languages such as Proto-Germanic, and most of the current techniques of linguistic reconstruction in historical linguistics (e.g., the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction) were developed as a result.[96]

PIE must have been spoken as a single language or a group of related dialects (before divergence began), though estimates of when this was by different authorities can vary massively, from the 7th millennium BCE to the second.[97] A number of hypotheses have been proposed for the origin and spread of the language, the most popular among linguists being the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe in the 5th or 4th millennia BCE.[98] Features of the culture of the speakers of PIE, known as Proto-Indo-Europeans, have also been reconstructed based on the shared vocabulary of the early attested Indo-European languages.[98]

As mentioned above, the existence of PIE was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. By the early 20th century, well-defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today (with some refinements).[95] The largest developments of the 20th century were the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages and the acceptance of the laryngeal theory. The Anatolian languages have also spurred a major re-evaluation of theories concerning the development of various shared Indo-European language features and the extent to which these features were present in PIE itself.[citation needed] Relationships to other language families, including the Uralic languages, have been proposed but remain controversial.[citation needed]

PIE is thought[by whom?] to have had a complex system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung). Nouns and verbs had complex systems of declension and conjugation respectively.

Arguments against an Indian origin of proto-Indo-European

Diversity

According to the linguistic center of gravity principle, the most likely point of origin of a language family is in the area of its greatest diversity.[99][note 14] By this criterion, Northern India, home to only a single branch of the Indo-European language family (i.e., Indo-Aryan), is an exceedingly unlikely candidate for the Indo-European homeland, compared to Central-Eastern Europe, for example, which is home to the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Albanian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian and Greek branches of Indo-European.[100]

Both mainstream Urheimat solutions locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the vicinity of the Black Sea.[101]

Dialectal variation

It has been recognized since the mid-19th century, beginning with Schmidt and Schuchardt, that a binary tree model cannot capture all linguistic alignments; certain areal features cut across language groups and are better explained through a model treating linguistic change like waves rippling out through a pond. This is true of the Indo-European languages as well. Various features originated and spread while Proto-Indo-European was still a dialect continuum.[102] These features sometimes cut across sub-families: for instance, the instrumental, dative and ablative plurals in Germanic and Balto-Slavic feature endings beginning with -m-, rather than the usual -*bh-, e.g. Gothic dative plural sunum 'to the sons' and Old Church Slavonic instrumental plural synъ-mi 'with sons',[103] despite the fact that the Germanic languages are centum, while Balto-Slavic languages are satem.

The strong correspondence between the dialectal relationships of the Indo-European languages and their actual geographical arrangement in their earliest attested forms makes an Indian origin, as suggested by the Out of India Theory, unlikely.[104]

Substrate influence

Already in the 1870s the Neogrammarians[who?] realised that the Greek/Latin vocalism couldn't be explained on the basis of the Sanskrit one, and therefore must be more original.[citation needed] The Indo-Iranian and Uralic languages influenced each other, with the Finno-Ugric languages containing Indo-European loan words. A telling example is the Finnish word vasara, "hammer", which is related to vajra, the weapon of Indra. Since the Finno-Ugric homeland was located in the northern forest zone in northern Europe, the contacts must have taken place – in line with the placement of the proto-Indo-European homeland at the Pontic-Caspian steppes – between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.[web 1]

Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical and morphological features that are alien to other Indo-European languages, including even its closest relative, Old Iranian. Phonologically, there is the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals in Indo-Aryan; morphologically there are the gerunds; and syntactically there is the use of a quotative marker (iti).[note 15] These are taken as evidence of substratum influence.

It has been argued[by whom?] that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", whereby native Dravidian speakers learned and adopted Indic languages.[citation needed] The presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is thus plausibly explained, that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.[105] Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.[106]

A pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum in the Indian subcontinent would be a good reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland.[107] However, several linguists[who?], all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on other grounds, are still open to considering the evidence as internal developments rather than the result of substrate influences,[108] or as adstratum effects.[109]

Archaeology: migrations from the steppe Urheimat

The Sintashta, Andronovo, Bactria-Margiana and Yaz cultures have been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations in Central Asia.[110] The Gandhara Grave, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard and Painted Grey Ware cultures are candidates for subsequent cultures within south India associated with Indo-Aryan movements.[needs context] The decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation predates the Indo-Aryan migrations, but archeological data show a cultural continuity in the archeological record. Together with the presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda, this[clarification needed] argues in favor of an interaction between post-Harappan and Indo-Aryan cultures.[6]

Stages of migrations

About 6,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans started to spread out from their proto-Indo-European homeland in Central Eurasia, between the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and the Black Sea.[16] About 4,000 years ago Indo-European speaking peoples started to migrate out of the Eurasian steppes.[111][note 16]

Diffusion from the "Urheimat"

Scholars regard the middle Volga, which was the location of the Samara culture (late 6th and early 5th millennium BCE), and the Yamna culture, to be the "Urheimat" of the Indo-Europeans, as described by the Kurgan hypothesis. From this "Urheimat", Indo-European languages spread throughout the Eurasian steppes between c. 4,500 and 2,500 BCE, forming the Yamna culture.

Sequence of migrations

David Anthony gives an elaborate overview of the sequence of migrations.

The oldest attested Indo-European language is Hittite, which belongs to the oldest written Indo-European languages, the Anatolian branch.[112] Although the Hittites are placed in the 2nd millennium BCE,[113] the Anatolian branch seems to predate Proto-Indo-European, and may have developed from an older Pre-Proto-Indo-European ancestor.[114] If it separated from Proto-Indo-European, it is likely to have done so between 4500 and 3500 BCE.[115]

A migration of archaic Proto-Indo-European speaking steppe herders into the lower Danube valley took place about 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.[65]

According to Mallory and Adams, migrations southward founded the Maykop culture (c. 3500–2500 BCE),[116] and eastward the Afanasevo culture (c. 3500–2500 BCE),[117] which developed into the Tocharians (c. 3700–3300 BCE).[118]

According to Anthony, between 3100 and 2800/2600 BCE, a real folk migration of Proto-Indo-European speakers from the Yamna-culture took place toward the west, into the Danube Valley.[119] These migrations probably split off Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic and Pre-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European.[120] According to Anthony, this was followed by a movement north, which split away Baltic-Slavic c. 2800 BCE.[121] Pre-Armenian split off at the same time.[122] According to Parpola, this migration is related to the appearance of Indo-European speakers from Europe in Anatolia, and the appearance of Hittite.[123]

The Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe ( 2900–2450/2350 cal. BCE),[124] has been associated with some of the languages in the Indo-European family. According to Haak et al. (2015) a massive migration took place from the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe.

 
Yamna culture

This migration is closely associated with the Corded Ware culture.[125][web 6][web 7]

The Indo-Iranian language and culture emerged in the Sintashta culture (c. 2050–1900 BCE),[2] where the chariot was invented.[14] Allentoft et al. (2015) found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture, which "suggests similar genetic sources of the two", and may imply that "the Sintashta derives directly from an eastward migration of Corded Ware peoples".[126]

The Indo-Iranian language and culture was further developed in the Andronovo culture (c. 2000–1450 BCE), and influenced by the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (c. 2250–1700 BCE). The Indo-Aryans split off sometime around 2000–1600 BCE from the Iranians,[9] after which Indo-Aryan groups are thought to have moved to the Levant (Mitanni), the northern Indian subcontinent (Vedic people, c. 1500 BCE), and China (Wusun).[18] Thereafter the Iranians migrated into Iran.[18]

Central Asia: formation of Indo-Iranians

Indo-Iranian peoples are a grouping of ethnic groups consisting of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani peoples; that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages.

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the Andronovo culture,[110] that flourished c. 2000–1450 BCE in an area of the Eurasian Steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east. The older Sintashta culture (2050–1900), formerly included within the Andronovo culture, is now considered separately, but regarded as its predecessor, and accepted as part of the wider Andronovo horizon.

The Indo-Aryan migration was part of the Indo-Iranian migrations from the Andronovo culture into Anatolia, Iran and South Asia.[10]

Sintashta-Petrovka culture

 
According to Allentoft (2015), the Sintashta culture probably derived from the Corded Ware Culture.
 
Map of the approximate maximal extent of the Andronovo culture. The formative Sintashta-Petrovka culture is shown in darker red. The location of the earliest spoke-wheeled chariot finds is indicated in purple. Adjacent and overlapping cultures (Afanasevo, Srubna and Bactria-Margiana cultures) are shown in green.

The Sintashta culture, also known as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture[127] or Sintashta-Arkaim culture,[128] is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian Steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dated to the period 2050–1900 BCE.[2] The Sintashta culture is probably the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian language group.[4]

The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures. Its immediate predecessor in the Ural-Tobol steppe was the Poltavka culture, an offshoot of the cattle-herding Yamnaya horizon that moved east into the region between 2800 and 2600 BCE.[129] Several Sintashta towns were built over older Poltovka settlements or close to Poltovka cemeteries, and Poltovka motifs are common on Sintashta pottery. Sintashta material culture also shows the influence of the late Abashevo culture, a collection of Corded Ware settlements in the forest steppe zone north of the Sintashta region that were also predominantly pastoralist.[130] Allentoft et al. (2015) also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture.[126]

The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare.[131] Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture.[132]

Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements, the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture.[128] It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the 'Andronovo horizon'.[127]

Andronovo culture

 
Archaeological cultures associated with Indo-Iranian migrations and Indo-Aryan migrations (after EIEC). The Andronovo, BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. The GGC, Cemetery H, Copper Hoard and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryan migrations.

The Andronovo culture is a collection of similar local Bronze Age Indo-Iranian cultures that flourished c. 2000–1450 BC in western Siberia and the central Eurasian Steppe.[7][133] It is probably better termed an archaeological complex or archaeological horizon. The name derives from the village of Andronovo (55°53′N 55°42′E / 55.883°N 55.700°E / 55.883; 55.700), where in 1914, several graves were discovered, with skeletons in crouched positions, buried with richly decorated pottery. The older Sintashta culture (2050–1900 BCE), formerly included within the Andronovo culture, is now considered[by whom?] separately, but regarded as its predecessor, and accepted as part of the wider Andronovo horizon.

Currently only two sub-cultures are considered as part of Andronovo culture:

Other authors identified previously the following sub-cultures also as part of Andronovo:

The geographical extent of the culture is vast and difficult to delineate exactly. On its western fringes, it overlaps with the approximately contemporaneous, but distinct, Srubna culture in the VolgaUral interfluvial. To the east, it reaches into the Minusinsk depression, with some sites as far west as the southern Ural Mountains,[138] overlapping with the area of the earlier Afanasevo culture.[139] Additional sites are scattered as far south as the Kopet Dag (Turkmenistan), the Pamir (Tajikistan) and the Tian Shan (Kyrgyzstan). The northern boundary vaguely corresponds to the beginning of the Taiga.[138] In the Volga basin, interaction with the Srubna culture was the most intense and prolonged, and Federovo style pottery is found as far west as Volgograd.

Towards the middle of the 2nd millennium, the Andronovo cultures begin to move intensively eastwards. They mined deposits of copper ore in the Altai Mountains and lived in villages of as many as ten sunken log cabin houses measuring up to 30m by 60m in size. Burials were made in stone cists or stone enclosures with buried timber chambers.

In other respects, the economy was pastoral, based on cattle, horses, sheep, and goats.[138] While agricultural use has been posited[by whom?], no clear evidence has been presented.

Studies associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo-Iranian languages, though it may have overlapped the early Uralic-speaking area at its northern fringe, including the Turkic-speaking area at its northeastern fringe.[140][141][142]

Based on its use by Indo-Aryans in Mitanni and Vedic India, its prior absence in the Near East and Harappan India, and its 19–20th century BCE attestation at the Andronovo site of Sintashta, Kuz'mina (1994) argues that the chariot corroborates the identification of Andronovo as Indo-Iranian.[143][note 17] Anthony & Vinogradov (1995) dated a chariot burial at Krivoye Lake to about 2000 BCE and a Bactria-Margiana burial that also contains a foal has recently been found, indicating further links with the steppes.[147]

Mallory acknowledges the difficulties of making a case for expansions from Andronovo to northern India, and that attempts to link the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Beshkent and Vakhsh cultures "only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans". He has developed the "kulturkugel" model that has the Indo-Iranians taking over Bactria-Margiana cultural traits but preserving their language and religion[contradictory] while moving into Iran and India.[148][146] Fred Hiebert also agrees that an expansion of the BMAC into Iran and the margin of the Indus Valley is "the best candidate for an archaeological correlate of the introduction of Indo-Iranian speakers to Iran and South Asia."[146] According to Narasimhan et al. (2018), the expansion of the Andronovo culture towards the BMAC took place via the Inner Asia Mountain Corridor.[149]

Bactria-Margiana culture

 
The extent of the Bactria-Margiana Culture (after EIEC).

The Bactria-Margiana Culture, also called "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex", was a non-Indo-European culture which influenced the Indo-Iranians.[10] It was centered in what is nowadays northwestern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan.[10] Proto-Indo-Iranian arose due to this influence.[10]

The Indo-Iranians also borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs[contradictory] and practices from this culture.[10] According to Anthony, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and (present-day) Iran.[150] It was "a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements",[150] which borrowed "distinctive religious beliefs and practices"[10] from the Bactria–Margiana culture.[10] At least 383 non-Indo-European words were borrowed from this culture, including the god Indra and the ritual drink Soma.[151]

The characteristically Bactria-Margiana (southern Turkmenistan/northern Afghanistan) artifacts found at burials in Mehrgarh and Balochistan are explained by a movement of peoples from Central Asia to the south.[152] The Indo-Aryan tribes may have been present in the area of the BMAC from 1700 BCE at the latest (incidentally corresponding with the decline of that culture).

From the BMAC, the Indo-Aryans moved into the Indian subcontinent. According to Bryant, the Bactria-Margiana material inventory of the Mehrgarh and Baluchistan burials is "evidence of an archaeological intrusion into the subcontinent from Central Asia during the commonly accepted time frame for the arrival of the Indo-Aryans".[153][note 18]

Two waves of Indo-Iranian migration

The Indo-Iranian migrations took place in two waves,[154][155] belonging to the second and the third stage of Beckwith's description of the Indo-European migrations.[156] The first wave consisted of the Indo-Aryan migration into the Levant, seemingly founding the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria[157] (c. 1600–1350 BCE),[158] and the migration south-eastward of the Vedic people, over the Hindu Kush into northern India.[159] Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Wusun, an Indo-European Europoid people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin.[160] The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave.[161]

First wave – Indo-Aryan migrations

Mittani

 
Map of the Near East c. 1400 BCE showing the Kingdom of Mitanni at its greatest extent

Mitanni (Hittite cuneiform KURURUMi-ta-an-ni), also Mittani (Mi-it-ta-ni) or Hanigalbat (Assyrian Hanigalbat, Khanigalbat cuneiform Ḫa-ni-gal-bat) or Naharin in ancient Egyptian texts was a Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and south-east Anatolia from c. 1600 BCE – 1350 BCE.[158]

According to one hypothesis, founded by an Indo-Aryan ruling class governing a predominately Hurrian population, Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite[162] Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia. At the beginning of its history, Mitanni's major rival was Egypt under the Thutmosids. However, with the ascent of the Hittite empire, Mitanni and Egypt made an alliance to protect their mutual interests from the threat of Hittite domination.

At the height of its power, during the 14th century BCE, Mitanni had outposts centered on its capital, Washukanni, whose location has been determined by archaeologists to be on the headwaters of the Khabur River. Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names, personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type. Eventually, Mitanni succumbed to Hittite and later Assyrian attacks, and was reduced to the status of a province of the Middle Assyrian Empire.

The earliest written evidence for an Indo-Aryan language is found not in Northwestern India and Pakistan, but in northern Syria, the location of the Mitanni kingdom.[110] The Mitanni kings took Old Indic throne names, and Old Indic technical terms were used for horse-riding and chariot-driving.[110] The Old Indic term r'ta, meaning "cosmic order and truth", the central concept of the Rigveda, was also employed in the Mitanni kingdom.[110] Old Indic gods, including Indra, were also known in the Mitanni kingdom.[163][164][165]

North-India – Vedic culture

Multiple waves of migration into northern India
 
Geography of the Rigveda, with river names; the extent of the Swat and Cemetery H cultures are indicated.

The standard model[by whom?] for the entry of the Indo-European languages into India is that Indo-Aryan migrants went over the Hindu Kush, forming the Gandhara grave culture or Swat culture, in present-day Swat valley, into the headwaters of either the Indus or the Ganges (probably both). The Gandhara grave culture, which emerged c. 1600 BCE and flourished from c. 1500 BCE to 500 BCE in Gandhara, modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, is thus the most likely locus of the earliest bearers of Rigvedic culture.

According to Parpola, Indo-Aryan clans migrated into South Asia in subsequent waves.[6] This explains the diversity of views found in the Rig Veda, and may also explain the existence of various Indo-Aryan cultural complexes in the later Vedic period, namely the Vedic culture centered on the Kuru Kingdom in the heartland of Aryavarta in the western Ganges plain, and the cultural complex of Greater Magadha at the eastern Ganges plain, which gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism.[6][166][167]

Writing in 1998, Parpola postulated a first wave of immigration from as early as 1900 BCE, corresponding to the Cemetery H culture and the Copper Hoard culture, c.q. Ochre Coloured Pottery culture, and an immigration to the Punjab . 1700–1400 BCE.[168][note 19] In 2020, Parpola proposed an even earlier wave of proto-Indo-Iranian speaking people from the Sintashta culture[169] into India at c. 1900 BCE, related to the Copper Hoard Culture, followed by a pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan wave of migration:[170]

It seems, then, that the earliest Aryan-speaking immigrants to South Asia, the Copper Hoard people, came with bull-drawn carts (Sanauli and Daimabad) via the BMAC and had Proto-Indo-Iranian as their language. They were, however, soon followed (and probably at least partially absorbed) by early Indo-Aryans.[171]

This pre-Rig-Vedic wave of migration by early Indo-Aryans is associated by Parpola with "the early (Ghalegay IV–V) phase of the Gandhāra Grave culture" and the Atharva Veda tradition, and related to the Petrovka culture.[172] The Rig-Vedic wave followed several centuries later, "perhaps in the fourteenth century BCE", and is associated by Parpola with the Fedorovo culture.[173]

According to Kochhar there were three waves of Indo-Aryan immigration that occurred after the mature Harappan phase:[174]

  1. the "Murghamu" (Bactria-Margiana culture) related people who entered Balochistan at Pirak, Mehrgarh south cemetery, and other places, and later merged with the post-urban Harappans during the late Harappans Jhukar phase (2000–1800 BCE);
  2. the Swat IV that co-founded the Harappan Cemetery H phase in Punjab (2000–1800 BCE);
  3. and the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans of Swat V that later absorbed the Cemetery H people and gave rise to the Painted Grey Ware culture (PGW) (to 1400 BCE).
Gandhara grave culture and Ochre Coloured Pottery culture

About 1800 BCE, there is a major cultural change in the Swat Valley with the emergence of the Gandhara grave culture. With its introduction of new ceramics, new burial rites, and the horse, the Gandhara grave culture is a major candidate for early Indo-Aryan presence. The two new burial rites—flexed inhumation in a pit and cremation burial in an urn—were, according to early Vedic literature, both practiced in early Indo-Aryan society. Horse-trappings indicate the importance of the horse to the economy of the Gandharan grave culture. Two horse burials indicate the importance of the horse in other respects. Horse burial is a custom that Gandharan grave culture has in common with Andronovo, though not within the distinctive timber-frame graves of the steppe.[175]

Parpola (2020) states:

The dramatic new discovery of cart burials dated to c. 1900 at Sinauli have been reviewed in this paper, and they support my proposal of a pre-Ṛvedic wave (now set of waves) of Aryan speakers arriving in South Asia and their making contact with the Late Harappans.[176]

Spread of Vedic-Brahmanic culture

During the Early Vedic Period (c. 1500–800 BCE[web 9]) the Indo-Aryan culture was centered in the northern Punjab, or Sapta Sindhu.[web 9] During the Later Vedic Period (c. 800–500 BCE[web 10]) the Indo-Aryan culture started to extend into the western Ganges Plain,[web 10] centering on the Vedic Kuru and Panchala area,[167] and had some influence[177] at the central Ganges Plain after 500 BCE.[web 11] Sixteen Mahajanapada developed at the Ganges Plain, of which the Kuru and Panchala became the most notable developed centers of Vedic culture, at the western Ganges Plain.[web 10][167]

The Central Ganges Plain, where Magadha gained prominence, forming the base of the Maurya Empire, was a distinct cultural area,[178] with new states arising after 500 BCE[web 11] during the so-called "Second urbanisation".[179][note 20] It was influenced by the Vedic culture,[177] but differed markedly from the Kuru-Panchala region.[178] It "was the area of the earliest known cultivation of rice in the Indian subcontinent and by 1800 BCE was the location of an advanced neolithic population associated with the sites of Chirand and Chechar".[180] In this region the Shramanic movements flourished, and Jainism and Buddhism originated.[167]

Indus Valley Civilization

The Indo-Aryan migration into the northern Punjab started shortly after the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation (IVC). According to the "Aryan Invasion Theory" this decline was caused by "invasions" of barbaric and violent Aryans who conquered the IVC. This "Aryan Invasion Theory" is not supported by the archeological and genetic data, and is not representative of the "Indo-Aryan migration theory".[citation needed]

Decline of Indus Valley Civilisation

The decline of the IVC from about 1900 BCE started before the onset of the Indo-Aryan migrations, caused by aridisation due to shifting mossoons.[181][182] A regional cultural discontinuity occurred during the second millennium BCE and many Indus Valley cities were abandoned during this period, while many new settlements began to appear in Gujarat and East Punjab and other settlements such as in the western Bahawalpur region increased in size.

Jim G. Shaffer and Lichtenstein contend that in the second millennium BCE considerable "location processes" took place. In the eastern Punjab 79.9% and in Gujarat 96% of sites changed settlement status. According to Shaffer & Lichtenstein,

It is evident that a major geographic population shift accompanied this 2nd millennium BCE localisation process. This shift by Harappan and, perhaps, other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups, is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in the Indian subcontinent before the first half of the first millennium B.C.[183]

Continuity of Indus Valley civilization

According to Erdosy, the ancient Harappans were not markedly different from modern populations in Northwestern India and present-day Pakistan. Craniometric data showed similarity with prehistoric peoples of the Iranian plateau and Western Asia,[note 21] although Mohenjo-daro was distinct from the other areas of the Indus Valley.[note 22][note 23]

According to Kennedy, there is no evidence of "demographic disruptions" after the decline of the Harappa culture.[185][note 24] Kenoyer notes that no biological evidence can be found for major new populations in post-Harappan communities.[186][note 25] Hemphill notes that "patterns of phonetic affinity" between Bactria and the Indus Valley Civilisation are best explained by "a pattern of long-standing, but low-level bidirectional mutual exchange".[note 26]

According to Kennedy, the Cemetery H culture "shows clear biological affinities" with the earlier population of Harappa.[187] The archaeologist Kenoyer noted that this culture "may only reflect a change in the focus of settlement organization from that which was the pattern of the earlier Harappan phase and not cultural discontinuity, urban decay, invading aliens, or site abandonment, all of which have been suggested in the past."[188] Recent excavations in 2008 at Alamgirpur, Meerut District, appeared to show an overlap between the Harappan and PGW[expand acronym] pottery[189] indicating cultural continuity.

Relation with Indo-Aryan migrations

According to Kenoyer, the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation is not explained by Aryan migrations,[190][note 27] which took place after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Yet, according to Erdosy,

Evidence in material culture for systems collapse, abandonment of old beliefs and large-scale, if localised, population shifts in response to ecological catastrophe in the 2nd millennium B.C. must all now be related to the spread of Indo-Aryan languages.[191]

Erdosy, testing hypotheses derived from linguistic evidence against hypotheses derived from archaeological data,[192] states that there is no evidence of "invasions by a barbaric race enjoying technological and military superiority",[193] but "some support was found in the archaeological record for small-scale migrations from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent in the late 3rd/early 2nd millennia BCE".[194] According to Erdosy, the postulated movements within Central Asia can be placed within a processional framework, replacing simplistic concepts of "diffusion", "migrations" and "invasions".[195]

Scholars have argued that the historical Vedic culture is the result of an amalgamation of the immigrating Indo-Aryans with the remnants of the indigenous civilization, such as the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture. Such remnants of IVC[expand acronym] culture are not prominent in the Rigveda, with its focus on chariot warfare and nomadic pastoralism in stark contrast with an urban civilization.

Inner Asia – Wusun and Yuezhi

 
The Tarim Basin, 2008
 
Wusun and their neighbours during the late 2nd century BCE. The Yancai did not change their name to Alans until the 1st century.
 
The migrations of the Yuezhi through Central Asia, from around 176 BCE to 30 CE

According to Christopher I. Beckwith the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin.[160] From the Chinese term Wusun, Beckwith reconstructs the Old Chinese *âswin, which he compares to the Old Indic aśvin "the horsemen", the name of the Rigvedic twin equestrian gods.[160] Beckwith suggests that the Wusun were an eastern remnant of the Indo-Aryans, who had been suddenly pushed to the extremeties of the Eurasian Steppe by the Iranian peoples in the 2nd millennium BCE.[196]

The Wusun are first mentioned[when?] by Chinese sources as vassals in the Tarim Basin of the Yuezhi,[197] another Indo-European Caucasian people of possible Tocharian stock.[198][199] Around 175 BCE, the Yuezhi were utterly defeated by the Xiongnu, also former vassals of the Yuezhi.[199][200] The Yuezhi subsequently attacked the Wusun and killed their king (Kunmo Chinese: 昆莫 or Kunmi Chinese: 昆彌) Nandoumi (Chinese: 難兜靡), capturing the Ili Valley from the Saka (Scythians) shortly afterwards.[200] In return the Wusun settled in the former territories of the Yuezhi as vassals of the Xiongnu.[200][201]

The son of Nandoumi was adopted by the Xiongnu king and made leader of the Wusun.[201] Around 130 BCE he attacked and utterly defeated the Yuezhi, settling the Wusun in the Ili Valley.[201] After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu, in the 2nd century BCE, a small group, known as the Little Yuezhi, fled to the south, while the majority migrated west to the Ili Valley, where they displaced the Sakas (Scythians). Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun, the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria, where they are often identified with the Tókharoi (Τοχάριοι) and Asii of Classical sources. They then expanded into northern Indian subcontinent, where one branch of the Yuezhi founded the Kushan Empire. The Kushan empire stretched from Turpan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Indo-Gangetic Plain at its greatest extent, and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China.

Soon after 130 BCE the Wusun became independent of the Xiongnu, becoming trusted vassals of the Han dynasty and powerful force in the region for centuries.[201] With the emerging steppe federations of the Rouran, the Wusun migrated into the Pamir Mountains in the 5th century CE.[200] They are last mentioned in 938 when a Wusun chieftain paid tribute to the Liao dynasty.[200]

Second wave – Iranians

The first Iranians to reach the Black Sea may have been the Cimmerians in the 8th century BCE, although their linguistic affiliation is uncertain. They were followed by the Scythians[when?], who would dominate the area, at their height, from the Carpathian Mountains in the west, to the easternmost fringes of Central Asia in the east. For most of their existence, the Scythians were based in what is modern-day Ukraine and southern European Russia. Sarmatian tribes, of whom the best known are the Roxolani (Rhoxolani), Iazyges (Jazyges) and the Alans, followed the Scythians westwards into Europe in the late centuries BCE and the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era (The Migration Period). The populous Sarmatian tribe of the Massagetae, dwelling near the Caspian Sea, were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Achaemenid Period. In the east, the Scythians occupied several areas in Xinjiang, from Khotan to Tumshuq.

The Medes, Parthians and Persians begin to appear on the western Iranian Plateau from c. 800 BCE, after which they remained under Assyrian rule for several centuries, as it was with the rest of the peoples in the Near East. The Achaemenids replaced Median rule from 559 BCE. Around the first millennium of the Common Era (AD), the Kambojas, the Pashtuns and the Baloch began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau, on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western Pakistan, displacing the earlier Indo-Aryans from the area.

In Central Asia, the Turkic languages have marginalized Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic migration of the early centuries CE. In Eastern Europe, Slavic and Germanic peoples assimilated and absorbed the native Iranian languages (Scythian and Sarmatian) of the region. Extant major Iranian languages are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi, besides numerous smaller ones.

Anthropology: elite recruitment and language shift

Elite dominance

Small groups can change a larger cultural area,[24][14] and elite male dominance by small groups may have led to a language shift in northern India.[25][26][27][note 28] Thapar notes that Indo-Aryan chiefs may have provided protection to non-Aryan agriculturalists, offering a system of patronage placing the chiefs in a superior position. This would have involved bilingualism, resulting in the adoption of Indo-Aryan languages by local populations.[202] According to Parpola, local elites joined "small but powerful groups" of Indo-European speaking migrants.[21] These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons, and luxury goods which marked their status and power. Joining these groups was attractive for local leaders, since it strengthened their position, and gave them additional advantages.[31] These new members were further incorporated by matrimonial alliances.[32][22]

Renfrew: models of "linguistic replacement"

Basu et al. refer to Renfrew, who described four models for "linguistic replacement":[25][203]

  1. The demographic-subsistence model, exemplified by the process of agricultural dispersal, in which the incoming group has exploitive technologies which makes them dominant. It may lead to significant gene flow, and significant genetic changes in the population. But it may also lead to acculturalisation, in which case the technologies are taken over, but there is less change in the genetic composition of the population;
  2. The existence of extended trading systems which led to the development of a lingua franca, in which case some gene flow is to be expected;
  3. The elite dominance model, in which "a relatively small but well-organized group [...] take[s] over the system".[204] Given the small size of the elite, its genetic influence may also be small, though "preferential access to marriage partners" may result in a relatively strong influence on the gene pool. Sexual asymmetry may also be of influence: incoming elites often consist mostly of males, who have no influence on the mitochondrial DNA of the gene pool, but may influence the Y chromosomes of the gene pool;
  4. System collapse, in which territorial boundaries are changed, and elite dominance may appear for a while.

David Anthony: elite recruitment

David Anthony, in his "revised Steppe hypothesis"[28] notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people.[29][note 3][note 29] Anthony gives the example of the Southern Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century.[26] Anthony notes that "Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe", carried forward by "Indo-European chiefs" and their "ideology of political clientage".[30] Anthony notes that "elite recruitment" may be a suitable term for this system.[30][note 30]

Michael Witzel: small groups and acculturation

Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model[note 31] "which stresses the osmosis, or a 'billiard ball', or Mallory's Kulturkugel, effect of cultural transmission".[24] According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to the cultural, economic and military choices made by the local population in question. The group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic and language shift.[24]

Witzel notes that "arya/ārya does not mean a particular 'people' or even a particular 'racial' group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)."[207] According to Witzel, "there must have been a long period of acculturation between the local population and the 'original' immigrants speaking Indo-Aryan."[207] Witzel also notes that the speakers of Indo-Aryan and the local population must have been bilingual, speaking each other's languages and interacting with each other, before the Rg Veda was composed in the Punjab.[208]

Salmons: systematic changes in community structure

Joseph Salmons notes that Anthony presents scarce concrete evidence or arguments.[209] Salmons is critical about the notion of "prestige" as a central factor in the shift to Indo-European languages, referring to Milroy who notes that "prestige" is "a cover term for a variety of very distinct notions".[209] Instead, Milroy offers "arguments built around network structure", though Salmons also notes that Anthony includes several of those arguments, "including political and technological advantages".[209] According to Salmons, the best model is offered by Fishman,[note 32] who

... understands shift in terms of geographical, social, and cultural "dislocation" of language communities. Social dislocation, to give the most relevant example, involves "siphoning off the talented, the enterprising, the imaginative and the creative" ([Fishman] 1991: 61), and sounds strikingly like Anthony's 'recruitment' scenario.[33]

Salmons himself argues that

... systematic changes in community structure are what drive language shift, incorporating Milroy's network structures as well. The heart of the view is the quintessential element of modernization, namely a shift from local community-internal organization to regional (state or national or international, in modern settings), extra-community organizations. Shift correlates with this move from pre-dominantly "horizontal" community structures to more "vertical" ones.[33][note 4]

Genetics: ancient ancestry and multiple gene flows

India has one of the most genetically diverse populations in the world, and the history of this genetic diversity is the topic of continued research and debate. The Indo-Aryan migrations form part of a complex genetical puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population, including various waves of admixture and language shift. The genetic impact of the Indo-Aryans may have been marginal, but this is not at odds with the cultural and linguistic influence, since language shift is possible without a change in genetics.[211]

Ancestral groups

Common maternal ancestry

Sahoo et al. (2006) states that "there is general agreement[clarification needed] that Indian caste and tribal populations share a common late Pleistocene maternal ancestry in India."

Kivisild et al. (1999) concluded that there is "an extensive deep late Pleistocene[jargon] genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians" via the mitochondrial DNA, that is, DNA which is inherited from the mother. According to them, the two groups split at the time of the peopling of Asia and Eurasia and before modern humans entered Europe.[34] Kivisild et al. (2000) note that "the sum of any recent (the last 15,000 years) western mtDNA gene flow to India comprises, in average, less than 10 percent of the contemporary Indian mtDNA lineages."[web 4]

Kivisild et al. (2003) and Sharma et al. (2005) note that north and south Indians share a common maternal ancestry: Kivisild et al. (2003) further note that "these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene[jargon] southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.[jargon][35]

"Ancestral North Indians" and "Ancestral South Indians"

Reich et al. (2009), in a collaborative effort between the Harvard Medical School and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), examined the entire genomes worth 560,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), as compared to 420 SNPs in prior work. They also cross-compared them with the genomes of other regions available in the global genome database.[212] Through this study, they were able to discern two genetic groups in the majority of populations in India, which they called "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI) and "Ancestral South Indians" (ASI).[note 33] They found that the ANI genes are close to those of Middle Easterners, Central Asians and Europeans whereas the ASI genes are dissimilar to all other known populations outside India, though the indigenous Andamanese were determined to be the most closely related to the ASI population of any living group (albeit distinct from the ASI).[note 34][note 35] These two distinct groups, which had split ca. 50,000 years ago, formed the basis for the present population of India.[web 12]

The two groups mixed between 1,900 and 4,200 years ago (2200 BCE – 100 CE), where-after a shift to endogamy took place and admixture became rare.[note 36] Speaking to Fountain Ink, David Reich stated, "Prior to 4,200 years ago, there were unmixed groups in India. Sometime between 1,900 to 4,200 years ago, profound, pervasive convulsive mixture occurred, affecting every Indo-European and Dravidian group in India without exception." Reich pointed out that their work does not show that a substantial migration occurred during this time.[web 13]

Metspalu et al. (2011), representing a collaboration between the Estonian Biocenter and CCMB, confirmed that the Indian populations are characterized by two major ancestry components. One of them is spread at comparable frequency and haplotype diversity in populations of South and West Asia and the Caucasus. The second component is more restricted to South Asia and accounts for more than 50% of the ancestry in Indian populations. Haplotype diversity associated with these South Asian ancestry components is significantly higher than that of the components dominating the West Eurasian ancestry palette.[39]

Segurel et al. (2020)[213] notes the -13910*T Lactase persistence mutation, found in present-day South Asia, first appeared approximately 3,960 BCE, in Ukraine, and spread between 2,000 and 1,500 BCE throughout Eurasia. Earlier Tandon et al. (1981) had studied the distribution of lactase toleration in North and South Indians.[49] Romero et al.(2011)[214] later plotting a decreasing North West to South East Indian cline for the mutations frequency .

Additional components

ArunKumar et al. (2015) discern three major ancestry components, which they call "Southwest Asian", "Southeast Asian" and "Northeast Asian". The Southwest Asian component seems to be a native Indian component, while the Southeast Asian component is related to East Asian populations.[215] Brahmin[needs context] populations "contained 11.4 and 10.6% of Northern Eurasian and Mediterranean components, thereby suggesting a shared ancestry with the Europeans". They note that this fits with earlier studies which "suggested similar shared ancestries with Europeans and Mediterraneans".[215] They further note that

Studies based on uni-parental marker have shown diverse Y-chromosomal haplogroups making up the Indian gene pool. Many of these Y-chromosomal markers show a strong correlation to the linguistic affiliation of the population. The genome-wide variation of the Indian samples in the present study correlated with the linguistic affiliation of the sample.[216]

They conclude that, while there may have been an ancient settlement in the subcontinent, "male-dominated genetic elements shap[ed] the Indian gene pool", and that these elements "have earlier been correlated to various languages", and further note "the fluidity of female gene pools when in a patriarchal and patrilocal society, such as that of India".[217]

Basu et al. (2016) extend the study of Reich et al. (2009) by postulating two other populations in addition to the ANI and ASI: "Ancestral Austro-Asiatic" (AAA) and "Ancestral Tibeto-Burman" (ATB), corresponding to the Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman language speakers.[41] According to them, ancestral populations seem to have occupied geographically separated habitats.[42] The ASI and the AAA were early[when?] settlers, who possibly arrived via the southern wave out of Africa.[42] The ANI are related to Central South Asians and entered India through the northwest, while the ATB are related to East Asians and entered India through northeast corridors.[42] They further note that

The asymmetry of admixture, with ANI populations providing genomic inputs to tribal populations (AA, Dravidian tribe, and TB) but not vice versa, is consistent with elite dominance and patriarchy. Males from dominant populations, possibly upper castes, with high ANI component, mated outside of their caste, but their offspring were not allowed to be inducted into the caste. This phenomenon has been previously observed as asymmetry in homogeneity of mtDNA and heterogeneity of Y-chromosomal haplotypes in tribal populations of India as well as the African Americans in United States.[42]

Male-mediated migration

Reich et al. (2009), citing Kivisild et al. (1999), indicate that there has been a low influx of female genetic material since 50,000 years ago, but a "male gene flow from groups with more ANI relatedness into ones with less".[38][note 37]

ArunKumar et al. (2015) "suggest that ancient male-mediated migratory events and settlement in various regional niches led to the present day scenario and peopling of India."[218]

North-south cline

According to Metspalu et al. (2011) there is "a general principal component cline stretching from Europe to south India". This northwest component is shared with populations from the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia, and is thought to represent at least one ancient influx of people from the northwest.[219][clarification needed] According to Saraswathy et al. (2010), there is "a major genetic contribution from Eurasia to North Indian upper castes" and a "greater genetic inflow among North Indian caste populations than is observed among South Indian caste and tribal populations".[web 14] According to Basu et al. (2003) and Saraswathy et al. (2010) certain sample populations of upper caste North Indians show a stronger affinity to Central Asian caucasians, whereas southern Indian Brahmins show a less stronger affinity.[web 14]

Scenarios

While Reich notes that the onset of admixture coincides with the arrival of Indo-European language,[web 2][note 38] according to Metspalu (2011), the commonalities of the ANI with European genes cannot be explained by the influx of Indo-Aryans at ca. 3,500 BP alone.[220] They state that the split of ASI and ANI predates the Indo-Aryan migration,[39] both of these ancestry components being older than 3,500 BP."[221][web 15] Moorjani (2013) states that "We have further shown that groups with unmixed ANI and ASI ancestry were plausibly living in India until this time."[222] Moorjani (2013) describes three scenarios regarding the bringing together of the two groups:[43]

  1. "migrations that occurred prior to the development of agriculture [8,000–9,000 years before present (BP)]. Evidence for this comes from mitochondrial DNA studies, which have shown that the mitochondrial haplogroups (hg U2, U7, and W) that are most closely shared between Indians and West Eurasians diverged about 30,000–40,000 years BP."
  2. "Western Asian peoples migrated to India along with the spread of agriculture [...] Any such agriculture related migrations would probably have begun at least 8,000–9,000 years BP (based on the dates for Mehrgarh) and may have continued into the period of the Indus civilization that began around 4,600 years BP and depended upon West Asian crops."
  3. "migrations from Western or Central Asia from 3,000 to 4,000 years BP, a time during which it is likely that Indo-European languages began to be spoken in the subcontinent. A difficulty with this theory, however, is that by this time India was a densely populated region with widespread agriculture, so the number of migrants of West Eurasian ancestry must have been extraordinarily large to explain the fact that today about half the ancestry in India derives from the ANI."

Pre-agricultural migrations

Metspalu et al. (2011) detected a genetic component in India, k5, which "distributed across the Indus Valley, Central Asia, and the Caucasus".[223] According to Metspalu et al. (2011), k5 "might represent the genetic vestige of the ANI", though they also note that the geographic cline of this component within India "is very weak, which is unexpected under the ASI-ANI model", explaining that the ASI-ANI model implies an ANI contribution which decreases toward southern India.[224] According to Metspalu et al. (2011), "regardless of where this component was from (the Caucasus, Near East, Indus Valley, or Central Asia), its spread to other regions must have occurred well before our detection limits at 12,500 years."[225] Speaking to Fountain Ink, Metspalu said, "the West Eurasian component in Indians appears to come from a population that diverged genetically from people actually living in Eurasia, and this separation happened at least 12,500 years ago."[web 13][note 39] Moorjani et al. (2013) refer to Metspalu (2011)[note 40] as "fail[ing] to find any evidence for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West Eurasia within the past 12,500 years".[229] CCMB researcher Thangaraj believes that "it was much longer ago", and that "the ANI came to India in a second wave of migration[note 41] that happened perhaps 40,000 years ago."[web 13]

Narasimhan et al. (2019) conclude that ANI and ASI were formed in the 2nd millennium BCE.[230] They were preceded by IVC-people, a mixture of AASI (ancient ancestral south Indians, that is, hunter-gatherers related), and people related to but distinct from Iranian agri-culturalists, lacking the Anatolian farmer-related ancestry which was common in Iranian farmers after 6000 BCE.[231][note 42][note 43] Those Iranian farmers-related people may have arrived in India before the advent of farming in northern India,[231] and mixed with people related to Indian hunter-gatherers ca. 5400 to 3700 BCE, before the advent of the mature IVC.[236][note 44] This mixed IVC-population, which probably was native to the Indus Valley Civilisation, "contributed in large proportions to both the ANI and ASI", which took shape during the 2nd millennium BCE. ANI formed out of a mixture of "Indus_Periphery-related groups" and migrants from the steppe, while ASI was formed out of "Indus_Periphery-related groups" who moved south and mixed with hunter-gatherers.[238]

Agricultural migrations

Near-Eastern migrations
 
Late Harappan phase (1900–1300 BCE)
 
Early Vedic Culture (1700–1100 BCE)

Kivisild et al. (1999) note that "a small fraction of the 'Caucasoid-specific' mtDNA lineages found in Indian populations can be ascribed to a relatively recent admixture."[226] at ca. 9,300 ± 3,000 years before present,[239] which coincides with "the arrival to India of cereals domesticated in the fertile Crescent" and "lends credence to the suggested linguistic connection between Elamite and Dravidic populations".[239][note 7]

According to Gallego Romero et al. (2011), their research on lactose tolerance in India suggests that "the west Eurasian genetic contribution identified by Reich et al. (2009) principally reflects gene flow from Iran and the Middle East."[45] Gallego Romero notes that Indians who are lactose-tolerant show a genetic pattern regarding this tolerance which is "characteristic of the common European mutation".[web 3] According to Gallego Romero, this suggests that "the most common lactose tolerance mutation made a two-way migration out of the Middle East less than 10,000 years ago. While the mutation spread across Europe, another explorer must have brought the mutation eastward to India – likely traveling along the coast of the Persian Gulf where other pockets of the same mutation have been found."[web 3] In contrast, Allentoft et al. (2015) found that lactose-tolerance was absent in the Yamnaya culture, noting that while "the Yamnaya and these other Bronze Age cultures herded cattle, goats, and sheep, they couldn't digest raw milk as adults. Lactose tolerance was still rare among Europeans and Asians at the end of the Bronze Age, just 2000 years ago."[web 16][126]

According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), "farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia."[46] They further note that ANI "can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe".[46][note 45]

Haplogroup R1a and related haplogroups
 
R1a origins (Underhill 2010;[241] R1a migration to Eastern Europe; R1a1a diversification (Pamjav 2012); and R1a1a oldest expansion and highest frequency (Underhill 2014)

The distribution and proposed origin of haplogroup R1a, more specifically R1a1a1b, is often being used as an argument pro or contra the Indo-Aryan migrations. It is found in high frequencies in Eastern Europe (Z282) and south Asia (Z93), the areas of the Indo-European migrations. The place of origin of this haplogroup may give an indication of the "homeland" of the Indo-Europeans, and the direction of the first migrations.[242]

Cordeaux et al. (2004), based on the spread of a cluster of haplogroups (J2, R1a, R2, and L) in India, with higher rates in northern India,[243] argue that agriculture in south India spread with migrating agriculturalists, which also influenced the genepool in south India.[244][243]

Sahoo et al. (2006), in response to Cordeaux et al. (2004), suggest that those haplogroups originated in India, based on the spread of these various haplogroups in India. According to Sahoo et al. (2006), this spread "argue[s] against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family".[243] They further propose that "the high incidence of R1* and R1a throughout Central Asian and East European populations (without R2 and R* in most cases) is more parsimoniously explained by gene flow in the opposite direction",[245] which according to Sahoo et al. (2006) explains the "sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations".[243]

Sengupta et al. (2006) also comment on Cordeaux et al. (2004), stating that "the influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor", and arguing for "a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus and with significant genetic input resulting from demic diffusion associated with agriculture".[246]

Sharma et al. (2009) found a high frequency of R1a1 in India. They therefore argue for an Indian origin of R1a1, and dispute "the origin of Indian higher most castes from Central Asian and Eurasian regions, supporting their origin within the Indian subcontinent".[247]

Underhill et al. (2014/2015) conclude that R1a1a1, the most frequent subclade of R1a, split into Z282 (Europe) and Z93 (Asia) at circe 5,800 before present.[248] According to Underhill et al. (2014/2015), "[t]his suggests the possibility that R1a lineages accompanied demic expansions initiated during the Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages."[249] They further note that the diversification of Z93 and the "early urbanization within the Indus Valley also occurred at this time and the geographic distribution of R1a-M780 (Figure 3d) may reflect this".[249]

Palanichamy et al. (2015), while responding to Cordeaux et al. (2004), Sahoo et al. (2006) and Sengupta et al. (2006), elaborated on Kivisild et al.'s (1999) suggestion that West Eurasian haplogroups "may have been spread by the early Neolithic migrations of proto-Dravidian farmers spreading from the eastern horn of the Fertile Crescent into India".[250] They conclude that "the L1a lineage arrived from western Asia during the Neolithic period and perhaps was associated with the spread of the Dravidian language to India", indicating that "the Dravidian language originated outside India and may have been introduced by pastoralists coming from western Asia (Iran)."[251] They further conclude that two subhalogroups originated with the Dravidian speaking peoples, and may have come to South India when the Dravidian language spread.[252]

Poznik et al. (2016) note that "striking expansions" occurred within R1a-Z93 at ~4,500–4,000 years ago, which "predates by a few centuries the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation".[253] Mascarenhas et al. (2015) note that the expansion of Z93 from Transcaucasia into South Asia is compatible with "the archeological records of eastward expansion of West Asian populations in the 4th millennium BCE culminating in the so-called Kura-Araxes migrations in the post-Uruk IV period".[237]

Indo-European migrations

Genetic impact of Indo-Aryan migrations

Bamshad et al. (2001), Wells et al. (2002) and Basu et al. (2003) argue for an influx of Indo-European migrants into the Indian subcontinent, but not necessarily an "invasion of any kind".[web 17] Bamshad et al. (2001) notice that the correlation between caste-status and West Eurasian DNA may be explained by subsequent male immigration into the Indian subcontinent. Basu et al. (2003) argue that the Indian subcontinent was subjected to a series of Indo-European migrations about 1500 BCE.

Metspalu et al. (2011) note that "any nonmarginal migration from Central Asia to South Asia should have also introduced readily apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India" (although this presupposes the unproven assumption that East Asian ancestry was present – to a significant extent – in prehistorical Central Asia), which is not the case, and conclude that if there was a major migration of Eurasians into India, this happened before the rise of the Yamna culture.[224] Based on Metspalu (2011), Lalji Singh, a co-author of Metspalu, concludes that "[t]here is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India".[web 18][web 19][web 20][note 46]

Moorjani et al. (2013) notes that the period of 4,200–1,900 years BP was a time of dramatic changes in northern India, and coincides with the "likely first appearance of Indo-European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent".[229][note 47] Moorjani further notes that there must have been multiple waves of admixture, which had more impact on higher-caste and northern Indians and took place more recently.[222][note 48] This may be explained by "additional gene flow", related to the spread of languages:[254]

...at least some of the history of population mixture in India is related to the spread of languages in the subcontinent. One possible explanation for the generally younger dates in northern Indians is that after an original mixture event of ANI and ASI that contributed to all present-day Indians, some northern groups received additional gene flow from groups with high proportions of West Eurasian ancestry, bringing down their average mixture date.[254][note 49]

Palanichamy et al. (2015), elaborating on Kivisild et al. (1999) conclude that "A large proportion of the west Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups observed among the higher-ranked caste groups, their phylogenetic affinity and age estimate indicate recent Indo-Aryan migration to India from west Asia.[251] According to Palanichamy et al. (2015), "the west Eurasian admixture was restricted to caste rank. It is likely that Indo-Aryan migration has influenced the social stratification in the pre-existing populations and helped in building the Hindu caste system, but it should not be inferred that the contemporary Indian caste groups have directly descended from Indo-Aryan immigrants.[251][note 50]

Jones et al. (2015) state that Caucasus hunter gatherer(CHG)[note 51] was "a major contributor to the Ancestral North Indian component". According to Jones et al. (2015), it "may be linked with the spread of Indo-European languages", but they also note that "earlier movements associated with other developments such as that of cereal farming and herding are also plausible".[259]

Basu et al. (2016) note that the ANI are inseparable from Central-South Asian populations in present-day Pakistan. They hypothesise that "the root of ANI is in Central Asia".[260]

According to Lazaridis et al. (2016) ANI "can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe".[46]

Silva et al. (2017) state that "the recently refined Y-chromosome tree strongly suggests that R1a is indeed a highly plausible marker for the long-contested Bronze Age spread of Indo-Aryan speakers into South Asia."[261][note 52] Silva et al. (2017) further notes "they likely spread from a single Central Asian source pool, there do seem to be at least three and probably more R1a founder clades within the Subcontinent, consistent with multiple waves of arrival."

Narasimhan et al. (2018) conclude that pastoralists spread southwards from the Eurasian steppe during the period 2300–1500 BCE. These pastoralists during the 2nd millennium BCE, who were likely associated with Indo-European languages, presumably mixed with the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilisation, who in turn were a mix of Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gatherers forming "the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia."[238]

Zerjal et al. (2002) argue that "multiple recent events" may have reshaped India's genetic landscape.[web 22]

Origins of R1a-Z93

Ornella Semino et al. (2000) proposed Ukrainian origins of R1a1, and a postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene during the Late Glacial, subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward.[262] Spencer Wells proposes central Asian origins, suggesting that the distribution and age of R1a1 points to an ancient migration corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion from the Eurasian Steppe.[263] According to Pamjav et al. (2012), "Inner and Central Asia is an overlap zone for the R1a1-Z280 and R1a1-Z93 lineages [which] implies that an early differentiation zone of R1a1-M198 conceivably occurred somewhere within the Eurasian Steppes or the Middle East and Caucasus region as they lie between South Asia and Eastern Europe."[264][261]

A 2014 study by Peter A. Underhill et al., using 16,244 individuals from over 126 populations from across Eurasia, concluded that there was compelling evidence that "the initial episodes of haplogroup R1a diversification likely occurred in the vicinity of present-day Iran."[265]

According to Martin P. Richards, co-author of Silva et al. (2017), "[the prevalence of R1a in India was] very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to India."[266][note 53]

Literary research: similarities, geography, and references to migration

Similarities

Mitanni

The oldest inscriptions in Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, is found not in India, but in northern Syria in Hittite records regarding one of their neighbors, the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni. In a treaty with the Hittites, the king of Mitanni, after swearing by a series of Hurrian gods, swears by the gods Mitrašil, Uruvanaššil, Indara, and Našatianna, who correspond to the Vedic gods Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nāsatya (Aśvin). Contemporary[when?] equestrian terminology, as recorded in a horse-training manual whose author is identified as "Kikkuli", contains Indo-Aryan loanwords. The personal names and gods of the Mitanni aristocracy also bear significant traces of Indo-Aryan. Because of the association of Indo-Aryan with horsemanship and the Mitanni aristocracy, it is presumed that, after superimposing themselves as rulers on a native Hurrian-speaking population about the 15th–16th centuries BCE, Indo-Aryan charioteers were absorbed into the local population and adopted the Hurrian language.[267]

Brentjes argues that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian, Eastern European, or Caucasian origin in the Mitannian area; he also associates with an Indo-Aryan presence the peacock motif found in the Middle East from before 1600 BCE and quite likely from before 2100 BCE.[268]

Scholars reject the possibility that the Indo-Aryans of Mitanni came from the Indian subcontinent as well as the possibility that the Indo-Aryans of the Indian subcontinent came from the territory of Mitanni, leaving migration from the north the only likely scenario.[note 54] The presence of some Bactria-Margiana loan words in Mitanni, Old Iranian and Vedic further strengthens this scenario.[269]

Iranian Avesta

The religious practices depicted in the Rigveda and those depicted in the Avesta, the central religious text of Zoroastrianism—the ancient Iranian faith founded by the prophet Zoroaster—have in common the deity Mitra, priests called hotṛ in the Rigveda and zaotar in the Avesta, and the use of a ritual substance that the Rigveda calls soma and the Avesta haoma. However, the Indo-Aryan deva 'god' is cognate with the Iranian daēva 'demon'. Similarly, the Indo-Aryan asura 'name of a particular group of gods' (later on, 'demon') is cognate with the Iranian ahura 'lord, god,' which 19th and early 20th century authors such as Burrow explained as a reflection of religious rivalry between Indo-Aryans and Iranians.[270]

Linguists such as Burrow argue that the strong similarity between the Avestan of the Gāthās—the oldest part of the Avesta—and the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda pushes the dating of Zarathustra or at least the Gathas closer to the conventional Rigveda dating of 1500–1200 BCE, i.e. 1100 BCE, possibly earlier. Boyce concurs with a lower date of 1100 BCE and tentatively proposes an upper date of 1500 BCE. Gnoli dates the Gathas to around 1000 BCE, as does Mallory (1989), with the caveat of a 400-year leeway on either side, i.e. between 1400 and 600 BCE. Therefore, the date of the Avesta could also indicate the date of the Rigveda.[271]

There is mention in the Avesta of Airyan Vaejah, one of the '16 the lands of the Aryans'.[272] Gnoli's interpretation of geographic references in the Avesta situates the Airyanem Vaejah in the Hindu Kush. For similar reasons, Boyce excludes places north of the Syr Darya and western Iranian places. With some reservations, Skjaervo concurs that the evidence of the Avestan texts makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion that they were composed somewhere in northeastern Iran. Witzel points to the central Afghan highlands. Humbach derives Vaējah from cognates of the Vedic root "vij", suggesting the region of fast-flowing rivers. Gnoli considers Choresmia (Xvairizem), the lower Oxus region, south of the Aral Sea to be an outlying area in the Avestan world. However, according to Mallory & Mair (2000), the probable homeland of Avestan is, in fact, the area south of the Aral Sea.[273]

Geographical location of Rigvedic rivers

 
Cluster of Indus Valley Civilization site along the course of the Indus River and in Pakistan and the Ghaggar-Hakra in India and Pakistan. See Sameer et al. (2018) for a more detailed map.

The geography of the Rigveda seems to be centered on the land of the seven rivers. While the geography of the Rigvedic rivers is unclear in some of the early books of the Rigveda, the Nadistuti sukta is an important source for the geography of late Rigvedic society.

The Sarasvati River is one of the chief Rigvedic rivers. The Nadistuti sukta in the Rigveda mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, and later texts like the Brahmanas and Mahabharata mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert.[274]

Scholars agree that at least some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra River,[53] while the Afghan river Haraxvaiti/Harauvati Helmand is sometimes quoted as the locus of the early Rigvedic river.[54] Whether such a transfer of the name has taken place from the Helmand to the Ghaggar-Hakra is a matter of dispute. Identification of the early Rigvedic Sarasvati with the Ghaggar-Hakra before its assumed drying up early in the second millennium would place the Rigveda BCE,[web 23] well outside the range commonly assumed by Indo-Aryan migration theory.

A non-Indo-Aryan substratum in the river-names and place-names of the Rigvedic homeland would support an external origin of the Indo-Aryans.[citation needed] However, most place-names in the Rigveda and the vast majority of the river-names in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent are Indo-Aryan.[275] Non-Indo-Aryan names are, however, frequent in the Ghaggar and Kabul River areas,[276] the first being a post-Harappan stronghold of Indus populations.[citation needed]

Textual references to migrations

Rigveda

 
Probable geographic expansion of late Vedic culture.

Just as the Avesta does not mention an external homeland of the Zoroastrians, the Rigveda does not explicitly refer to an external homeland[55] or to a migration.[56][note 55] Later Hindu texts, such as the Brahmanas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Puranas, are centered in the Ganges region (rather than Haryana and Punjab) and mention regions still further to the south and east, suggesting a later movement or expansion of the Vedic religion and culture to the east. There is no clear indication of general movement in either direction in the Rigveda itself; searching for indirect references in the text, or by correlating geographic references with the proposed order of composition of its hymns, has not led to any consensus on the issue.[citation needed]

Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana

According to Romila Thapar, the Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana "refers to the Parasus and the arattas who stayed behind and others who moved eastwards to the middle Ganges valley and the places equivalent such as the Kasi, the Videhas and the Kuru Pancalas, and so on. In fact, when one looks for them, there are evidence for migration."[web 24]

Later Vedic and Hindu texts

Texts like the Puranas and Mahabharata belong to a much later period than the Rigveda, making their evidence less than sufficient to be used for or against the Indo-Aryan migration theory.[original research?]

Later Vedic texts show a shift[citation needed] of location from the Punjab to the East. According to the Yajurveda, Yajnavalkya (a Vedic ritualist and philosopher) lived in the eastern region of Mithila.[277] Aitareya Brahmana 33.6.1. records that Vishvamitra's sons migrated to the north, and in Shatapatha Brahmana 1:2:4:10 the Asuras were driven to the north.[278] In much later texts, Manu was said to be a king from Dravida.[279] In the legend of the flood he stranded with his ship in Northwestern India or the Himalayas.[280] The Vedic lands (e.g. Aryavarta, Brahmavarta) are located in Northern India or at the Sarasvati and Drishadvati river.[281] However, in a post-Vedic text the Mahabharata Udyoga Parva (108), the East is described as the homeland of the Vedic culture, where "the divine Creator of the universe first sang the Vedas".[282] The legends of Ikshvaku, Sumati and other Hindu legends may have their origin in Southeast Asia.[283]

The Puranas record that Yayati left Prayag (confluence of the Ganges & Yamuna) and conquered the region of Sapta Sindhu.[284][285] His five sons Yadu, Druhyus, Puru, Anu and Turvashu correspond to the main tribes of the Rigveda.

The Puranas also record that the Druhyus were driven out of the land of the seven rivers by Mandhatr and that their next king Gandhara settled in a north-western region which became known as Gandhara. The sons of the later Druhyu king Prachetas are supposed by some to have 'migrated' to the region north of Afghanistan though the Puranic texts only speak of an "adjacent" settlement.[286][287]

Ecology

Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers, and the migration of Indo-Europeans from the steppes in south-central Asia and India.

Around 4200–4100 BCE a climate change occurred, manifesting in colder winters in Europe.[64] Between 4200 and 3900 BCE many tell settlements in the lower Danube Valley were burned and abandoned,[64] while the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture showed an increase in fortifications,[288] meanwhile moving eastwards towards the Dniepr.[289] Steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.[65]

The Yamna horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE, in which the steppes became drier and cooler. Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently, and the use of wagons and horse-back riding made this possible, leading to "a new, more mobile form of pastoralism".[66] It was accompanied by new social rules and institutions, to regulate the local migrations in the steppes, creating a new social awareness of a distinct culture, and of "cultural Others" who did not participate in these new institutions.[290]

In the second century BCE widespread aridization led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and south Asia.[web 1][63] At the steppes, humidization led to a change of vegetation, triggering "higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding".[63][note 56][note 57] Water shortage also had a strong impact in south Asia:

This time was one of great upheaval for ecological reasons. Prolonged failure of rains caused acute water shortage in a large area, causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south-central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, and triggering large-scale migrations. Inevitably, the new arrivals came to merge with and dominate the post-urban cultures.[web 1]

The Indus Valley civilisation was localised, that is, urban centers disappeared and were replaced by local cultures, due to a climatic change that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle East.[291] As of 2016 many scholars believe that drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse of the Indus Civilisation.[292] The Ghaggar-Hakra system was rain-fed,[293][294][295] and water-supply depended on the monsoons. The Indus valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BCE, linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time.[293] The Indian monsoon declined and aridity increased, with the Ghaggar-Hakra retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya,[293][296][297] leading to erratic and less extensive floods that made inundation agriculture less sustainable. Aridification reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation's demise, and to scatter its population eastward.[298][299][300]

Indigenous Aryanism

 
The approximate extent of Āryāvarta during the late Vedic period (ca. 1100–500 BCE). Aryavarta was limited to northwest India and the western Ganges plain, while Greater Magadha in the east was habitated by non-Vedic Indo-Aryans, who gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism.[166][167]

Indian nationalistic opponents of the Indo-Aryan migration question it, and instead promote Indigenous Aryanism, claiming that speakers of Indo-Iranian languages (sometimes called Aryan languages) are "indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent.[301][302][303][304][note 58][dead link] Indigenous Aryanism has no support in contemporary mainstream scholarship, as it is contradicted by a broad range of research on Indo-European migrations.[14][note 59]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The term "invasion", while it was once commonly used in regard to Indo-Aryan migration, is now usually used only by opponents of the Indo-Aryan migration theory.[1] The term "invasion" does not any longer reflect the scholarly understanding of the Indo-Aryan migrations,[1] and is now generally regarded as polemical, distracting and unscholarly.
  2. ^ Michael Witzel: "Just one 'Afghan' IA tribe that did not return to the highlands but stayed in their Panjab winter quarters in spring was needed to set off a wave of acculturation in the plains, by transmitting its 'status kit' (Ehret) to its neighbors."[19]

    Compare Max Muller: "why should not one shepherd, with his servants and flocks, have transferred his peculiar dialect from one part of Asia or Europe to another? This may seem a very humble and modest view of what was formerly represented as the irresistible stream of mighty waves rolling forth from the Aryan centre and gradually overflowing the mountains and valleys of Asia and Europe, but it is, at all events, a possible view; nay, I should say a view far more in keeping with what we know of recent colonisation."[20]

  3. ^ a b David Anthony (1995): "Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige, power, and domestic security [...] What is important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power [...] A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in a non-state or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases [...] demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations."[205]
  4. ^ a b Note the dislocation of the Indus Valley civilisation prior to the start of the Indo-Aryan migrations into northern India, and the onset of Sanskritisation with the rise of the Kuru Kingdom, as described by Michael Witzel.[210] The "Ancestral North Indians" and "Ancestral South Indians"[39][38] mixed between 4,200 to 1,900 years ago (2200 BCE–100 CE), whereafter a shift to endogamy took place.[40]
  5. ^ Basu et al. (2016) discern four major ancestries in mainland India, namely ANI, ASI, Ancestral Austro-Asiatic tribals (AAA) and Ancestral Tibeto-Burman (ATB).[41]
  6. ^ See also Fertile Crescent, Western Asia and Near East.
  7. ^ a b Both Renfrew and Cavalli-Sforza propose that proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent.[240] The Dravidian language was present in northern India at the time of the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, who borrowed a substantial number of words from the Dravidian language.
  8. ^ Demkina et al. (2017): "In the second millennium BC, humidification of the climate led to the divergence of the soil cover with secondary formation of the complexes of chestnut soils and solonetzes. This paleoecological crisis had a significant effect on the economy of the tribes in the Late Catacomb and Post-Catacomb time stipulating their higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding."[63]
  9. ^ See also Eurogenes Blogspot, The crisis.
  10. ^ See:
    • Duperron, Anquetil (1808), Histoire et mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, de 1701 à 1793, imprimerie royale
    • Godfrey, John J. (1967). "Sir William Jones and Père Coeurdoux: A philological footnote". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 87 (1): 57–59. doi:10.2307/596596. JSTOR 596596.
  11. ^ Esleben: "In later years, especially before his death, he was deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms."[79]
  12. ^ According to Bryant, keeping up-to-date is problematic for many Indian scholars, since most Indian universities don't have enough funds to keep up with current scholarship, and most Indian scholars are not able to gain access to recent western publications.[86] Bryant further notes that "while one would be lucky to find a book by Max Muller even in the antique book markets of London, one can find a plethora of recent-edition publications of his and other nineteenth-century scholars' works in just about any bookstore in India (some of these on their tenth or twelfth edition). Practically speaking, it is small Delhi publishers that are keeping the most crude versions of the Aryan invasion theory alive by their nineteenth-century reprints! These are some of the main sources available to most Indian readers."[86][unbalanced opinion?]
  13. ^ Michael Witzel: "In these views, though often for quite different reasons, any immigration or trickling in – nearly always called "invasion" – of the (Indo-)Aryans into the subcontinent is suspect or simply denied. The Arya of the Rigveda are supposed to be just another tribe or group of tribes that have always been resident in India, next to Dravidians, Mundas, etc. The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.
    However, present (European, American, Japanese, etc.) Indologists do not maintain anything like this now [...] While the "invasion model" was still prominent in the work of archaeologists such as Wheeler (1966: "Indra stands accused"), it has been supplanted by much more sophisticated models over the past few decades (see Kuiper 1955 sqq.; Thapar 1968; Witzel 1995). This development has not occurred because Indologists were reacting, as is now frequently alleged, to current Indian criticism of the older theory. Rather, philologists first, and archaeologists somewhat later, noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory and tried to find new explanations, a new version of the immigration theories.[1]
  14. ^ Latham, as cited in Mallory 1989, p. 152
  15. ^ Krishnamurti states: "Besides, the Ṛg Vedas has used the gerund, not found in Avestan, with the same grammatical function as in Dravidian, as a non-finite verb for 'incomplete' action. Ṛg Vedic language also attests the use of it as a quotation clause complementary. All these features are not a consequence of simple borrowing but they indicate substratum influence (Kuiper 1991: ch 2)".
  16. ^ Steppe herders, archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers, spread into the lower Danube valley as early as 4200–4000 BCE, either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe.[65]
  17. ^ Klejn (1974), as cited in Bryant 2001:206, acknowledges the Iranian identification of the Andronovo-culture, but finds the Andronovo culture too late for an Indo-Iranian identification, giving a later date for the start of the Andronovo-culture "in the 16th or 17th century BC, whereas the Aryans appeared in the Near East not later than the 15th to 16th century BCE.[144] Klejn (1974, p.58) further argues that "these [latter] regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber-Frame Andronovo materials."[144] Brentjes (1981) also gives a later dating for the Andronovo-culture.[145] Bryant further refers to Lyonnet (1993) and Francfort (1989), who point to the absence of archaeological remains of the Andronovians south of the Hindu Kush.[145] Bosch-Gimpera (1973) and Hiebert (1998) argue that there also no Andronovo-remains in Iran,[145] but Hiebert "agrees that the expansion of the BMAC people to the Iranian plateau and the Indus Valley borderlands at the beginning of the second millennium BCE is 'the best candidate for an archaeological correlate of the introduction of Indo-Iranian speakers to Iran and South Asia' (Hiebert 1995:192)".[146] Sarianidi states that the Andronovo-tribes "penetrated to a minimum extent".[145]
  18. ^ Nevertheless, archaeologists like B.B. Lal have seriously questioned the Bactria-Margiana and Indo-Iranian "connections", and thoroughly disputed all the proclaimed relations.[web 8]
  19. ^ However, this culture may also represent forerunners of the Indo-Iranians, similar to the Lullubi and Kassite invasion of Mesopotamia early in the second millennium BCE.[citation needed]
  20. ^ The "First urbanisation" was the Indus Valley Civilisation.[167]
  21. ^ Comparing the Harappan and Gandhara cultures, Kennedy states: "Our multivariate approach does not define the biological identity of an ancient Aryan population, but it does indicate that the Indus Valley and Gandhara peoples shared a number of craniometric, odontometric and discrete traits that point to a high degree of biological affinity." Kennedy in Erdosy 1995, p. 49
  22. ^ Kennedy: "Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia? Biological anthropology and concepts of ancient races", in Erdosy 1995 at p. 49.
  23. ^ Cephalic measures, however, may not be a good indicator as they do not necessarily indicate ethnicity and they might vary in different environments. On the use of which, however, see [184]
  24. ^ Kennedy: "there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the north-western sector of the Subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture. If Vedic Aryans were a biological entity represented by the skeletons from Timargarha, then their biological features of cranial and dental anatomy were not distinct to a marked degree from what we encountered in the ancient Harappans." Kennedy in Erdosy 1995, p. 54
  25. ^ Kenoyer: "there was an overlap between Late Harappan and post-Harappan communities ... with no biological evidence for major new populations." Kenoyer as quoted in Bryant 2001, p. 231
  26. ^ Hemphill: "the data provide no support for any model of massive migration and gene flow between the oases of Bactria and the Indus Valley. Rather, patterns of phonetic affinity best conform to a pattern of long-standing, but low-level bidirectional mutual exchange. Hemphill (1998). "Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians: III. An initial craniometric assessment". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 106 (3): 329–348. doi:10.1002/(sici)1096-8644(199807)106:3<329::aid-ajpa6>3.0.co;2-h. PMID 9696149.; Hemphill (1999). "Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians: III. A Craniometric Investigation of Bactrian Origins". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 108 (2): 173–192. doi:10.1002/(sici)1096-8644(199902)108:2<173::aid-ajpa4>3.0.co;2-3. PMID 9988380.
  27. ^ Kenoyer: "Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology, subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people. For many years, the 'invasions' or 'migrations' of these Indo-Aryan-speaking Vedic/Aryan tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the Ganges-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an uncritical reading of Vedic texts...",[190]
  28. ^ Basu et al. (2003) refer to Renfrew (1992), Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity, stating: "Renfrew (1992) has suggested that the elite dominance model, which envisages the intrusion of a relatively small but well-organized group that takes over an existing system by the use of force, may be appropriate to explain the distribution of the IE languages in north India and Pakistan."[25] Anthony explains that small elite groups may effect significant social changes because their social organisation allows for the recruitment of new members via patronage-systems, which may be attractive for outsiders.[26][27]
  29. ^ Compare the process of Sanskritization in India.
  30. ^ Another example Anthony gives of how an open social system can encourage recruitment and language shift, are the Pathans in western Afghanistan. Traditionally status depended on agricultural surpluses and landownership. The neighbouring Baluch, outnumbered by the Pathans, were pastoral herders, and has hierarchical political system. Pathans who lost their land, could take refuge among the Baluch. As Anthony notes, "chronic tribal warfare might generally favor pastoralism over sedentary economics as herds can be defended by moving them, whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target."[206]
  31. ^ Michael Witzel: Ehret, Ch., 1988. "Language Change and the Material Correlates of Language and Ethnic Shift," Antiquity, 62: 564–74; derived from Africa, cf. Diakonoff 1985.[24]
  32. ^ Joshua Fisfman (1991), Reversing language shift
  33. ^ Reich et al. (2009) excluded the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman speakers from their analysis in order to avoid interference.
  34. ^ Reich et al. (2009): "We analyze 25 diverse groups to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans[contradictory], while the other, the "Ancestral South Indians" (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other."
  35. ^ Moorjani et al. (2013): "Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent."
  36. ^ Moorjani et al. (2013): "We report genome-wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI-ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago. In a subset of groups, 100% of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period. These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy."
  37. ^ Reich et al.: "The stronger gradient in males, replicating previous reports, could reflect either male gene flow from groups with more ANI relatedness into ones with less, or female gene flow in the reverse direction. However, extensive female gene flow in India would be expected to homogenize ANI ancestry on the autosomes just as in mtDNA, which we do not observe. Supporting the view of little female ANI ancestry in India, Kivisild et al. reported that mtDNA 'haplogroup U' splits into two deep clades. 'U2i' accounts for 77% of copies in India but ~0% in Europe, and 'U2e' accounts for 0% of all copies in India but ~10% in Europe. The split is ~50,000 years old, indicating low female gene flow between Europe and India since that time."[38]
  38. ^ David reich: "This mystery of how Indo-Europeans spread over such a vast region and what the historical underpinnings of it would have been is ongoing and remains a mystery. The fact that these languages are in India has led to the hypothesis that they came in from somewhere else, from the north, from the west, and that perhaps maybe this would be a vector for the movement of these people.

    Another reason that people think that is that when you have languages coming in, not always but usually, they're brought by large movements of people. Hungarian is an exception. The Hungarians are mostly not descended from the people who brought Hungarian to Hungary. In general, languages typically tend to follow large movements of people.

    On the other hand, once agriculture is established, as it has been for 5000 to 8000 years in India, it's very hard for a group to make a dent on it. The British didn't make any demographic dent on India even though they politically ruled it for a couple of hundred years.

    It's a mystery how this occurred, and it remains a mystery. What we know is that the likely timing of this event is probably around 3000 to 4000 years ago. The timing of the arrival of Indo-European language corresponds to the timing of the mixture event.[web 2]
  39. ^ Note that according to Jones et al. (2015), Caucasian Hunter Gatherers and "the ancestors of Neolithic farmers" split circa 25,000 years ago: "Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ~45 kya, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ~25 kya, around the Last Glacial Maximum. CHG genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe B3,000 BC, supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture."[47]
  40. ^ The reference is to a "recent study", and gives Kivisild et al. (1999). Kivisild (1999) does not mention the number 12,500, nor does it explicitly make such a statement. What it does state is that western-Eurasian and Indian mtDNA lineages overlap in haplogroup U;[226] that the split between the western-Eurasian and Indian U2 lineages appeared circa 53,000 ± 4,000 years before present;[226] and that "despite their equally deep time depth, the Indian U2 has not penetrated western Eurasia, and the European U5 has almost not reached India."[227] They further note that wester-Eurasian mtDNA lineages did spread in India at the time of the spread of agricultural crops from the fertile Crescent.[228] Metspalu et al. (2011) do refer to 12,500 years ago.[225] Apparently, the reference to Kivisld (1999) is incorrect, and was not noticed by the authors.
  41. ^ After the initial settlement of India by the ASI.
  42. ^ Narasimhan et al.: "[One possibility is that] Iranian farmer–related ancestry in this group was characteristic of the Indus Valley hunter-gatherers in the same way as it was characteristic of northern Caucasus and Iranian plateau hunter-gatherers. The presence of such ancestry in hunter-gatherers from Belt and Hotu Caves in northeastern Iran increases the plausibility that this ancestry could have existed in hunter-gatherers farther east."[231]
    Shinde et al. (2019) note that these Iranian people "had little if any genetic contribution from [...] western Iranian farmers or herders";[232] they split from each other more than 12,000 years ago.[233]
    See also Razib Kkan, The Day of the Dasa: "...it may, in fact, be the case that ANI-like quasi-Iranians occupied northwest South Asia for a long time, and AHG populations hugged the southern and eastern fringes, during the height of the Pleistocene."
  43. ^ There was a rapid increase of the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer-related south Caucasian population at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 18,000 years ago,[234] and Near East and Caucasus people probably also migrated to Europe during the Mesolithic, around 14,000 years ago.[235]
  44. ^ Mascarenhas et al. (2015) note that "new, possibly West Asian, body types are reported from the graves of Mehrgarh beginning in the Togau phase (3800 BCE)."[237]
  45. ^ See also eurogenes.blogspot, The genetic structure of the world's first farmers (Lazaridis et al. preprint) .
  46. ^ Metspalu et al (2011): "However, any nonmarginal migration from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent should have also introduced readily apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India (see Figure 2B). Because this ancestry component is absent from the region, we have to conclude that if such a dispersal event nevertheless took place, it occurred before the East Asian ancestry component reached Central Asia. The demographic history of Central Asia is, however, complex, and although it has been shown that demic diffusion coupled with influx of Turkic speakers during historical times has shaped the genetic makeup of Uzbeks75 [...] it is not clear what was the extent of East Asian ancestry in Central Asian populations prior to these events.[224] See also Dinesh C. Sharma (2011), "Indians are not descendants of Aryans, says new study", India Today
  47. ^ Moorjani: "The period of around 1,900–4,200 years BP was a time of profound change in India, characterized by the deurbanization of the Indus civilization, increasing population density in the central and downstream portions of the Gangetic system,40 shifts in burial practices, and the likely first appearance of Indo-European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent."[229] Note that according to Salmons, language shift is driven by "systematic changes in community structure [...] namely a shift from local community-internal organization to regional (state or national or international, in modern settings), extra-community organizations. Shift correlates with this move from pre-dominantly 'horizontal' community structures to more 'vertical' ones."[33]
  48. ^ Moorjani: "Further evidence for multiple waves of admixture in the history of many traditionally middle- and upper-caste groups (as well as Indo-European and northern groups) comes from the more recent admixture dates we observe in these groups (Table 1) and the fact that a sum of two exponential functions often produces a better fit to the decay of admixture LD than does a single exponential (as noted above for some northern groups; Appendix B). Evidence for multiple components of West Eurasian-related ancestry in northern Indian populations has also been reported by Metspalu et al. based on clustering analysis."[222]
  49. ^ The "original mixture event of ANI and ASI" may have been the spread of Dravidian languages to the south, followed by the (still ongoing) Sanskritization of India.[255] Note that Asko Parpola proposes that the Harappans spoke Proto-Dravidian language,[web 21] and Mikhail Andronov proposes that the Proto-Dravidian language was introduced by migrations at the beginning of the third millennium BCE.[256] See Dieneke's blogspot, "560K SNP study reveals dual rigin of Indian populations (Reich et al. 2009)" and Razib Khan (8 August 2013), "Indo-Aryans, Dravidians, and waves of admixture (migration?)" for various proposals and discussions, and this chart for the complexities of the Indian (and European) genepool.
  50. ^ According to George Hart, there existed an "Early South Indian Caste System", which differed from the well-known classic north Indian vanas.[257]
  51. ^ Caucasus Hunter Gatherers, one of the contributors to the Indo-Aryan gene-pool. According to Jones et al. (2015), "Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter-gatherers ~45 kya, shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers ~25 kya, around the Last Glacial Maximum."[258]
  52. ^ See also Eurogenes Blog, "Heavily sex-biased" population dispersals into the Indian Subcontinent.
  53. ^ See also: ""Heavily sex-biased" population dispersals into the Indian Subcontinent (Silva et al. 2017)". Eurogenes Blog. 28 March 2017.</ref>
  54. ^ Mallory: "It is highly improbable that the Indo-Aryans of Western Asia migrated eastwards, for example with the collapse of the Mitanni, and wandered into India, since there is not a shred of evidence — for example, names of non-Indic deities, personal names, loan words — that the Indo-Aryans of India ever had any contacts with their west Asian neighbours. The reverse possibility, that a small group broke off and wandered from India into Western Asia is readily dismissed as an improbably long migration, again without the least bit of evidence."[52][page needed]
  55. ^ According to Cardona, "there is no textual evidence in the early literary traditions unambiguously showing a trace" of an Indo-Aryan migration.[56]
  56. ^ Demkina et al. (2017): "In the second millennium BC, humidization of the climate led to the divergence of the soil cover with secondary formation of the complexes of chestnut soils and solonetzes. This paleoecological crisis had a significant effect on the economy of the tribes in the Late Catacomb and Post-Catacomb time stipulating their higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding."[63]
  57. ^ See also Eurogenes Blogspot, The crisis.
  58. ^ See also S. Kalyanaraman (19 December 2005), "Harvard University's international scandal unravels a global Hindu conspiracy.
  59. ^ No support in mainstream scholarship:
    • Romila Thapar (2006): "there is no scholar at this time seriously arguing for the indigenous origin of Aryans".[305]
    • Wendy Doniger (2017): "The opposing argument, that speakers of Indo-European languages were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, is not supported by any reliable scholarship. It is now championed primarily by Hindu nationalists, whose religious sentiments have led them to regard the theory of Aryan migration with some asperity."[web 25]
    • Girish Shahane (September 14, 2019), in response to Narasimhan et al. (2019): "Hindutva activists, however, have kept the Aryan Invasion Theory alive, because it offers them the perfect strawman, 'an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument' ... The Out of India hypothesis is a desperate attempt to reconcile linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence with Hindutva sentiment and nationalistic pride, but it cannot reverse time's arrow ... The evidence keeps crushing Hindutva ideas of history."[web 26]
    • Koenraad Elst (May 10, 2016): "Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity."[306]
    • Witzel 2001, p. 95: "The "revisionist project" certainly is not guided by the principles of critical theory but takes, time and again, recourse to pre-enlightenment beliefs in the authority of traditional religious texts such as the Purånas. In the end, it belongs, as has been pointed out earlier, to a different 'discourse' than that of historical and critical scholarship. In other words, it continues the writing of religious literature, under a contemporary, outwardly 'scientific' guise ... The revisionist and autochthonous project, then, should not be regarded as scholarly in the usual post-enlightenment sense of the word, but as an apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking aiming at proving the "truth" of traditional texts and beliefs. Worse, it is, in many cases, not even scholastic scholarship at all but a political undertaking aiming at "rewriting" history out of national pride or for the purpose of "nation building"."

Subnotes

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Witzel 2005, p. 348.
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indo, aryan, migrations, note, were, migrations, into, indian, subcontinent, indo, aryan, peoples, ethnolinguistic, group, that, spoke, indo, aryan, languages, predominant, languages, today, north, india, pakistan, nepal, bangladesh, lanka, maldives, indo, ary. The Indo Aryan migrations note 1 were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo Aryan peoples an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo Aryan languages the predominant languages of today s North India Pakistan Nepal Bangladesh Sri Lanka and the Maldives Indo Aryan population movements into the region from Central Asia are considered to have started after 2000 BCE as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent Several hundred years later the Iranian languages were brought into the Iranian plateau by the Iranians who were closely related to the Indo Aryans The Proto Indo Iranian culture which gave rise to the Indo Aryans and Iranians developed on the Central Asian steppes north of the Caspian Sea as the Sintashta culture 2050 2 1800 BCE 3 4 5 6 in present day Russia and Kazakhstan and developed further as the Andronovo culture 2000 1450 BCE 7 8 The Indo Aryans split off sometime between 2000 BCE and 1600 BCE from the Indo Iranians 9 and migrated southwards to the Bactria Margiana culture BMAC from which they borrowed some of their distinctive religious beliefs and practices 10 From the BMAC the Indo Aryans migrated into northern Syria and possibly in multiple waves into the Punjab northern Pakistan and India while the Iranians could have reached western Iran before 1300 BCE 11 both bringing with them the Indo Iranian languages Migration by an Indo European people was first hypothesized in the late 18th century following the discovery of the Indo European language family when similarities between western and Indian languages had been noted Given these similarities a single source or origin was proposed which was diffused by migrations from some original homeland This linguistic argument of this theory is supported by archaeological anthropological genetic literary and ecological research Genetic research reveals that those migrations form part of a complex genetic puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population Literary research reveals similarities between various geographically distinct Indo Aryan historical cultures Ecological studies reveal that in the second millennium BCE widespread aridization led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and the Indian subcontinent web 1 causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia Afghanistan Iran and India and triggering large scale migrations resulting in the merger of migrating peoples with the post urban cultures web 1 The Indo Aryan migrations started sometime in the period from approximately 2000 to 1600 BCE 9 after the invention of the war chariot and also brought Indo Aryan languages into the Levant and possibly Inner Asia It was part of the diffusion of Indo European languages from the proto Indo European homeland at the Pontic Caspian steppe a large area of grasslands in far Eastern Europe which started in the 5th to 4th millennia BCE and the Indo European migrations out of the Eurasian Steppes which started approximately in 2000 BCE 1 12 These Indo Aryan speaking people were united by shared cultural norms and language referred to as arya noble Diffusion of this culture and language took place by patron client systems which allowed for the absorption and acculturation of other groups into this culture and explains the strong influence on other cultures with which it interacted Contents 1 Fundamentals 1 1 Linguistics relationships between languages 1 2 Archaeology migrations from the steppe Urheimat 1 3 Anthropology elite recruitment and language shift 1 4 Genetics ancient ancestry and multiple gene flows 1 5 Literary research similarities geography and references to migration 1 6 Ecological studies widespread drought urban collapse and pastoral migrations 2 Development of the theory 2 1 Similarities between Sanskrit Persian Greek 2 2 Homeland 2 3 Aryan race 2 4 Aryan invasion 2 5 Aryan migration 2 6 Future directions 3 Linguistics relationships between languages 3 1 Comparative method 3 2 Proto Indo European 3 3 Arguments against an Indian origin of proto Indo European 3 3 1 Diversity 3 3 2 Dialectal variation 3 3 3 Substrate influence 4 Archaeology migrations from the steppe Urheimat 4 1 Stages of migrations 4 1 1 Diffusion from the Urheimat 4 1 2 Sequence of migrations 4 2 Central Asia formation of Indo Iranians 4 2 1 Sintashta Petrovka culture 4 2 2 Andronovo culture 4 2 3 Bactria Margiana culture 4 3 Two waves of Indo Iranian migration 4 4 First wave Indo Aryan migrations 4 4 1 Mittani 4 4 2 North India Vedic culture 4 4 2 1 Multiple waves of migration into northern India 4 4 2 2 Gandhara grave culture and Ochre Coloured Pottery culture 4 4 2 3 Spread of Vedic Brahmanic culture 4 4 3 Indus Valley Civilization 4 4 3 1 Decline of Indus Valley Civilisation 4 4 3 2 Continuity of Indus Valley civilization 4 4 3 3 Relation with Indo Aryan migrations 4 4 4 Inner Asia Wusun and Yuezhi 4 5 Second wave Iranians 5 Anthropology elite recruitment and language shift 5 1 Elite dominance 5 2 Renfrew models of linguistic replacement 5 3 David Anthony elite recruitment 5 4 Michael Witzel small groups and acculturation 5 5 Salmons systematic changes in community structure 6 Genetics ancient ancestry and multiple gene flows 6 1 Ancestral groups 6 1 1 Common maternal ancestry 6 1 2 Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians 6 1 3 Additional components 6 1 4 Male mediated migration 6 2 North south cline 6 3 Scenarios 6 3 1 Pre agricultural migrations 6 3 2 Agricultural migrations 6 3 2 1 Near Eastern migrations 6 3 2 2 Haplogroup R1a and related haplogroups 6 3 3 Indo European migrations 6 3 3 1 Genetic impact of Indo Aryan migrations 6 3 4 Origins of R1a Z93 7 Literary research similarities geography and references to migration 7 1 Similarities 7 1 1 Mitanni 7 1 2 Iranian Avesta 7 2 Geographical location of Rigvedic rivers 7 3 Textual references to migrations 7 3 1 Rigveda 7 3 2 Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana 7 3 3 Later Vedic and Hindu texts 8 Ecology 9 Indigenous Aryanism 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 13 Sources 13 1 Printed sources 13 2 Web sources 14 Further reading 15 External linksFundamentals Scheme of Indo European language dispersals from c 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis Center Steppe cultures1 black Anatolian languages archaic PIE 2 black Afanasievo culture early PIE 3 black Yamnaya culture expansion Pontic Caspian steppe Danube Valley late PIE 4A black Western Corded Ware4B C blue amp dark blue Bell Beaker adopted by Indo European speakers5A B red Eastern Corded ware5C red Sintashta proto Indo Iranian 6 magenta Andronovo7A purple Indo Aryans Mittani 7B purple Indo Aryans India NN dark yellow proto Balto Slavic8 grey Greek9 yellow Iranians not drawn Armenian expanding from western steppe The Indo Aryan migration theory is part of a larger theoretical framework This framework explains the similarities between a wide range of contemporary and ancient languages It combines linguistic archaeological and anthropological research 13 14 This provides an overview of the development of Indo European languages and the spread of these Indo European languages by migration and acculturation 14 Linguistics relationships between languages The linguistic part traces the connections between the various Indo European languages and reconstructs the proto Indo European language This is possible because the processes that change languages are not random but follow strict patterns Sound shifts the changing of vowels and consonants are especially important although grammar especially morphology and the lexicon vocabulary may also be significant Historical comparative linguistics thus makes it possible to see great similarities between related languages which at first sight might seem very different 14 15 Various characteristics of the Indo European languages argue against an Indian origin of these languages and point to a steppe origin 15 Archaeology migrations from the steppe Urheimat The archaeological part posits an Urheimat on the Pontic steppes which developed after the introduction of cattle on the steppes around 5 200 BCE 14 This introduction marked the change from foragist to pastoralist cultures and the development of a hierarchical social system with chieftains patron client systems and the exchange of goods and gifts 14 The oldest nucleus may have been the Samara culture late 6th and early 5th millennium BCE at a bend in the Volga A wider horizon developed called the Kurgan culture by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s She included several cultures in this Kurgan Culture including the Samara culture and the Yamna culture although the Yamna culture 36th 23rd centuries BCE also called Pit Grave Culture may more aptly be called the nucleus of the proto Indo European language 14 From this area which already included various subcultures Indo European languages spread west south and east starting around 4 000 BCE 16 These languages may have been carried by small groups of males with patron client systems which allowed for the inclusion of other groups into their cultural system 14 Eastward emerged the Sintashta culture 2050 1900 BCE where common Indo Iranian was spoken 17 Out of the Sintashta culture developed the Andronovo culture 2000 1450 BCE which interacted with the Bactria Margiana culture 2250 1700 BCE This interaction further shaped the Indo Iranians which split at sometime between 2000 and 1600 BCE into the Indo Aryans and the Iranians 9 The Indo Aryans migrated to the Levant and South Asia 18 The migration into northern India was not a large scale immigration but may have consisted of small groups 19 note 2 which were genetically diverse clarification needed Their culture and language spread by the same mechanisms of acculturalisation and the absorption of other groups into their patron client system 14 Anthropology elite recruitment and language shift See also Language shift Indo European languages probably spread through language shifts 21 22 23 Small groups can change a larger cultural area 24 14 and elite male dominance by small groups may have led to a language shift in northern India 25 26 27 David Anthony in his revised Steppe hypothesis 28 notes that the spread of the Indo European languages probably did not happen through chain type folk migrations but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites which were emulated by large groups of people 29 note 3 a process which he calls elite recruitment 30 According to Parpola local elites joined small but powerful groups of Indo European speaking migrants 21 These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons and luxury goods which marked their status and power Joining these groups was attractive for local leaders since it strengthened their position and gave them additional advantages 31 These new members were further incorporated by matrimonial alliances 32 22 According to Joseph Salmons language shift is facilitated by dislocation of language communities in which the elite is taken over 33 According to Salmons this change is facilitated by systematic changes in community structure in which a local community becomes incorporated in a larger social structure 33 note 4 Genetics ancient ancestry and multiple gene flows See also Genetics and archaeogenetics of South Asia and Peopling of India The Indo Aryan migrations form part of a complex genetic puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population including various waves of admixture and language shift Studies indicate north and south Indians share a common maternal ancestry 34 35 36 37 A series of studies show that the Indian subcontinent harbours two major ancestral components 38 39 40 namely the Ancestral North Indians ANI which is genetically close to Middle Easterners Central Asians and Europeans and the Ancestral South Indians ASI which is clearly distinct from ANI 38 note 5 These two groups mixed in India between 4 200 and 1 900 years ago 2200 BCE 100 CE after which a shift to endogamy took place 40 possibly by the enforcement of social values and norms during the Gupta Empire 42 when Moorjani et al 2013 describe three scenarios regarding the bringing together of the two groups migrations before the development of agriculture before 8 000 9 000 years before present BP migration of western Asian note 6 people together with the spread of agriculture maybe up to 4 600 years BP migrations of western Eurasians from 3 000 to 4 000 years BP 43 Percentage of adults that can digest lactose 44 While Reich notes that the onset of admixture coincides with the arrival of Indo European language web 2 according to Moorjani et al 2013 these groups were present unmixed in India before the Indo Aryan migrations 40 Gallego Romero et al 2011 propose that the ANI component came from Iran and the Middle East 45 less than 10 000 years ago web 3 note 7 while according to Lazaridis et al 2016 ANI is a mix of early farmers of western Iran and people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe 46 Several studies also show traces of later influxes of maternal genetic material 34 web 4 and of paternal genetic material related to ANI and possibly the Indo Europeans 38 47 48 While others have analysed the herditary distribution of Lactose intolerance and specifically the presence of the 13910T Lactase persistence mutation found in Europe and Central Asia across South Asia 49 50 44 Literary research similarities geography and references to migration The oldest known inscribed Indo Iranian words and particularly invocations of the Indo Aryan deities date to mid second millenia BCE as loan words in Hurrian treaties of the Mitanni kingdom of present day northern Syria 51 52 The religious practices depicted in the Rigveda and those depicted in the Avesta the central religious text of Zoroastrianism show similarities 52 Some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar Hakra River 53 while the Afghan river Haraxvaiti Harauvati Helmand is sometimes quoted as the locus of the early Rigvedic river 54 needs context The Rigveda does not explicitly refer to an external homeland 55 or to a migration 56 but later Vedic and Puranic texts do show the movement into the Gangetic plains A number of Indologists and historians offering the Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra verse 18 44 397 9 as explicit recorded evidence of a migration 57 58 59 60 while others have criticised their interpretations or the general reliability of Vedic texts discounting the like of 58 Then there is the following direct statement contained in the admittedly much later BSS Baudhayana Srauta Sutra 18 44 397 9 sqq which has once again been overlooked not having been translated yet Ayu went eastwards His people are the Kuru Panchala and the Kasi Videha This is the Ayava migration His other people stayed at home His people are the Gandhari Parsu and Aratta This is the Amavasava group Witzel 1989 235 61 Ecological studies widespread drought urban collapse and pastoral migrations Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo European speakers and the migration of Indo Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India 62 63 Around 4200 4100 BCE a climate change occurred manifesting in colder winters in Europe 64 Steppe herders archaic Proto Indo European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200 4000 BCE either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe 65 The Yamna horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE in which the steppes became drier and cooler Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently and the use of wagons and horse back riding made this possible leading to a new more mobile form of pastoralism 66 In the third millennium BCE widespread aridification led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and the Indian subcontinent web 1 63 On the steppes humidification led to a change of vegetation triggering higher mobility and transition to nomadic cattle breeding 63 note 8 66 note 9 Water shortage also had a strong impact in the Indian subcontinent causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia Afghanistan Iran and India and triggering large scale migrations web 1 Development of the theorySimilarities between Sanskrit Persian Greek In the 16th century European visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages 67 and as early as 1653 Van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto language Scythian for Germanic Romance Greek Baltic Slavic Celtic and Iranian 68 In a memoir sent to the French Academy of Sciences in 1767 Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India had specifically demonstrated the existing analogy between Sanskrit and European languages 69 note 10 In 1786 William Jones a judge in the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William Calcutta linguist and classics scholar on studying Sanskrit postulated in his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society a proto language uniting Sanskrit Persian Greek Latin Gothic and Celtic languages but in many ways his work was less accurate than his predecessors as he erroneously included Egyptian Japanese and Chinese in the Indo European languages while omitting Hindustani 68 and Slavic 70 71 The Sanskrit language whatever be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists there is a similar reason though not quite so forcible for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic though blended with a very different idiom had the same origin with the Sanskrit and the old Persian might be added to the same family if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia 72 web 5 Jones concluded that all these languages originated from the same source 72 Homeland Main article Proto Indo European homeland Scholars assume a homeland either in central Asia or in Western Asia and Sanskrit must in this case have reached India by a language transfer from west to east 73 74 In 19th century Indo European studies the language of the Rigveda was the most archaic Indo European language known to scholars indeed the only records of Indo European that could reasonably claim to date to the Bronze Age This primacy of Sanskrit inspired scholars such as Friedrich Schlegel to assume that the locus of the proto Indo European homeland had been in India with the other dialects spread to the west by historical migration 73 74 With the 20th century discovery of Bronze Age attestations of Indo European Anatolian Mycenaean Greek Vedic Sanskrit lost its special status as the most archaic Indo European language known 73 74 Aryan race Main articles Aryan race and Scientific racism A 1910 depiction of Aryans entering India from Hutchinson s History of the Nations In the 1850s Max Muller introduced the notion of two Aryan races a western and an eastern one who migrated from the Caucasus into Europe and India respectively Muller dichotomized the two groups ascribing greater prominence and value to the western branch Nevertheless this eastern branch of the Aryan race was more powerful than the indigenous eastern natives who were easy to conquer 75 Herbert Hope Risley expanded on Muller s two race Indo European speaking Aryan invasion theory concluding that the caste system was a remnant of the Indo Aryans domination of the native Dravidians with observable variations in phenotypes between hereditary race based castes 76 77 Thomas Trautmann explains that Risley found a direct relation between the proportion of Aryan blood and the nasal index along a gradient from the highest castes to the lowest This assimilation of caste to race proved very influential 78 Muller s work contributed to the developing interest in Aryan culture which often set Indo European Aryan traditions in opposition to Semitic religions He was deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms as this was far from his intention 79 note 11 For Muller the discovery of common Indian and European ancestry was a powerful argument against racism arguing that an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race Aryan blood Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar and that the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians 80 In his later work Max Muller took great care to limit the use of the term Aryan to a strictly linguistic one 81 Aryan invasion The excavation of the Harappa Mohenjo daro and Lothal sites of the Indus Valley civilisation IVC in the 1920 82 showed that northern India already had an advanced culture when the Indo Aryans migrated into the area The theory changed from a migration of advanced Aryans towards a primitive aboriginal population to a migration of nomadic people into an advanced urban civilization comparable to the Germanic migrations during the Fall of the Western Roman Empire or the Kassite invasion of Babylonia 83 This possibility was for a short time seen as a hostile invasion into northern India The decline of the Indus Valley civilisation at precisely the period in history in which the Indo Aryan migrations probably took place seemed to provide independent support of such an invasion This argument was proposed by the mid 20th century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler who interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo daro as the victims of conquest wars and who famously stated that the god Indra stands accused of the destruction of the Civilisation 83 This position was discarded after finding no evidence of wars The skeletons were found to be hasty interments not massacred victims 83 Wheeler himself also nuanced this interpretation in later publications stating This is a possibility but it can t be proven and it may not be correct 84 Wheeler further notes that the unburied corpses may indicate an event in the final phase of human occupation of Mohenjo Daro and that thereafter the place was uninhabited but that the decay of Mohenjo Daro has to be ascribed to structural causes such as salinisation 85 Nevertheless although invasion was discredited critics of the Indo Aryan Migration theory continue to present the theory as an Aryan Invasion Theory 1 86 note 12 presenting it as a racist and colonialist discourse The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya Aryan invasion is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule in both cases a white race was seen as subduing the local darker colored population 1 Aryan migration An early 20th century depiction of Aryans settling in agricultural villages in India In the later 20th century ideas were refined along with data accrual and migration and acculturation were seen as the methods whereby Indo Aryans and their language and culture spread into northwest India around 1500 BCE The term invasion is only being used nowadays by opponents who of the Indo Aryan Migration theory 1 86 Michael Witzel it has been supplanted by much more sophisticated models over the past few decades philologists first and archaeologists somewhat later noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory and tried to find new explanations a new version of the immigration theories 1 note 13 The changed approach was in line with newly developed thinking about language transfer in general such as the migration of the Greeks into Greece between 2100 and 1600 BCE and their adoption of a syllabic script Linear B from the pre existing Linear A with the purpose of writing Mycenaean Greek or the Indo Europeanization of Western Europe in stages between 2200 and 1300 BCE Future directions This section needs to be updated Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information May 2017 Mallory notes that with the development and the growing sophistication of the knowledge on the Indo European migrations and their purported homeland new questions arise and that it is evident that we still have a very long way to go 87 One of those questions is the origin of the shared agricultural vocabulary and the earliest dates for agriculturalism in areas settled by the Indo Europeans Those dates seem to be too late to account for the shared vocabulary and raise the question what their origin is 88 Linguistics relationships between languagesLinguistic research traces the connections between the various Indo European languages and reconstructs proto Indo European Accumulated linguistic evidence points to the Indo Aryan languages as intrusive into the Indian subcontinent some time in the 2nd millennium BCE 89 90 91 92 The language of the Rigveda the earliest stratum of Vedic Sanskrit is assigned to about 1500 1200 BCE 51 Comparative method Main article Comparative method Connections between languages can be traced because the processes that change languages are not random but follow strict patterns Especially sound shifts the changing of vowels and consonants are important although grammar especially morphology and the lexicon vocabulary may also be significant Historical comparative linguistics thus makes it possible to see great similarities between languages which at first sight might seem very different 14 Linguistics use the comparative method to study the development of languages by performing a feature by feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction which analyses the internal development of a single language over time 93 Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language to discover the development of phonological morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or refute hypothesized relationships between languages The comparative method aims to prove that two or more historically attested languages are descended from a single proto language by comparing lists of cognate terms From them regular sound correspondences between the languages are established and a sequence of regular sound changes can then be postulated which allows the proto language to be reconstructed Relation is deemed certain only if at least a partial reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible and if regular sound correspondences can be established with chance similarities ruled out The comparative method was developed over the 19th century Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto language was August Schleicher in his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen originally published in 1861 94 Proto Indo European Proto Indo European PIE is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Indo European languages August Schleicher s 1861 reconstruction of PIE was the first proposed proto language to be accepted by modern linguists 95 More work has gone into reconstructing it than any other proto language and it is by far the best understood among all proto languages of its age During the 19th century the vast majority of linguistic work was devoted to reconstruction of Proto Indo European or its daughter proto languages such as Proto Germanic and most of the current techniques of linguistic reconstruction in historical linguistics e g the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction were developed as a result 96 PIE must have been spoken as a single language or a group of related dialects before divergence began though estimates of when this was by different authorities can vary massively from the 7th millennium BCE to the second 97 A number of hypotheses have been proposed for the origin and spread of the language the most popular among linguists being the Kurgan hypothesis which postulates an origin in the Pontic Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe in the 5th or 4th millennia BCE 98 Features of the culture of the speakers of PIE known as Proto Indo Europeans have also been reconstructed based on the shared vocabulary of the early attested Indo European languages 98 As mentioned above the existence of PIE was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones who observed the similarities between Sanskrit Ancient Greek and Latin By the early 20th century well defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today with some refinements 95 The largest developments of the 20th century were the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages and the acceptance of the laryngeal theory The Anatolian languages have also spurred a major re evaluation of theories concerning the development of various shared Indo European language features and the extent to which these features were present in PIE itself citation needed Relationships to other language families including the Uralic languages have been proposed but remain controversial citation needed PIE is thought by whom to have had a complex system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes as well as ablaut vowel alterations as preserved in English sing sang sung Nouns and verbs had complex systems of declension and conjugation respectively Arguments against an Indian origin of proto Indo European Diversity According to the linguistic center of gravity principle the most likely point of origin of a language family is in the area of its greatest diversity 99 note 14 By this criterion Northern India home to only a single branch of the Indo European language family i e Indo Aryan is an exceedingly unlikely candidate for the Indo European homeland compared to Central Eastern Europe for example which is home to the Italic Venetic Illyrian Albanian Germanic Baltic Slavic Thracian and Greek branches of Indo European 100 Both mainstream Urheimat solutions locate the Proto Indo European homeland in the vicinity of the Black Sea 101 Dialectal variation This section may be too technical for most readers to understand Please help improve it to make it understandable to non experts without removing the technical details August 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message It has been recognized since the mid 19th century beginning with Schmidt and Schuchardt that a binary tree model cannot capture all linguistic alignments certain areal features cut across language groups and are better explained through a model treating linguistic change like waves rippling out through a pond This is true of the Indo European languages as well Various features originated and spread while Proto Indo European was still a dialect continuum 102 These features sometimes cut across sub families for instance the instrumental dative and ablative plurals in Germanic and Balto Slavic feature endings beginning with m rather than the usual bh e g Gothic dative plural sunum to the sons and Old Church Slavonic instrumental plural syn mi with sons 103 despite the fact that the Germanic languages are centum while Balto Slavic languages are satem The strong correspondence between the dialectal relationships of the Indo European languages and their actual geographical arrangement in their earliest attested forms makes an Indian origin as suggested by the Out of India Theory unlikely 104 Substrate influence Main article Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit Already in the 1870s the Neogrammarians who realised that the Greek Latin vocalism couldn t be explained on the basis of the Sanskrit one and therefore must be more original citation needed The Indo Iranian and Uralic languages influenced each other with the Finno Ugric languages containing Indo European loan words A telling example is the Finnish word vasara hammer which is related to vajra the weapon of Indra Since the Finno Ugric homeland was located in the northern forest zone in northern Europe the contacts must have taken place in line with the placement of the proto Indo European homeland at the Pontic Caspian steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea web 1 Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo Aryan a number of syntactical and morphological features that are alien to other Indo European languages including even its closest relative Old Iranian Phonologically there is the introduction of retroflexes which alternate with dentals in Indo Aryan morphologically there are the gerunds and syntactically there is the use of a quotative marker iti note 15 These are taken as evidence of substratum influence It has been argued by whom that Dravidian influenced Indic through shift whereby native Dravidian speakers learned and adopted Indic languages citation needed The presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo Aryan is thus plausibly explained that the majority of early Old Indo Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned 105 Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony moreover early Dravidian influence accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed 106 A pre Indo European linguistic substratum in the Indian subcontinent would be a good reason to exclude India as a potential Indo European homeland 107 However several linguists who all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on other grounds are still open to considering the evidence as internal developments rather than the result of substrate influences 108 or as adstratum effects 109 Archaeology migrations from the steppe UrheimatSee also Indo European migrations Indo European migration The Yamna culture 3500 2000 BCE Scheme of Indo European migrations from c 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the Kurgan hypothesis The magenta area corresponds to the assumed Urheimat Samara culture Sredny Stog culture The red area corresponds to the area which may have been settled by Indo European speaking peoples up to c 2500 BCE the orange area to 1000 BCE Christopher I Beckwith 2009 Empires of the Silk Road Oxford University Press p 30 According to Allentoft 2015 the Sintashta culture probably derived from the Corded Ware Culture Historical spread of the chariot Dates given in image are approximate BCE years Spread of IE languages Indo European languages c 3500 BC Indo European languages c 2500 BC Indo European languages c 1500 BC Indo European languages c 500 BC Indo European languages c 500 ADThe Sintashta Andronovo Bactria Margiana and Yaz cultures have been associated with Indo Iranian migrations in Central Asia 110 The Gandhara Grave Cemetery H Copper Hoard and Painted Grey Ware cultures are candidates for subsequent cultures within south India associated with Indo Aryan movements needs context The decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation predates the Indo Aryan migrations but archeological data show a cultural continuity in the archeological record Together with the presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda this clarification needed argues in favor of an interaction between post Harappan and Indo Aryan cultures 6 Stages of migrations About 6 000 years ago the Indo Europeans started to spread out from their proto Indo European homeland in Central Eurasia between the southern Ural Mountains the North Caucasus and the Black Sea 16 About 4 000 years ago Indo European speaking peoples started to migrate out of the Eurasian steppes 111 note 16 Diffusion from the Urheimat Main articles Proto Indo European homeland Kurgan hypothesis and Yamnaya culture Scholars regard the middle Volga which was the location of the Samara culture late 6th and early 5th millennium BCE and the Yamna culture to be the Urheimat of the Indo Europeans as described by the Kurgan hypothesis From this Urheimat Indo European languages spread throughout the Eurasian steppes between c 4 500 and 2 500 BCE forming the Yamna culture Sequence of migrations David Anthony gives an elaborate overview of the sequence of migrations The oldest attested Indo European language is Hittite which belongs to the oldest written Indo European languages the Anatolian branch 112 Although the Hittites are placed in the 2nd millennium BCE 113 the Anatolian branch seems to predate Proto Indo European and may have developed from an older Pre Proto Indo European ancestor 114 If it separated from Proto Indo European it is likely to have done so between 4500 and 3500 BCE 115 A migration of archaic Proto Indo European speaking steppe herders into the lower Danube valley took place about 4200 4000 BCE either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe 65 According to Mallory and Adams migrations southward founded the Maykop culture c 3500 2500 BCE 116 and eastward the Afanasevo culture c 3500 2500 BCE 117 which developed into the Tocharians c 3700 3300 BCE 118 According to Anthony between 3100 and 2800 2600 BCE a real folk migration of Proto Indo European speakers from the Yamna culture took place toward the west into the Danube Valley 119 These migrations probably split off Pre Italic Pre Celtic and Pre Germanic from Proto Indo European 120 According to Anthony this was followed by a movement north which split away Baltic Slavic c 2800 BCE 121 Pre Armenian split off at the same time 122 According to Parpola this migration is related to the appearance of Indo European speakers from Europe in Anatolia and the appearance of Hittite 123 The Corded Ware culture in Middle Europe 2900 2450 2350 cal BCE 124 has been associated with some of the languages in the Indo European family According to Haak et al 2015 a massive migration took place from the Eurasian steppes to Central Europe Yamna cultureThis migration is closely associated with the Corded Ware culture 125 web 6 web 7 The Indo Iranian language and culture emerged in the Sintashta culture c 2050 1900 BCE 2 where the chariot was invented 14 Allentoft et al 2015 found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture which suggests similar genetic sources of the two and may imply that the Sintashta derives directly from an eastward migration of Corded Ware peoples 126 The Indo Iranian language and culture was further developed in the Andronovo culture c 2000 1450 BCE and influenced by the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex c 2250 1700 BCE The Indo Aryans split off sometime around 2000 1600 BCE from the Iranians 9 after which Indo Aryan groups are thought to have moved to the Levant Mitanni the northern Indian subcontinent Vedic people c 1500 BCE and China Wusun 18 Thereafter the Iranians migrated into Iran 18 Central Asia formation of Indo Iranians Indo Iranian peoples are a grouping of ethnic groups consisting of the Indo Aryan Iranian and Nuristani peoples that is speakers of Indo Iranian languages The Proto Indo Iranians are commonly identified with the Andronovo culture 110 that flourished c 2000 1450 BCE in an area of the Eurasian Steppe that borders the Ural River on the west the Tian Shan on the east The older Sintashta culture 2050 1900 formerly included within the Andronovo culture is now considered separately but regarded as its predecessor and accepted as part of the wider Andronovo horizon The Indo Aryan migration was part of the Indo Iranian migrations from the Andronovo culture into Anatolia Iran and South Asia 10 Sintashta Petrovka culture Main article Sintashta culture According to Allentoft 2015 the Sintashta culture probably derived from the Corded Ware Culture Map of the approximate maximal extent of the Andronovo culture The formative Sintashta Petrovka culture is shown in darker red The location of the earliest spoke wheeled chariot finds is indicated in purple Adjacent and overlapping cultures Afanasevo Srubna and Bactria Margiana cultures are shown in green The Sintashta culture also known as the Sintashta Petrovka culture 127 or Sintashta Arkaim culture 128 is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian Steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia dated to the period 2050 1900 BCE 2 The Sintashta culture is probably the archaeological manifestation of the Indo Iranian language group 4 The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures Its immediate predecessor in the Ural Tobol steppe was the Poltavka culture an offshoot of the cattle herding Yamnaya horizon that moved east into the region between 2800 and 2600 BCE 129 Several Sintashta towns were built over older Poltovka settlements or close to Poltovka cemeteries and Poltovka motifs are common on Sintashta pottery Sintashta material culture also shows the influence of the late Abashevo culture a collection of Corded Ware settlements in the forest steppe zone north of the Sintashta region that were also predominantly pastoralist 130 Allentoft et al 2015 also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture 126 The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare 131 Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there which is unusual for a steppe culture 132 Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture 128 It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the Andronovo horizon 127 Andronovo culture Main article Andronovo culture Archaeological cultures associated with Indo Iranian migrations and Indo Aryan migrations after EIEC The Andronovo BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo Iranian migrations The GGC Cemetery H Copper Hoard and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo Aryan migrations The Andronovo culture is a collection of similar local Bronze Age Indo Iranian cultures that flourished c 2000 1450 BC in western Siberia and the central Eurasian Steppe 7 133 It is probably better termed an archaeological complex or archaeological horizon The name derives from the village of Andronovo 55 53 N 55 42 E 55 883 N 55 700 E 55 883 55 700 where in 1914 several graves were discovered with skeletons in crouched positions buried with richly decorated pottery The older Sintashta culture 2050 1900 BCE formerly included within the Andronovo culture is now considered by whom separately but regarded as its predecessor and accepted as part of the wider Andronovo horizon Currently only two sub cultures are considered as part of Andronovo culture Alakul 2000 1700 BC 8 between Oxus today Amu Darya and Jaxartes Kyzylkum desert Fedorovo 2000 1450 BC 134 8 in southern Siberia earliest evidence of cremation and fire cult 135 Other authors identified previously the following sub cultures also as part of Andronovo Eastern Fedorovo 1750 1500 BC 136 in Tian Shan mountains Northwestern Xinjiang China southeastern Kazakhstan eastern Kyrgyzstan Alekseyevka 1200 1000 BC 137 final Bronze Age phase in eastern Kazakhstan contacts with Namazga VI in TurkmeniaThe geographical extent of the culture is vast and difficult to delineate exactly On its western fringes it overlaps with the approximately contemporaneous but distinct Srubna culture in the Volga Ural interfluvial To the east it reaches into the Minusinsk depression with some sites as far west as the southern Ural Mountains 138 overlapping with the area of the earlier Afanasevo culture 139 Additional sites are scattered as far south as the Kopet Dag Turkmenistan the Pamir Tajikistan and the Tian Shan Kyrgyzstan The northern boundary vaguely corresponds to the beginning of the Taiga 138 In the Volga basin interaction with the Srubna culture was the most intense and prolonged and Federovo style pottery is found as far west as Volgograd Towards the middle of the 2nd millennium the Andronovo cultures begin to move intensively eastwards They mined deposits of copper ore in the Altai Mountains and lived in villages of as many as ten sunken log cabin houses measuring up to 30m by 60m in size Burials were made in stone cists or stone enclosures with buried timber chambers In other respects the economy was pastoral based on cattle horses sheep and goats 138 While agricultural use has been posited by whom no clear evidence has been presented Studies associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo Iranian languages though it may have overlapped the early Uralic speaking area at its northern fringe including the Turkic speaking area at its northeastern fringe 140 141 142 Based on its use by Indo Aryans in Mitanni and Vedic India its prior absence in the Near East and Harappan India and its 19 20th century BCE attestation at the Andronovo site of Sintashta Kuz mina 1994 argues that the chariot corroborates the identification of Andronovo as Indo Iranian 143 note 17 Anthony amp Vinogradov 1995 dated a chariot burial at Krivoye Lake to about 2000 BCE and a Bactria Margiana burial that also contains a foal has recently been found indicating further links with the steppes 147 Mallory acknowledges the difficulties of making a case for expansions from Andronovo to northern India and that attempts to link the Indo Aryans to such sites as the Beshkent and Vakhsh cultures only gets the Indo Iranian to Central Asia but not as far as the seats of the Medes Persians or Indo Aryans He has developed the kulturkugel model that has the Indo Iranians taking over Bactria Margiana cultural traits but preserving their language and religion contradictory while moving into Iran and India 148 146 Fred Hiebert also agrees that an expansion of the BMAC into Iran and the margin of the Indus Valley is the best candidate for an archaeological correlate of the introduction of Indo Iranian speakers to Iran and South Asia 146 According to Narasimhan et al 2018 the expansion of the Andronovo culture towards the BMAC took place via the Inner Asia Mountain Corridor 149 Bactria Margiana culture Main article Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex The extent of the Bactria Margiana Culture after EIEC The Bactria Margiana Culture also called Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex was a non Indo European culture which influenced the Indo Iranians 10 It was centered in what is nowadays northwestern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan 10 Proto Indo Iranian arose due to this influence 10 The Indo Iranians also borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs contradictory and practices from this culture 10 According to Anthony the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River present day Uzbekistan and present day Iran 150 It was a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo European elements 150 which borrowed distinctive religious beliefs and practices 10 from the Bactria Margiana culture 10 At least 383 non Indo European words were borrowed from this culture including the god Indra and the ritual drink Soma 151 The characteristically Bactria Margiana southern Turkmenistan northern Afghanistan artifacts found at burials in Mehrgarh and Balochistan are explained by a movement of peoples from Central Asia to the south 152 The Indo Aryan tribes may have been present in the area of the BMAC from 1700 BCE at the latest incidentally corresponding with the decline of that culture From the BMAC the Indo Aryans moved into the Indian subcontinent According to Bryant the Bactria Margiana material inventory of the Mehrgarh and Baluchistan burials is evidence of an archaeological intrusion into the subcontinent from Central Asia during the commonly accepted time frame for the arrival of the Indo Aryans 153 note 18 Two waves of Indo Iranian migration See also Indo Iranians The Indo Iranian migrations took place in two waves 154 155 belonging to the second and the third stage of Beckwith s description of the Indo European migrations 156 The first wave consisted of the Indo Aryan migration into the Levant seemingly founding the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria 157 c 1600 1350 BCE 158 and the migration south eastward of the Vedic people over the Hindu Kush into northern India 159 Christopher I Beckwith suggests that the Wusun an Indo European Europoid people of Inner Asia in antiquity were also of Indo Aryan origin 160 The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave 161 First wave Indo Aryan migrations Mittani Main article Mitanni Map of the Near East c 1400 BCE showing the Kingdom of Mitanni at its greatest extent Mitanni Hittite cuneiform KURURUMi ta an ni also Mittani Mi it ta ni or Hanigalbat Assyrian Hanigalbat Khanigalbat cuneiform Ḫa ni gal bat or Naharin in ancient Egyptian texts was a Hurrian speaking state in northern Syria and south east Anatolia from c 1600 BCE 1350 BCE 158 According to one hypothesis founded by an Indo Aryan ruling class governing a predominately Hurrian population Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite 162 Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia At the beginning of its history Mitanni s major rival was Egypt under the Thutmosids However with the ascent of the Hittite empire Mitanni and Egypt made an alliance to protect their mutual interests from the threat of Hittite domination At the height of its power during the 14th century BCE Mitanni had outposts centered on its capital Washukanni whose location has been determined by archaeologists to be on the headwaters of the Khabur River Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type Eventually Mitanni succumbed to Hittite and later Assyrian attacks and was reduced to the status of a province of the Middle Assyrian Empire The earliest written evidence for an Indo Aryan language is found not in Northwestern India and Pakistan but in northern Syria the location of the Mitanni kingdom 110 The Mitanni kings took Old Indic throne names and Old Indic technical terms were used for horse riding and chariot driving 110 The Old Indic term r ta meaning cosmic order and truth the central concept of the Rigveda was also employed in the Mitanni kingdom 110 Old Indic gods including Indra were also known in the Mitanni kingdom 163 164 165 North India Vedic culture Spread of Vedic culture Late Harappan phase Early Vedic Period Painted Grey Ware culture 1200 600 BCE Kingdoms tribes and theological schools of the Late Vedic Period Mahajanapadas c 500 BCE Northern Black Polished Ware culture 700 200 BCE Language families in the Indian subcontinent Multiple waves of migration into northern India See also Inner Outer hypothesis Geography of the Rigveda with river names the extent of the Swat and Cemetery H cultures are indicated The standard model by whom for the entry of the Indo European languages into India is that Indo Aryan migrants went over the Hindu Kush forming the Gandhara grave culture or Swat culture in present day Swat valley into the headwaters of either the Indus or the Ganges probably both The Gandhara grave culture which emerged c 1600 BCE and flourished from c 1500 BCE to 500 BCE in Gandhara modern day Pakistan and Afghanistan is thus the most likely locus of the earliest bearers of Rigvedic culture According to Parpola Indo Aryan clans migrated into South Asia in subsequent waves 6 This explains the diversity of views found in the Rig Veda and may also explain the existence of various Indo Aryan cultural complexes in the later Vedic period namely the Vedic culture centered on the Kuru Kingdom in the heartland of Aryavarta in the western Ganges plain and the cultural complex of Greater Magadha at the eastern Ganges plain which gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism 6 166 167 Writing in 1998 Parpola postulated a first wave of immigration from as early as 1900 BCE corresponding to the Cemetery H culture and the Copper Hoard culture c q Ochre Coloured Pottery culture and an immigration to the Punjab 1700 1400 BCE 168 note 19 In 2020 Parpola proposed an even earlier wave of proto Indo Iranian speaking people from the Sintashta culture 169 into India at c 1900 BCE related to the Copper Hoard Culture followed by a pre Rig Vedic Indo Aryan wave of migration 170 It seems then that the earliest Aryan speaking immigrants to South Asia the Copper Hoard people came with bull drawn carts Sanauli and Daimabad via the BMAC and had Proto Indo Iranian as their language They were however soon followed and probably at least partially absorbed by early Indo Aryans 171 This pre Rig Vedic wave of migration by early Indo Aryans is associated by Parpola with the early Ghalegay IV V phase of the Gandhara Grave culture and the Atharva Veda tradition and related to the Petrovka culture 172 The Rig Vedic wave followed several centuries later perhaps in the fourteenth century BCE and is associated by Parpola with the Fedorovo culture 173 According to Kochhar there were three waves of Indo Aryan immigration that occurred after the mature Harappan phase 174 the Murghamu Bactria Margiana culture related people who entered Balochistan at Pirak Mehrgarh south cemetery and other places and later merged with the post urban Harappans during the late Harappans Jhukar phase 2000 1800 BCE the Swat IV that co founded the Harappan Cemetery H phase in Punjab 2000 1800 BCE and the Rigvedic Indo Aryans of Swat V that later absorbed the Cemetery H people and gave rise to the Painted Grey Ware culture PGW to 1400 BCE Gandhara grave culture and Ochre Coloured Pottery culture Main articles Gandhara grave culture and Ochre Coloured Pottery culture About 1800 BCE there is a major cultural change in the Swat Valley with the emergence of the Gandhara grave culture With its introduction of new ceramics new burial rites and the horse the Gandhara grave culture is a major candidate for early Indo Aryan presence The two new burial rites flexed inhumation in a pit and cremation burial in an urn were according to early Vedic literature both practiced in early Indo Aryan society Horse trappings indicate the importance of the horse to the economy of the Gandharan grave culture Two horse burials indicate the importance of the horse in other respects Horse burial is a custom that Gandharan grave culture has in common with Andronovo though not within the distinctive timber frame graves of the steppe 175 Parpola 2020 states The dramatic new discovery of cart burials dated to c 1900 at Sinauli have been reviewed in this paper and they support my proposal of a pre Ṛvedic wave now set of waves of Aryan speakers arriving in South Asia and their making contact with the Late Harappans 176 Spread of Vedic Brahmanic culture Main article Vedic period During the Early Vedic Period c 1500 800 BCE web 9 the Indo Aryan culture was centered in the northern Punjab or Sapta Sindhu web 9 During the Later Vedic Period c 800 500 BCE web 10 the Indo Aryan culture started to extend into the western Ganges Plain web 10 centering on the Vedic Kuru and Panchala area 167 and had some influence 177 at the central Ganges Plain after 500 BCE web 11 Sixteen Mahajanapada developed at the Ganges Plain of which the Kuru and Panchala became the most notable developed centers of Vedic culture at the western Ganges Plain web 10 167 The Central Ganges Plain where Magadha gained prominence forming the base of the Maurya Empire was a distinct cultural area 178 with new states arising after 500 BCE web 11 during the so called Second urbanisation 179 note 20 It was influenced by the Vedic culture 177 but differed markedly from the Kuru Panchala region 178 It was the area of the earliest known cultivation of rice in the Indian subcontinent and by 1800 BCE was the location of an advanced neolithic population associated with the sites of Chirand and Chechar 180 In this region the Shramanic movements flourished and Jainism and Buddhism originated 167 Indus Valley Civilization The Indo Aryan migration into the northern Punjab started shortly after the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation IVC According to the Aryan Invasion Theory this decline was caused by invasions of barbaric and violent Aryans who conquered the IVC This Aryan Invasion Theory is not supported by the archeological and genetic data and is not representative of the Indo Aryan migration theory citation needed Decline of Indus Valley Civilisation The decline of the IVC from about 1900 BCE started before the onset of the Indo Aryan migrations caused by aridisation due to shifting mossoons 181 182 A regional cultural discontinuity occurred during the second millennium BCE and many Indus Valley cities were abandoned during this period while many new settlements began to appear in Gujarat and East Punjab and other settlements such as in the western Bahawalpur region increased in size Jim G Shaffer and Lichtenstein contend that in the second millennium BCE considerable location processes took place In the eastern Punjab 79 9 and in Gujarat 96 of sites changed settlement status According to Shaffer amp Lichtenstein It is evident that a major geographic population shift accompanied this 2nd millennium BCE localisation process This shift by Harappan and perhaps other Indus Valley cultural mosaic groups is the only archaeologically documented west to east movement of human populations in the Indian subcontinent before the first half of the first millennium B C 183 Continuity of Indus Valley civilization According to Erdosy the ancient Harappans were not markedly different from modern populations in Northwestern India and present day Pakistan Craniometric data showed similarity with prehistoric peoples of the Iranian plateau and Western Asia note 21 although Mohenjo daro was distinct from the other areas of the Indus Valley note 22 note 23 According to Kennedy there is no evidence of demographic disruptions after the decline of the Harappa culture 185 note 24 Kenoyer notes that no biological evidence can be found for major new populations in post Harappan communities 186 note 25 Hemphill notes that patterns of phonetic affinity between Bactria and the Indus Valley Civilisation are best explained by a pattern of long standing but low level bidirectional mutual exchange note 26 According to Kennedy the Cemetery H culture shows clear biological affinities with the earlier population of Harappa 187 The archaeologist Kenoyer noted that this culture may only reflect a change in the focus of settlement organization from that which was the pattern of the earlier Harappan phase and not cultural discontinuity urban decay invading aliens or site abandonment all of which have been suggested in the past 188 Recent excavations in 2008 at Alamgirpur Meerut District appeared to show an overlap between the Harappan and PGW expand acronym pottery 189 indicating cultural continuity Relation with Indo Aryan migrations According to Kenoyer the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation is not explained by Aryan migrations 190 note 27 which took place after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation Yet according to Erdosy Evidence in material culture for systems collapse abandonment of old beliefs and large scale if localised population shifts in response to ecological catastrophe in the 2nd millennium B C must all now be related to the spread of Indo Aryan languages 191 Erdosy testing hypotheses derived from linguistic evidence against hypotheses derived from archaeological data 192 states that there is no evidence of invasions by a barbaric race enjoying technological and military superiority 193 but some support was found in the archaeological record for small scale migrations from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent in the late 3rd early 2nd millennia BCE 194 According to Erdosy the postulated movements within Central Asia can be placed within a processional framework replacing simplistic concepts of diffusion migrations and invasions 195 Scholars have argued that the historical Vedic culture is the result of an amalgamation of the immigrating Indo Aryans with the remnants of the indigenous civilization such as the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture Such remnants of IVC expand acronym culture are not prominent in the Rigveda with its focus on chariot warfare and nomadic pastoralism in stark contrast with an urban civilization Inner Asia Wusun and Yuezhi Main articles Wusun and Yuezhi The Tarim Basin 2008 Wusun and their neighbours during the late 2nd century BCE The Yancai did not change their name to Alans until the 1st century The migrations of the Yuezhi through Central Asia from around 176 BCE to 30 CE According to Christopher I Beckwith the Wusun an Indo European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity were also of Indo Aryan origin 160 From the Chinese term Wusun Beckwith reconstructs the Old Chinese aswin which he compares to the Old Indic asvin the horsemen the name of the Rigvedic twin equestrian gods 160 Beckwith suggests that the Wusun were an eastern remnant of the Indo Aryans who had been suddenly pushed to the extremeties of the Eurasian Steppe by the Iranian peoples in the 2nd millennium BCE 196 The Wusun are first mentioned when by Chinese sources as vassals in the Tarim Basin of the Yuezhi 197 another Indo European Caucasian people of possible Tocharian stock 198 199 Around 175 BCE the Yuezhi were utterly defeated by the Xiongnu also former vassals of the Yuezhi 199 200 The Yuezhi subsequently attacked the Wusun and killed their king Kunmo Chinese 昆莫 or Kunmi Chinese 昆彌 Nandoumi Chinese 難兜靡 capturing the Ili Valley from the Saka Scythians shortly afterwards 200 In return the Wusun settled in the former territories of the Yuezhi as vassals of the Xiongnu 200 201 The son of Nandoumi was adopted by the Xiongnu king and made leader of the Wusun 201 Around 130 BCE he attacked and utterly defeated the Yuezhi settling the Wusun in the Ili Valley 201 After the Yuezhi were defeated by the Xiongnu in the 2nd century BCE a small group known as the Little Yuezhi fled to the south while the majority migrated west to the Ili Valley where they displaced the Sakas Scythians Driven from the Ili Valley shortly afterwards by the Wusun the Yuezhi migrated to Sogdia and then Bactria where they are often identified with the Tokharoi Toxarioi and Asii of Classical sources They then expanded into northern Indian subcontinent where one branch of the Yuezhi founded the Kushan Empire The Kushan empire stretched from Turpan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Indo Gangetic Plain at its greatest extent and played an important role in the development of the Silk Road and the transmission of Buddhism to China Soon after 130 BCE the Wusun became independent of the Xiongnu becoming trusted vassals of the Han dynasty and powerful force in the region for centuries 201 With the emerging steppe federations of the Rouran the Wusun migrated into the Pamir Mountains in the 5th century CE 200 They are last mentioned in 938 when a Wusun chieftain paid tribute to the Liao dynasty 200 Second wave Iranians This section does not cite any sources Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed August 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message The first Iranians to reach the Black Sea may have been the Cimmerians in the 8th century BCE although their linguistic affiliation is uncertain They were followed by the Scythians when who would dominate the area at their height from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the easternmost fringes of Central Asia in the east For most of their existence the Scythians were based in what is modern day Ukraine and southern European Russia Sarmatian tribes of whom the best known are the Roxolani Rhoxolani Iazyges Jazyges and the Alans followed the Scythians westwards into Europe in the late centuries BCE and the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era The Migration Period The populous Sarmatian tribe of the Massagetae dwelling near the Caspian Sea were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Achaemenid Period In the east the Scythians occupied several areas in Xinjiang from Khotan to Tumshuq The Medes Parthians and Persians begin to appear on the western Iranian Plateau from c 800 BCE after which they remained under Assyrian rule for several centuries as it was with the rest of the peoples in the Near East The Achaemenids replaced Median rule from 559 BCE Around the first millennium of the Common Era AD the Kambojas the Pashtuns and the Baloch began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western Pakistan displacing the earlier Indo Aryans from the area In Central Asia the Turkic languages have marginalized Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic migration of the early centuries CE In Eastern Europe Slavic and Germanic peoples assimilated and absorbed the native Iranian languages Scythian and Sarmatian of the region Extant major Iranian languages are Persian Pashto Kurdish and Balochi besides numerous smaller ones Anthropology elite recruitment and language shiftSee also Language shift Elite dominance Small groups can change a larger cultural area 24 14 and elite male dominance by small groups may have led to a language shift in northern India 25 26 27 note 28 Thapar notes that Indo Aryan chiefs may have provided protection to non Aryan agriculturalists offering a system of patronage placing the chiefs in a superior position This would have involved bilingualism resulting in the adoption of Indo Aryan languages by local populations 202 According to Parpola local elites joined small but powerful groups of Indo European speaking migrants 21 These migrants had an attractive social system and good weapons and luxury goods which marked their status and power Joining these groups was attractive for local leaders since it strengthened their position and gave them additional advantages 31 These new members were further incorporated by matrimonial alliances 32 22 Renfrew models of linguistic replacement Basu et al refer to Renfrew who described four models for linguistic replacement 25 203 The demographic subsistence model exemplified by the process of agricultural dispersal in which the incoming group has exploitive technologies which makes them dominant It may lead to significant gene flow and significant genetic changes in the population But it may also lead to acculturalisation in which case the technologies are taken over but there is less change in the genetic composition of the population The existence of extended trading systems which led to the development of a lingua franca in which case some gene flow is to be expected The elite dominance model in which a relatively small but well organized group take s over the system 204 Given the small size of the elite its genetic influence may also be small though preferential access to marriage partners may result in a relatively strong influence on the gene pool Sexual asymmetry may also be of influence incoming elites often consist mostly of males who have no influence on the mitochondrial DNA of the gene pool but may influence the Y chromosomes of the gene pool System collapse in which territorial boundaries are changed and elite dominance may appear for a while David Anthony elite recruitment David Anthony in his revised Steppe hypothesis 28 notes that the spread of the Indo European languages probably did not happen through chain type folk migrations but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites which are emulated by large groups of people 29 note 3 note 29 Anthony gives the example of the Southern Luo speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century 26 Anthony notes that Indo European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe carried forward by Indo European chiefs and their ideology of political clientage 30 Anthony notes that elite recruitment may be a suitable term for this system 30 note 30 Michael Witzel small groups and acculturation Michael Witzel refers to Ehret s model note 31 which stresses the osmosis or a billiard ball or Mallory s Kulturkugel effect of cultural transmission 24 According to Ehret ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies due to the cultural economic and military choices made by the local population in question The group bringing new traits may initially be small contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of the already local culture The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent expansionist process of ethnic and language shift 24 Witzel notes that arya arya does not mean a particular people or even a particular racial group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms such as ritual poetry etc 207 According to Witzel there must have been a long period of acculturation between the local population and the original immigrants speaking Indo Aryan 207 Witzel also notes that the speakers of Indo Aryan and the local population must have been bilingual speaking each other s languages and interacting with each other before the Rg Veda was composed in the Punjab 208 Salmons systematic changes in community structure Joseph Salmons notes that Anthony presents scarce concrete evidence or arguments 209 Salmons is critical about the notion of prestige as a central factor in the shift to Indo European languages referring to Milroy who notes that prestige is a cover term for a variety of very distinct notions 209 Instead Milroy offers arguments built around network structure though Salmons also notes that Anthony includes several of those arguments including political and technological advantages 209 According to Salmons the best model is offered by Fishman note 32 who understands shift in terms of geographical social and cultural dislocation of language communities Social dislocation to give the most relevant example involves siphoning off the talented the enterprising the imaginative and the creative Fishman 1991 61 and sounds strikingly like Anthony s recruitment scenario 33 Salmons himself argues that systematic changes in community structure are what drive language shift incorporating Milroy s network structures as well The heart of the view is the quintessential element of modernization namely a shift from local community internal organization to regional state or national or international in modern settings extra community organizations Shift correlates with this move from pre dominantly horizontal community structures to more vertical ones 33 note 4 Genetics ancient ancestry and multiple gene flowsSee also Genetics and archaeogenetics of South Asia and Peopling of India India has one of the most genetically diverse populations in the world and the history of this genetic diversity is the topic of continued research and debate The Indo Aryan migrations form part of a complex genetical puzzle on the origin and spread of the various components of the Indian population including various waves of admixture and language shift The genetic impact of the Indo Aryans may have been marginal but this is not at odds with the cultural and linguistic influence since language shift is possible without a change in genetics 211 Ancestral groups Common maternal ancestry Sahoo et al 2006 states that there is general agreement clarification needed that Indian caste and tribal populations share a common late Pleistocene maternal ancestry in India Kivisild et al 1999 concluded that there is an extensive deep late Pleistocene jargon genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians via the mitochondrial DNA that is DNA which is inherited from the mother According to them the two groups split at the time of the peopling of Asia and Eurasia and before modern humans entered Europe 34 Kivisild et al 2000 note that the sum of any recent the last 15 000 years western mtDNA gene flow to India comprises in average less than 10 percent of the contemporary Indian mtDNA lineages web 4 Kivisild et al 2003 and Sharma et al 2005 note that north and south Indians share a common maternal ancestry Kivisild et al 2003 further note that these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene jargon southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene jargon 35 Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians Reich et al 2009 in a collaborative effort between the Harvard Medical School and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology CCMB examined the entire genomes worth 560 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms SNPs as compared to 420 SNPs in prior work They also cross compared them with the genomes of other regions available in the global genome database 212 Through this study they were able to discern two genetic groups in the majority of populations in India which they called Ancestral North Indians ANI and Ancestral South Indians ASI note 33 They found that the ANI genes are close to those of Middle Easterners Central Asians and Europeans whereas the ASI genes are dissimilar to all other known populations outside India though the indigenous Andamanese were determined to be the most closely related to the ASI population of any living group albeit distinct from the ASI note 34 note 35 These two distinct groups which had split ca 50 000 years ago formed the basis for the present population of India web 12 The two groups mixed between 1 900 and 4 200 years ago 2200 BCE 100 CE where after a shift to endogamy took place and admixture became rare note 36 Speaking to Fountain Ink David Reich stated Prior to 4 200 years ago there were unmixed groups in India Sometime between 1 900 to 4 200 years ago profound pervasive convulsive mixture occurred affecting every Indo European and Dravidian group in India without exception Reich pointed out that their work does not show that a substantial migration occurred during this time web 13 Metspalu et al 2011 representing a collaboration between the Estonian Biocenter and CCMB confirmed that the Indian populations are characterized by two major ancestry components One of them is spread at comparable frequency and haplotype diversity in populations of South and West Asia and the Caucasus The second component is more restricted to South Asia and accounts for more than 50 of the ancestry in Indian populations Haplotype diversity associated with these South Asian ancestry components is significantly higher than that of the components dominating the West Eurasian ancestry palette 39 Segurel et al 2020 213 notes the 13910 T Lactase persistence mutation found in present day South Asia first appeared approximately 3 960 BCE in Ukraine and spread between 2 000 and 1 500 BCE throughout Eurasia Earlier Tandon et al 1981 had studied the distribution of lactase toleration in North and South Indians 49 Romero et al 2011 214 later plotting a decreasing North West to South East Indian cline for the mutations frequency Additional components ArunKumar et al 2015 discern three major ancestry components which they call Southwest Asian Southeast Asian and Northeast Asian The Southwest Asian component seems to be a native Indian component while the Southeast Asian component is related to East Asian populations 215 Brahmin needs context populations contained 11 4 and 10 6 of Northern Eurasian and Mediterranean components thereby suggesting a shared ancestry with the Europeans They note that this fits with earlier studies which suggested similar shared ancestries with Europeans and Mediterraneans 215 They further note that Studies based on uni parental marker have shown diverse Y chromosomal haplogroups making up the Indian gene pool Many of these Y chromosomal markers show a strong correlation to the linguistic affiliation of the population The genome wide variation of the Indian samples in the present study correlated with the linguistic affiliation of the sample 216 They conclude that while there may have been an ancient settlement in the subcontinent male dominated genetic elements shap ed the Indian gene pool and that these elements have earlier been correlated to various languages and further note the fluidity of female gene pools when in a patriarchal and patrilocal society such as that of India 217 Basu et al 2016 extend the study of Reich et al 2009 by postulating two other populations in addition to the ANI and ASI Ancestral Austro Asiatic AAA and Ancestral Tibeto Burman ATB corresponding to the Austroasiatic and Tibeto Burman language speakers 41 According to them ancestral populations seem to have occupied geographically separated habitats 42 The ASI and the AAA were early when settlers who possibly arrived via the southern wave out of Africa 42 The ANI are related to Central South Asians and entered India through the northwest while the ATB are related to East Asians and entered India through northeast corridors 42 They further note that The asymmetry of admixture with ANI populations providing genomic inputs to tribal populations AA Dravidian tribe and TB but not vice versa is consistent with elite dominance and patriarchy Males from dominant populations possibly upper castes with high ANI component mated outside of their caste but their offspring were not allowed to be inducted into the caste This phenomenon has been previously observed as asymmetry in homogeneity of mtDNA and heterogeneity of Y chromosomal haplotypes in tribal populations of India as well as the African Americans in United States 42 Male mediated migration Reich et al 2009 citing Kivisild et al 1999 indicate that there has been a low influx of female genetic material since 50 000 years ago but a male gene flow from groups with more ANI relatedness into ones with less 38 note 37 ArunKumar et al 2015 suggest that ancient male mediated migratory events and settlement in various regional niches led to the present day scenario and peopling of India 218 North south cline According to Metspalu et al 2011 there is a general principal component cline stretching from Europe to south India This northwest component is shared with populations from the Middle East Europe and Central Asia and is thought to represent at least one ancient influx of people from the northwest 219 clarification needed According to Saraswathy et al 2010 there is a major genetic contribution from Eurasia to North Indian upper castes and a greater genetic inflow among North Indian caste populations than is observed among South Indian caste and tribal populations web 14 According to Basu et al 2003 and Saraswathy et al 2010 certain sample populations of upper caste North Indians show a stronger affinity to Central Asian caucasians whereas southern Indian Brahmins show a less stronger affinity web 14 Scenarios While Reich notes that the onset of admixture coincides with the arrival of Indo European language web 2 note 38 according to Metspalu 2011 the commonalities of the ANI with European genes cannot be explained by the influx of Indo Aryans at ca 3 500 BP alone 220 They state that the split of ASI and ANI predates the Indo Aryan migration 39 both of these ancestry components being older than 3 500 BP 221 web 15 Moorjani 2013 states that We have further shown that groups with unmixed ANI and ASI ancestry were plausibly living in India until this time 222 Moorjani 2013 describes three scenarios regarding the bringing together of the two groups 43 migrations that occurred prior to the development of agriculture 8 000 9 000 years before present BP Evidence for this comes from mitochondrial DNA studies which have shown that the mitochondrial haplogroups hg U2 U7 and W that are most closely shared between Indians and West Eurasians diverged about 30 000 40 000 years BP Western Asian peoples migrated to India along with the spread of agriculture Any such agriculture related migrations would probably have begun at least 8 000 9 000 years BP based on the dates for Mehrgarh and may have continued into the period of the Indus civilization that began around 4 600 years BP and depended upon West Asian crops migrations from Western or Central Asia from 3 000 to 4 000 years BP a time during which it is likely that Indo European languages began to be spoken in the subcontinent A difficulty with this theory however is that by this time India was a densely populated region with widespread agriculture so the number of migrants of West Eurasian ancestry must have been extraordinarily large to explain the fact that today about half the ancestry in India derives from the ANI Pre agricultural migrations See also Peopling of India Metspalu et al 2011 detected a genetic component in India k5 which distributed across the Indus Valley Central Asia and the Caucasus 223 According to Metspalu et al 2011 k5 might represent the genetic vestige of the ANI though they also note that the geographic cline of this component within India is very weak which is unexpected under the ASI ANI model explaining that the ASI ANI model implies an ANI contribution which decreases toward southern India 224 According to Metspalu et al 2011 regardless of where this component was from the Caucasus Near East Indus Valley or Central Asia its spread to other regions must have occurred well before our detection limits at 12 500 years 225 Speaking to Fountain Ink Metspalu said the West Eurasian component in Indians appears to come from a population that diverged genetically from people actually living in Eurasia and this separation happened at least 12 500 years ago web 13 note 39 Moorjani et al 2013 refer to Metspalu 2011 note 40 as fail ing to find any evidence for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West Eurasia within the past 12 500 years 229 CCMB researcher Thangaraj believes that it was much longer ago and that the ANI came to India in a second wave of migration note 41 that happened perhaps 40 000 years ago web 13 Narasimhan et al 2019 conclude that ANI and ASI were formed in the 2nd millennium BCE 230 They were preceded by IVC people a mixture of AASI ancient ancestral south Indians that is hunter gatherers related and people related to but distinct from Iranian agri culturalists lacking the Anatolian farmer related ancestry which was common in Iranian farmers after 6000 BCE 231 note 42 note 43 Those Iranian farmers related people may have arrived in India before the advent of farming in northern India 231 and mixed with people related to Indian hunter gatherers ca 5400 to 3700 BCE before the advent of the mature IVC 236 note 44 This mixed IVC population which probably was native to the Indus Valley Civilisation contributed in large proportions to both the ANI and ASI which took shape during the 2nd millennium BCE ANI formed out of a mixture of Indus Periphery related groups and migrants from the steppe while ASI was formed out of Indus Periphery related groups who moved south and mixed with hunter gatherers 238 Agricultural migrations Near Eastern migrations Late Harappan phase 1900 1300 BCE Early Vedic Culture 1700 1100 BCE See also Neolithic Revolution Fertile Crescent and Dravidian languages Prehistory Kivisild et al 1999 note that a small fraction of the Caucasoid specific mtDNA lineages found in Indian populations can be ascribed to a relatively recent admixture 226 at ca 9 300 3 000 years before present 239 which coincides with the arrival to India of cereals domesticated in the fertile Crescent and lends credence to the suggested linguistic connection between Elamite and Dravidic populations 239 note 7 According to Gallego Romero et al 2011 their research on lactose tolerance in India suggests that the west Eurasian genetic contribution identified by Reich et al 2009 principally reflects gene flow from Iran and the Middle East 45 Gallego Romero notes that Indians who are lactose tolerant show a genetic pattern regarding this tolerance which is characteristic of the common European mutation web 3 According to Gallego Romero this suggests that the most common lactose tolerance mutation made a two way migration out of the Middle East less than 10 000 years ago While the mutation spread across Europe another explorer must have brought the mutation eastward to India likely traveling along the coast of the Persian Gulf where other pockets of the same mutation have been found web 3 In contrast Allentoft et al 2015 found that lactose tolerance was absent in the Yamnaya culture noting that while the Yamnaya and these other Bronze Age cultures herded cattle goats and sheep they couldn t digest raw milk as adults Lactose tolerance was still rare among Europeans and Asians at the end of the Bronze Age just 2000 years ago web 16 126 According to Lazaridis et al 2016 farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia 46 They further note that ANI can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe 46 note 45 Haplogroup R1a and related haplogroups R1a origins Underhill 2010 241 R1a migration to Eastern Europe R1a1a diversification Pamjav 2012 and R1a1a oldest expansion and highest frequency Underhill 2014 Main article Haplogroup R1a The distribution and proposed origin of haplogroup R1a more specifically R1a1a1b is often being used as an argument pro or contra the Indo Aryan migrations It is found in high frequencies in Eastern Europe Z282 and south Asia Z93 the areas of the Indo European migrations The place of origin of this haplogroup may give an indication of the homeland of the Indo Europeans and the direction of the first migrations 242 Cordeaux et al 2004 based on the spread of a cluster of haplogroups J2 R1a R2 and L in India with higher rates in northern India 243 argue that agriculture in south India spread with migrating agriculturalists which also influenced the genepool in south India 244 243 Sahoo et al 2006 in response to Cordeaux et al 2004 suggest that those haplogroups originated in India based on the spread of these various haplogroups in India According to Sahoo et al 2006 this spread argue s against any major influx from regions north and west of India of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo Aryan language family 243 They further propose that the high incidence of R1 and R1a throughout Central Asian and East European populations without R2 and R in most cases is more parsimoniously explained by gene flow in the opposite direction 245 which according to Sahoo et al 2006 explains the sharing of some Y chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations 243 Sengupta et al 2006 also comment on Cordeaux et al 2004 stating that the influence of Central Asia on the pre existing gene pool was minor and arguing for a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus and with significant genetic input resulting from demic diffusion associated with agriculture 246 Sharma et al 2009 found a high frequency of R1a1 in India They therefore argue for an Indian origin of R1a1 and dispute the origin of Indian higher most castes from Central Asian and Eurasian regions supporting their origin within the Indian subcontinent 247 Underhill et al 2014 2015 conclude that R1a1a1 the most frequent subclade of R1a split into Z282 Europe and Z93 Asia at circe 5 800 before present 248 According to Underhill et al 2014 2015 t his suggests the possibility that R1a lineages accompanied demic expansions initiated during the Copper Bronze and Iron ages 249 They further note that the diversification of Z93 and the early urbanization within the Indus Valley also occurred at this time and the geographic distribution of R1a M780 Figure 3d may reflect this 249 Palanichamy et al 2015 while responding to Cordeaux et al 2004 Sahoo et al 2006 and Sengupta et al 2006 elaborated on Kivisild et al s 1999 suggestion that West Eurasian haplogroups may have been spread by the early Neolithic migrations of proto Dravidian farmers spreading from the eastern horn of the Fertile Crescent into India 250 They conclude that the L1a lineage arrived from western Asia during the Neolithic period and perhaps was associated with the spread of the Dravidian language to India indicating that the Dravidian language originated outside India and may have been introduced by pastoralists coming from western Asia Iran 251 They further conclude that two subhalogroups originated with the Dravidian speaking peoples and may have come to South India when the Dravidian language spread 252 Poznik et al 2016 note that striking expansions occurred within R1a Z93 at 4 500 4 000 years ago which predates by a few centuries the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation 253 Mascarenhas et al 2015 note that the expansion of Z93 from Transcaucasia into South Asia is compatible with the archeological records of eastward expansion of West Asian populations in the 4th millennium BCE culminating in the so called Kura Araxes migrations in the post Uruk IV period 237 Indo European migrations Genetic impact of Indo Aryan migrations Bamshad et al 2001 Wells et al 2002 and Basu et al 2003 argue for an influx of Indo European migrants into the Indian subcontinent but not necessarily an invasion of any kind web 17 Bamshad et al 2001 notice that the correlation between caste status and West Eurasian DNA may be explained by subsequent male immigration into the Indian subcontinent Basu et al 2003 argue that the Indian subcontinent was subjected to a series of Indo European migrations about 1500 BCE Metspalu et al 2011 note that any nonmarginal migration from Central Asia to South Asia should have also introduced readily apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India although this presupposes the unproven assumption that East Asian ancestry was present to a significant extent in prehistorical Central Asia which is not the case and conclude that if there was a major migration of Eurasians into India this happened before the rise of the Yamna culture 224 Based on Metspalu 2011 Lalji Singh a co author of Metspalu concludes that t here is no genetic evidence that Indo Aryans invaded or migrated to India web 18 web 19 web 20 note 46 Moorjani et al 2013 notes that the period of 4 200 1 900 years BP was a time of dramatic changes in northern India and coincides with the likely first appearance of Indo European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent 229 note 47 Moorjani further notes that there must have been multiple waves of admixture which had more impact on higher caste and northern Indians and took place more recently 222 note 48 This may be explained by additional gene flow related to the spread of languages 254 at least some of the history of population mixture in India is related to the spread of languages in the subcontinent One possible explanation for the generally younger dates in northern Indians is that after an original mixture event of ANI and ASI that contributed to all present day Indians some northern groups received additional gene flow from groups with high proportions of West Eurasian ancestry bringing down their average mixture date 254 note 49 Palanichamy et al 2015 elaborating on Kivisild et al 1999 conclude that A large proportion of the west Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups observed among the higher ranked caste groups their phylogenetic affinity and age estimate indicate recent Indo Aryan migration to India from west Asia 251 According to Palanichamy et al 2015 the west Eurasian admixture was restricted to caste rank It is likely that Indo Aryan migration has influenced the social stratification in the pre existing populations and helped in building the Hindu caste system but it should not be inferred that the contemporary Indian caste groups have directly descended from Indo Aryan immigrants 251 note 50 Jones et al 2015 state that Caucasus hunter gatherer CHG note 51 was a major contributor to the Ancestral North Indian component According to Jones et al 2015 it may be linked with the spread of Indo European languages but they also note that earlier movements associated with other developments such as that of cereal farming and herding are also plausible 259 Basu et al 2016 note that the ANI are inseparable from Central South Asian populations in present day Pakistan They hypothesise that the root of ANI is in Central Asia 260 According to Lazaridis et al 2016 ANI can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe 46 Silva et al 2017 state that the recently refined Y chromosome tree strongly suggests that R1a is indeed a highly plausible marker for the long contested Bronze Age spread of Indo Aryan speakers into South Asia 261 note 52 Silva et al 2017 further notes they likely spread from a single Central Asian source pool there do seem to be at least three and probably more R1a founder clades within the Subcontinent consistent with multiple waves of arrival Narasimhan et al 2018 conclude that pastoralists spread southwards from the Eurasian steppe during the period 2300 1500 BCE These pastoralists during the 2nd millennium BCE who were likely associated with Indo European languages presumably mixed with the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilisation who in turn were a mix of Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter gatherers forming the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia 238 Zerjal et al 2002 argue that multiple recent events may have reshaped India s genetic landscape web 22 Origins of R1a Z93 Ornella Semino et al 2000 proposed Ukrainian origins of R1a1 and a postglacial spread of the R1a1 gene during the Late Glacial subsequently magnified by the expansion of the Kurgan culture into Europe and eastward 262 Spencer Wells proposes central Asian origins suggesting that the distribution and age of R1a1 points to an ancient migration corresponding to the spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion from the Eurasian Steppe 263 According to Pamjav et al 2012 Inner and Central Asia is an overlap zone for the R1a1 Z280 and R1a1 Z93 lineages which implies that an early differentiation zone of R1a1 M198 conceivably occurred somewhere within the Eurasian Steppes or the Middle East and Caucasus region as they lie between South Asia and Eastern Europe 264 261 A 2014 study by Peter A Underhill et al using 16 244 individuals from over 126 populations from across Eurasia concluded that there was compelling evidence that the initial episodes of haplogroup R1a diversification likely occurred in the vicinity of present day Iran 265 According to Martin P Richards co author of Silva et al 2017 the prevalence of R1a in India was very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo European speakers to India 266 note 53 Literary research similarities geography and references to migrationSimilarities Mitanni See also Indo Aryan superstrate in Mitanni The oldest inscriptions in Old Indic the language of the Rig Veda is found not in India but in northern Syria in Hittite records regarding one of their neighbors the Hurrian speaking Mitanni In a treaty with the Hittites the king of Mitanni after swearing by a series of Hurrian gods swears by the gods Mitrasil Uruvanassil Indara and Nasatianna who correspond to the Vedic gods Mitra Varuna Indra and Nasatya Asvin Contemporary when equestrian terminology as recorded in a horse training manual whose author is identified as Kikkuli contains Indo Aryan loanwords The personal names and gods of the Mitanni aristocracy also bear significant traces of Indo Aryan Because of the association of Indo Aryan with horsemanship and the Mitanni aristocracy it is presumed that after superimposing themselves as rulers on a native Hurrian speaking population about the 15th 16th centuries BCE Indo Aryan charioteers were absorbed into the local population and adopted the Hurrian language 267 Brentjes argues that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian Eastern European or Caucasian origin in the Mitannian area he also associates with an Indo Aryan presence the peacock motif found in the Middle East from before 1600 BCE and quite likely from before 2100 BCE 268 Scholars reject the possibility that the Indo Aryans of Mitanni came from the Indian subcontinent as well as the possibility that the Indo Aryans of the Indian subcontinent came from the territory of Mitanni leaving migration from the north the only likely scenario note 54 The presence of some Bactria Margiana loan words in Mitanni Old Iranian and Vedic further strengthens this scenario 269 Iranian Avesta The religious practices depicted in the Rigveda and those depicted in the Avesta the central religious text of Zoroastrianism the ancient Iranian faith founded by the prophet Zoroaster have in common the deity Mitra priests called hotṛ in the Rigveda and zaotar in the Avesta and the use of a ritual substance that the Rigveda calls soma and the Avesta haoma However the Indo Aryan deva god is cognate with the Iranian daeva demon Similarly the Indo Aryan asura name of a particular group of gods later on demon is cognate with the Iranian ahura lord god which 19th and early 20th century authors such as Burrow explained as a reflection of religious rivalry between Indo Aryans and Iranians 270 Linguists such as Burrow argue that the strong similarity between the Avestan of the Gathas the oldest part of the Avesta and the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda pushes the dating of Zarathustra or at least the Gathas closer to the conventional Rigveda dating of 1500 1200 BCE i e 1100 BCE possibly earlier Boyce concurs with a lower date of 1100 BCE and tentatively proposes an upper date of 1500 BCE Gnoli dates the Gathas to around 1000 BCE as does Mallory 1989 with the caveat of a 400 year leeway on either side i e between 1400 and 600 BCE Therefore the date of the Avesta could also indicate the date of the Rigveda 271 There is mention in the Avesta of Airyan Vaejah one of the 16 the lands of the Aryans 272 Gnoli s interpretation of geographic references in the Avesta situates the Airyanem Vaejah in the Hindu Kush For similar reasons Boyce excludes places north of the Syr Darya and western Iranian places With some reservations Skjaervo concurs that the evidence of the Avestan texts makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion that they were composed somewhere in northeastern Iran Witzel points to the central Afghan highlands Humbach derives Vaejah from cognates of the Vedic root vij suggesting the region of fast flowing rivers Gnoli considers Choresmia Xvairizem the lower Oxus region south of the Aral Sea to be an outlying area in the Avestan world However according to Mallory amp Mair 2000 the probable homeland of Avestan is in fact the area south of the Aral Sea 273 Geographical location of Rigvedic rivers Cluster of Indus Valley Civilization site along the course of the Indus River and in Pakistan and the Ghaggar Hakra in India and Pakistan See Sameer et al 2018 for a more detailed map Main articles Sarasvati River and Samudra The geography of the Rigveda seems to be centered on the land of the seven rivers While the geography of the Rigvedic rivers is unclear in some of the early books of the Rigveda the Nadistuti sukta is an important source for the geography of late Rigvedic society The Sarasvati River is one of the chief Rigvedic rivers The Nadistuti sukta in the Rigveda mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west and later texts like the Brahmanas and Mahabharata mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert 274 Scholars agree that at least some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar Hakra River 53 while the Afghan river Haraxvaiti Harauvati Helmand is sometimes quoted as the locus of the early Rigvedic river 54 Whether such a transfer of the name has taken place from the Helmand to the Ghaggar Hakra is a matter of dispute Identification of the early Rigvedic Sarasvati with the Ghaggar Hakra before its assumed drying up early in the second millennium would place the Rigveda BCE web 23 well outside the range commonly assumed by Indo Aryan migration theory A non Indo Aryan substratum in the river names and place names of the Rigvedic homeland would support an external origin of the Indo Aryans citation needed However most place names in the Rigveda and the vast majority of the river names in the north west of the Indian subcontinent are Indo Aryan 275 Non Indo Aryan names are however frequent in the Ghaggar and Kabul River areas 276 the first being a post Harappan stronghold of Indus populations citation needed Textual references to migrations Rigveda Probable geographic expansion of late Vedic culture Just as the Avesta does not mention an external homeland of the Zoroastrians the Rigveda does not explicitly refer to an external homeland 55 or to a migration 56 note 55 Later Hindu texts such as the Brahmanas Mahabharata Ramayana and Puranas are centered in the Ganges region rather than Haryana and Punjab and mention regions still further to the south and east suggesting a later movement or expansion of the Vedic religion and culture to the east There is no clear indication of general movement in either direction in the Rigveda itself searching for indirect references in the text or by correlating geographic references with the proposed order of composition of its hymns has not led to any consensus on the issue citation needed Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana According to Romila Thapar the Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana refers to the Parasus and the arattas who stayed behind and others who moved eastwards to the middle Ganges valley and the places equivalent such as the Kasi the Videhas and the Kuru Pancalas and so on In fact when one looks for them there are evidence for migration web 24 Later Vedic and Hindu texts Texts like the Puranas and Mahabharata belong to a much later period than the Rigveda making their evidence less than sufficient to be used for or against the Indo Aryan migration theory original research Later Vedic texts show a shift citation needed of location from the Punjab to the East According to the Yajurveda Yajnavalkya a Vedic ritualist and philosopher lived in the eastern region of Mithila 277 Aitareya Brahmana 33 6 1 records that Vishvamitra s sons migrated to the north and in Shatapatha Brahmana 1 2 4 10 the Asuras were driven to the north 278 In much later texts Manu was said to be a king from Dravida 279 In the legend of the flood he stranded with his ship in Northwestern India or the Himalayas 280 The Vedic lands e g Aryavarta Brahmavarta are located in Northern India or at the Sarasvati and Drishadvati river 281 However in a post Vedic text the Mahabharata Udyoga Parva 108 the East is described as the homeland of the Vedic culture where the divine Creator of the universe first sang the Vedas 282 The legends of Ikshvaku Sumati and other Hindu legends may have their origin in Southeast Asia 283 The Puranas record that Yayati left Prayag confluence of the Ganges amp Yamuna and conquered the region of Sapta Sindhu 284 285 His five sons Yadu Druhyus Puru Anu and Turvashu correspond to the main tribes of the Rigveda The Puranas also record that the Druhyus were driven out of the land of the seven rivers by Mandhatr and that their next king Gandhara settled in a north western region which became known as Gandhara The sons of the later Druhyu king Prachetas are supposed by some to have migrated to the region north of Afghanistan though the Puranic texts only speak of an adjacent settlement 286 287 EcologySee also Bond event 5 9 kiloyear event and 4 2 kiloyear event Climate change and drought may have triggered both the initial dispersal of Indo European speakers and the migration of Indo Europeans from the steppes in south central Asia and India Around 4200 4100 BCE a climate change occurred manifesting in colder winters in Europe 64 Between 4200 and 3900 BCE many tell settlements in the lower Danube Valley were burned and abandoned 64 while the Cucuteni Tripolye culture showed an increase in fortifications 288 meanwhile moving eastwards towards the Dniepr 289 Steppe herders archaic Proto Indo European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley about 4200 4000 BCE either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe 65 The Yamna horizon was an adaptation to a climate change which occurred between 3500 and 3000 BCE in which the steppes became drier and cooler Herds needed to be moved frequently to feed them sufficiently and the use of wagons and horse back riding made this possible leading to a new more mobile form of pastoralism 66 It was accompanied by new social rules and institutions to regulate the local migrations in the steppes creating a new social awareness of a distinct culture and of cultural Others who did not participate in these new institutions 290 In the second century BCE widespread aridization led to water shortages and ecological changes in both the Eurasian steppes and south Asia web 1 63 At the steppes humidization led to a change of vegetation triggering higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding 63 note 56 note 57 Water shortage also had a strong impact in south Asia This time was one of great upheaval for ecological reasons Prolonged failure of rains caused acute water shortage in a large area causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia Afghanistan Iran and India and triggering large scale migrations Inevitably the new arrivals came to merge with and dominate the post urban cultures web 1 The Indus Valley civilisation was localised that is urban centers disappeared and were replaced by local cultures due to a climatic change that is also signalled for the neighbouring areas of the Middle East 291 As of 2016 update many scholars believe that drought and a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia caused the collapse of the Indus Civilisation 292 The Ghaggar Hakra system was rain fed 293 294 295 and water supply depended on the monsoons The Indus valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier from about 1800 BCE linked to a general weakening of the monsoon at that time 293 The Indian monsoon declined and aridity increased with the Ghaggar Hakra retracting its reach towards the foothills of the Himalaya 293 296 297 leading to erratic and less extensive floods that made inundation agriculture less sustainable Aridification reduced the water supply enough to cause the civilisation s demise and to scatter its population eastward 298 299 300 Indigenous Aryanism The approximate extent of Aryavarta during the late Vedic period ca 1100 500 BCE Aryavarta was limited to northwest India and the western Ganges plain while Greater Magadha in the east was habitated by non Vedic Indo Aryans who gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism 166 167 Indian nationalistic opponents of the Indo Aryan migration question it and instead promote Indigenous Aryanism claiming that speakers of Indo Iranian languages sometimes called Aryan languages are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent 301 302 303 304 note 58 dead link Indigenous Aryanism has no support in contemporary mainstream scholarship as it is contradicted by a broad range of research on Indo European migrations 14 note 59 See alsoEarly Indians List of ancient Indo Aryan peoples and tribes Indo Aryan peoples Indo Aryan languages Indo European migrations Ariana Tamil nationalismNotes The term invasion while it was once commonly used in regard to Indo Aryan migration is now usually used only by opponents of the Indo Aryan migration theory 1 The term invasion does not any longer reflect the scholarly understanding of the Indo Aryan migrations 1 and is now generally regarded as polemical distracting and unscholarly Michael Witzel Just one Afghan IA tribe that did not return to the highlands but stayed in their Panjab winter quarters in spring was needed to set off a wave of acculturation in the plains by transmitting its status kit Ehret to its neighbors 19 Compare Max Muller why should not one shepherd with his servants and flocks have transferred his peculiar dialect from one part of Asia or Europe to another This may seem a very humble and modest view of what was formerly represented as the irresistible stream of mighty waves rolling forth from the Aryan centre and gradually overflowing the mountains and valleys of Asia and Europe but it is at all events a possible view nay I should say a view far more in keeping with what we know of recent colonisation 20 a b David Anthony 1995 Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige power and domestic security What is important then is not just dominance but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in a non state or pre state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments Ethnohistorical cases demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non state situations 205 a b Note the dislocation of the Indus Valley civilisation prior to the start of the Indo Aryan migrations into northern India and the onset of Sanskritisation with the rise of the Kuru Kingdom as described by Michael Witzel 210 The Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians 39 38 mixed between 4 200 to 1 900 years ago 2200 BCE 100 CE whereafter a shift to endogamy took place 40 Basu et al 2016 discern four major ancestries in mainland India namely ANI ASI Ancestral Austro Asiatic tribals AAA and Ancestral Tibeto Burman ATB 41 See also Fertile Crescent Western Asia and Near East a b Both Renfrew and Cavalli Sforza propose that proto Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent 240 The Dravidian language was present in northern India at the time of the arrival of the Indo Aryans who borrowed a substantial number of words from the Dravidian language Demkina et al 2017 In the second millennium BC humidification of the climate led to the divergence of the soil cover with secondary formation of the complexes of chestnut soils and solonetzes This paleoecological crisis had a significant effect on the economy of the tribes in the Late Catacomb and Post Catacomb time stipulating their higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding 63 See also Eurogenes Blogspot The crisis See Duperron Anquetil 1808 Histoire et memoires de l Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de 1701 a 1793 imprimerie royale Godfrey John J 1967 Sir William Jones and Pere Coeurdoux A philological footnote Journal of the American Oriental Society 87 1 57 59 doi 10 2307 596596 JSTOR 596596 Esleben In later years especially before his death he was deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms 79 According to Bryant keeping up to date is problematic for many Indian scholars since most Indian universities don t have enough funds to keep up with current scholarship and most Indian scholars are not able to gain access to recent western publications 86 Bryant further notes that while one would be lucky to find a book by Max Muller even in the antique book markets of London one can find a plethora of recent edition publications of his and other nineteenth century scholars works in just about any bookstore in India some of these on their tenth or twelfth edition Practically speaking it is small Delhi publishers that are keeping the most crude versions of the Aryan invasion theory alive by their nineteenth century reprints These are some of the main sources available to most Indian readers 86 unbalanced opinion Michael Witzel In these views though often for quite different reasons any immigration or trickling in nearly always called invasion of the Indo Aryans into the subcontinent is suspect or simply denied The Arya of the Rigveda are supposed to be just another tribe or group of tribes that have always been resident in India next to Dravidians Mundas etc The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya Aryan invasion is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule in both cases a white race was seen as subduing the local darker colored population However present European American Japanese etc Indologists do not maintain anything like this now While the invasion model was still prominent in the work of archaeologists such as Wheeler 1966 Indra stands accused it has been supplanted by much more sophisticated models over the past few decades see Kuiper 1955 sqq Thapar 1968 Witzel 1995 This development has not occurred because Indologists were reacting as is now frequently alleged to current Indian criticism of the older theory Rather philologists first and archaeologists somewhat later noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory and tried to find new explanations a new version of the immigration theories 1 Latham as cited in Mallory 1989 p 152 Krishnamurti states Besides the Ṛg Vedas has used the gerund not found in Avestan with the same grammatical function as in Dravidian as a non finite verb for incomplete action Ṛg Vedic language also attests the use of it as a quotation clause complementary All these features are not a consequence of simple borrowing but they indicate substratum influence Kuiper 1991 ch 2 Steppe herders archaic Proto Indo European speakers spread into the lower Danube valley as early as 4200 4000 BCE either causing or taking advantage of the collapse of Old Europe 65 Klejn 1974 as cited in Bryant 2001 206 acknowledges the Iranian identification of the Andronovo culture but finds the Andronovo culture too late for an Indo Iranian identification giving a later date for the start of the Andronovo culture in the 16th or 17th century BC whereas the Aryans appeared in the Near East not later than the 15th to 16th century BCE 144 Klejn 1974 p 58 further argues that these latter regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber Frame Andronovo materials 144 Brentjes 1981 also gives a later dating for the Andronovo culture 145 Bryant further refers to Lyonnet 1993 and Francfort 1989 who point to the absence of archaeological remains of the Andronovians south of the Hindu Kush 145 Bosch Gimpera 1973 and Hiebert 1998 argue that there also no Andronovo remains in Iran 145 but Hiebert agrees that the expansion of the BMAC people to the Iranian plateau and the Indus Valley borderlands at the beginning of the second millennium BCE is the best candidate for an archaeological correlate of the introduction of Indo Iranian speakers to Iran and South Asia Hiebert 1995 192 146 Sarianidi states that the Andronovo tribes penetrated to a minimum extent 145 Nevertheless archaeologists like B B Lal have seriously questioned the Bactria Margiana and Indo Iranian connections and thoroughly disputed all the proclaimed relations web 8 However this culture may also represent forerunners of the Indo Iranians similar to the Lullubi and Kassite invasion of Mesopotamia early in the second millennium BCE citation needed The First urbanisation was the Indus Valley Civilisation 167 Comparing the Harappan and Gandhara cultures Kennedy states Our multivariate approach does not define the biological identity of an ancient Aryan population but it does indicate that the Indus Valley and Gandhara peoples shared a number of craniometric odontometric and discrete traits that point to a high degree of biological affinity Kennedy in Erdosy 1995 p 49 Kennedy Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia Biological anthropology and concepts of ancient races in Erdosy 1995 at p 49 Cephalic measures however may not be a good indicator as they do not necessarily indicate ethnicity and they might vary in different environments On the use of which however see 184 Kennedy there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the north western sector of the Subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture If Vedic Aryans were a biological entity represented by the skeletons from Timargarha then their biological features of cranial and dental anatomy were not distinct to a marked degree from what we encountered in the ancient Harappans Kennedy in Erdosy 1995 p 54 Kenoyer there was an overlap between Late Harappan and post Harappan communities with no biological evidence for major new populations Kenoyer as quoted in Bryant 2001 p 231 Hemphill the data provide no support for any model of massive migration and gene flow between the oases of Bactria and the Indus Valley Rather patterns of phonetic affinity best conform to a pattern of long standing but low level bidirectional mutual exchange Hemphill 1998 Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians III An initial craniometric assessment American Journal of Physical Anthropology 106 3 329 348 doi 10 1002 sici 1096 8644 199807 106 3 lt 329 aid ajpa6 gt 3 0 co 2 h PMID 9696149 Hemphill 1999 Biological Affinities and Adaptations of Bronze Age Bactrians III A Craniometric Investigation of Bactrian Origins American Journal of Physical Anthropology 108 2 173 192 doi 10 1002 sici 1096 8644 199902 108 2 lt 173 aid ajpa4 gt 3 0 co 2 3 PMID 9988380 Kenoyer Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed continuities in technology subsistence practices settlement organization and some regional symbols show that the indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo Aryan speaking people For many years the invasions or migrations of these Indo Aryan speaking Vedic Aryan tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the Ganges Yamuna valley This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an uncritical reading of Vedic texts 190 Basu et al 2003 refer to Renfrew 1992 Archaeology genetics and linguistic diversity stating Renfrew 1992 has suggested that the elite dominance model which envisages the intrusion of a relatively small but well organized group that takes over an existing system by the use of force may be appropriate to explain the distribution of the IE languages in north India and Pakistan 25 Anthony explains that small elite groups may effect significant social changes because their social organisation allows for the recruitment of new members via patronage systems which may be attractive for outsiders 26 27 Compare the process of Sanskritization in India Another example Anthony gives of how an open social system can encourage recruitment and language shift are the Pathans in western Afghanistan Traditionally status depended on agricultural surpluses and landownership The neighbouring Baluch outnumbered by the Pathans were pastoral herders and has hierarchical political system Pathans who lost their land could take refuge among the Baluch As Anthony notes chronic tribal warfare might generally favor pastoralism over sedentary economics as herds can be defended by moving them whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target 206 Michael Witzel Ehret Ch 1988 Language Change and the Material Correlates of Language and Ethnic Shift Antiquity 62 564 74 derived from Africa cf Diakonoff 1985 24 Joshua Fisfman 1991 Reversing language shift Reich et al 2009 excluded the Austro Asiatic and Tibeto Burman speakers from their analysis in order to avoid interference Reich et al 2009 We analyze 25 diverse groups to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations genetically divergent that are ancestral to most Indians today One the Ancestral North Indians ANI is genetically close to Middle Easterners Central Asians and Europeans contradictory while the other the Ancestral South Indians ASI is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other Moorjani et al 2013 Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations Ancestral North Indians ANI related to Central Asians Middle Easterners Caucasians and Europeans and Ancestral South Indians ASI not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent Moorjani et al 2013 We report genome wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1 900 to 4 200 years ago In a subset of groups 100 of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy Reich et al The stronger gradient in males replicating previous reports could reflect either male gene flow from groups with more ANI relatedness into ones with less or female gene flow in the reverse direction However extensive female gene flow in India would be expected to homogenize ANI ancestry on the autosomes just as in mtDNA which we do not observe Supporting the view of little female ANI ancestry in India Kivisild et al reported that mtDNA haplogroup U splits into two deep clades U2i accounts for 77 of copies in India but 0 in Europe and U2e accounts for 0 of all copies in India but 10 in Europe The split is 50 000 years old indicating low female gene flow between Europe and India since that time 38 David reich This mystery of how Indo Europeans spread over such a vast region and what the historical underpinnings of it would have been is ongoing and remains a mystery The fact that these languages are in India has led to the hypothesis that they came in from somewhere else from the north from the west and that perhaps maybe this would be a vector for the movement of these people Another reason that people think that is that when you have languages coming in not always but usually they re brought by large movements of people Hungarian is an exception The Hungarians are mostly not descended from the people who brought Hungarian to Hungary In general languages typically tend to follow large movements of people On the other hand once agriculture is established as it has been for 5000 to 8000 years in India it s very hard for a group to make a dent on it The British didn t make any demographic dent on India even though they politically ruled it for a couple of hundred years It s a mystery how this occurred and it remains a mystery What we know is that the likely timing of this event is probably around 3000 to 4000 years ago The timing of the arrival of Indo European language corresponds to the timing of the mixture event web 2 Note that according to Jones et al 2015 Caucasian Hunter Gatherers and the ancestors of Neolithic farmers split circa 25 000 years ago Caucasus hunter gatherers CHG belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter gatherers 45 kya shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers 25 kya around the Last Glacial Maximum CHG genomes significantly contributed to the Yamnaya steppe herders who migrated into Europe B3 000 BC supporting a formative Caucasus influence on this important Early Bronze age culture 47 The reference is to a recent study and gives Kivisild et al 1999 Kivisild 1999 does not mention the number 12 500 nor does it explicitly make such a statement What it does state is that western Eurasian and Indian mtDNA lineages overlap in haplogroup U 226 that the split between the western Eurasian and Indian U2 lineages appeared circa 53 000 4 000 years before present 226 and that despite their equally deep time depth the Indian U2 has not penetrated western Eurasia and the European U5 has almost not reached India 227 They further note that wester Eurasian mtDNA lineages did spread in India at the time of the spread of agricultural crops from the fertile Crescent 228 Metspalu et al 2011 do refer to 12 500 years ago 225 Apparently the reference to Kivisld 1999 is incorrect and was not noticed by the authors After the initial settlement of India by the ASI Narasimhan et al One possibility is that Iranian farmer related ancestry in this group was characteristic of the Indus Valley hunter gatherers in the same way as it was characteristic of northern Caucasus and Iranian plateau hunter gatherers The presence of such ancestry in hunter gatherers from Belt and Hotu Caves in northeastern Iran increases the plausibility that this ancestry could have existed in hunter gatherers farther east 231 Shinde et al 2019 note that these Iranian people had little if any genetic contribution from western Iranian farmers or herders 232 they split from each other more than 12 000 years ago 233 See also Razib Kkan The Day of the Dasa it may in fact be the case that ANI like quasi Iranians occupied northwest South Asia for a long time and AHG populations hugged the southern and eastern fringes during the height of the Pleistocene There was a rapid increase of the Caucasus Hunter Gatherer related south Caucasian population at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum about 18 000 years ago 234 and Near East and Caucasus people probably also migrated to Europe during the Mesolithic around 14 000 years ago 235 Mascarenhas et al 2015 note that new possibly West Asian body types are reported from the graves of Mehrgarh beginning in the Togau phase 3800 BCE 237 See also eurogenes blogspot The genetic structure of the world s first farmers Lazaridis et al preprint Metspalu et al 2011 However any nonmarginal migration from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent should have also introduced readily apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India see Figure 2B Because this ancestry component is absent from the region we have to conclude that if such a dispersal event nevertheless took place it occurred before the East Asian ancestry component reached Central Asia The demographic history of Central Asia is however complex and although it has been shown that demic diffusion coupled with influx of Turkic speakers during historical times has shaped the genetic makeup of Uzbeks75 it is not clear what was the extent of East Asian ancestry in Central Asian populations prior to these events 224 See also Dinesh C Sharma 2011 Indians are not descendants of Aryans says new study India Today Moorjani The period of around 1 900 4 200 years BP was a time of profound change in India characterized by the deurbanization of the Indus civilization increasing population density in the central and downstream portions of the Gangetic system 40 shifts in burial practices and the likely first appearance of Indo European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent 229 Note that according to Salmons language shift is driven by systematic changes in community structure namely a shift from local community internal organization to regional state or national or international in modern settings extra community organizations Shift correlates with this move from pre dominantly horizontal community structures to more vertical ones 33 Moorjani Further evidence for multiple waves of admixture in the history of many traditionally middle and upper caste groups as well as Indo European and northern groups comes from the more recent admixture dates we observe in these groups Table 1 and the fact that a sum of two exponential functions often produces a better fit to the decay of admixture LD than does a single exponential as noted above for some northern groups Appendix B Evidence for multiple components of West Eurasian related ancestry in northern Indian populations has also been reported by Metspalu et al based on clustering analysis 222 The original mixture event of ANI and ASI may have been the spread of Dravidian languages to the south followed by the still ongoing Sanskritization of India 255 Note that Asko Parpola proposes that the Harappans spoke Proto Dravidian language web 21 and Mikhail Andronov proposes that the Proto Dravidian language was introduced by migrations at the beginning of the third millennium BCE 256 See Dieneke s blogspot 560K SNP study reveals dual rigin of Indian populations Reich et al 2009 and Razib Khan 8 August 2013 Indo Aryans Dravidians and waves of admixture migration for various proposals and discussions and this chart for the complexities of the Indian and European genepool According to George Hart there existed an Early South Indian Caste System which differed from the well known classic north Indian vanas 257 Caucasus Hunter Gatherers one of the contributors to the Indo Aryan gene pool According to Jones et al 2015 Caucasus hunter gatherers CHG belong to a distinct ancient clade that split from western hunter gatherers 45 kya shortly after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe and from the ancestors of Neolithic farmers 25 kya around the Last Glacial Maximum 258 See also Eurogenes Blog Heavily sex biased population dispersals into the Indian Subcontinent See also Heavily sex biased population dispersals into the Indian Subcontinent Silva et al 2017 Eurogenes Blog 28 March 2017 lt ref gt Mallory It is highly improbable that the Indo Aryans of Western Asia migrated eastwards for example with the collapse of the Mitanni and wandered into India since there is not a shred of evidence for example names of non Indic deities personal names loan words that the Indo Aryans of India ever had any contacts with their west Asian neighbours The reverse possibility that a small group broke off and wandered from India into Western Asia is readily dismissed as an improbably long migration again without the least bit of evidence 52 page needed According to Cardona there is no textual evidence in the early literary traditions unambiguously showing a trace of an Indo Aryan migration 56 Demkina et al 2017 In the second millennium BC humidization of the climate led to the divergence of the soil cover with secondary formation of the complexes of chestnut soils and solonetzes This paleoecological crisis had a significant effect on the economy of the tribes in the Late Catacomb and Post Catacomb time stipulating their higher mobility and transition to the nomadic cattle breeding 63 See also Eurogenes Blogspot The crisis See also S Kalyanaraman 19 December 2005 Harvard University s international scandal unravels a global Hindu conspiracy No support in mainstream scholarship Romila Thapar 2006 there is no scholar at this time seriously arguing for the indigenous origin of Aryans 305 Wendy Doniger 2017 The opposing argument that speakers of Indo European languages were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent is not supported by any reliable scholarship It is now championed primarily by Hindu nationalists whose religious sentiments have led them to regard the theory of Aryan migration with some asperity web 25 Girish Shahane September 14 2019 in response to Narasimhan et al 2019 Hindutva activists however have kept the Aryan Invasion Theory alive because it offers them the perfect strawman an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent s real argument The Out of India hypothesis is a desperate attempt to reconcile linguistic archaeological and genetic evidence with Hindutva sentiment and nationalistic pride but it cannot reverse time s arrow The evidence keeps crushing Hindutva ideas of history web 26 Koenraad Elst May 10 2016 Of course it is a fringe theory at least internationally where the Aryan Invasion Theory AIT is still the official paradigm In India though it has the support of most archaeologists who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity 306 Witzel 2001 p 95 The revisionist project certainly is not guided by the principles of critical theory but takes time and again recourse to pre enlightenment beliefs in the authority of traditional religious texts such as the Puranas In the end it belongs as has been pointed out earlier to a different discourse than that of historical and critical scholarship In other words it continues the writing of religious literature under a contemporary outwardly scientific guise The revisionist and autochthonous project then should not be regarded as scholarly in the usual post enlightenment sense of the word but as an apologetic ultimately religious undertaking aiming at proving the truth of traditional texts and beliefs Worse it is in many cases not even scholastic scholarship at all but a political undertaking aiming at rewriting history out of national pride or for the purpose of nation building SubnotesReferences a b c d e f g h Witzel 2005 p 348 a b c Lindner Stephan 2020 Chariots in the Eurasian Steppe a Bayesian approach to the emergence of horse drawn transport in the early second millennium BC in Antiquity Vol 94 Issue 374 April 2020 p 367 The 12 calibrated radiocarbon dates belonging to the Sintashta horizon range between 2050 and 1760 cal BC at 95 4 confidence Epimakhov amp Krause 2013 137 These dates correlate well with the seven AMS sampled Sintashta graves in the associated KA 5cemetery which date to 2040 1730 cal BC 95 4 confidence Witzel 2003 a b Anthony 2007 pp 390 fig 15 9 405 411 Kuz mina 2007 p 222 a b c d Parpola 2015 a b Grigoriev Stanislav 2021 Andronovo Problem Studies of Cultural Genesis in the Eurasian Bronze Age in Open Archaeology 2021 7 p 3 By Andronovo cultures we may understand only Fyodorovka and Alakul cultures a b c Parpola Asko 2020 Royal Chariot Burials of Sanauli near Delhi and Archaeological Correlates of Prehistoric Indo Iranian Languages in Studia Orientalia Electronica Vol 8 No 1 Oct 23 2020 p 188 the Alakul culture c 2000 1700 BCE in the west and the Fedorovo culture c 1850 1450 BCE in the east a b c d Lubotsky Alexander 2020 What language was spoken by the people of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex in Paul W Kroll and Jonathan A Silk eds At the Shores of the Sky Asian Studies for Albert Hoffstadt Brill Leiden Boston p 6 The breakdown of the Indo Iranian branch into Indian and Iranian occurred somewhere between 2000 and 1600 bce when future Indians left their tribesmen and crossed the Hindu Kush on their way to India a b c d e f g h Beckwith 2009 p 32 Gopnik Hilary 2017 The Median Confederacy in Touraj Daryaee ed King of the Seven Climes A History of the Ancient Iranian World 3000 BCE 651 CE Ancient Iran Series Vol IV UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies p 40 We can say for certain that the neighboring Assyrians recognized a group of people that they identified as coming from the land of the Medes mat madayya as early as the reign of Shalmaneser III 858 824 BCE and it is almost certain that Indo Iranian speaking peoples had settled in Western Iran at least some 500 years if not 1 000 years earlier than this Beckwith 2009 p 33 Witzel 2005 a b c d e f g h i j k l m Anthony 2007 a b Anthony amp Ringe 2015 a b Beckwith 2009 p 29 Anthony 2007 p 408 a b c Beckwith 2009 a b Witzel 2005 pp 342 343 Muller 1988 p 91 a b c Parpola 2015 p 67 a b c Mallory 2002 Salmons 2015 pp 114 119 a b c d e Witzel 2005 p 347 a b c d Basu et al 2003 p 2287 a b c d Anthony 2007 pp 117 118 a b c Pereltsvaig amp Lewis 2015 pp 208 215 a b Pereltsvaig amp Lewis 2015 p 205 a b Anthony 2007 p 117 a b c Anthony 2007 p 118 a b Parpola 2015 pp 67 68 a b Parpola 2015 p 68 a b c d e Salmons 2015 p 118 a b c Kivisild et al 1999 a b Kivisild et al 2003 Sharma et al 2005 Sahoo et al 2006 a b c d e f Reich et al 2009 a b c d Metspalu et al 2011 a b c d Moorjani et al 2013 a b Basu et al 2016 p 1594 a b c d e Basu et al 2016 p 1598 a b Moorjani et al 2013 pp 422 423 a b Itan Yuval Jones Bryony L Ingram Catherine JE Swallow Dallas M Thomas Mark G 9 February 2010 A worldwide correlation of lactase persistence phenotype and genotypes BMC Evolutionary Biology 10 1 36 doi 10 1186 1471 2148 10 36 ISSN 1471 2148 PMC 2834688 PMID 20144208 a b Gallego Romero 2011 p 9 a b c d Lazaridis et al 2016 a b Jones 2016 Basu et al 2016 a b Tandon R K Joshi Y K Singh D S Narendranathan M Balakrishnan V Lal K 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