Chariots and Aryans

it is said that the war chariots in mahabharata were also light, and not the 6 wheeled ones we see in pictures.
as a result, arjuna had to bear his bent left leg on krishna’s shoulder to shoot his arrows and was very uncomfortable in the beginning.
mahabharatha pundits here can clarify.

@Razib,
I am writing smaller posts now, as suggested.
As a learned person, I know you understand that AMT is based on linguistics + genetics proofs. Without linguistics, only population movement is demonstrated by genetics and cannot prove AMT. “ratha” , a word for chariot was postulated to be imported from Steppes to India. It was one of the strongest linguistic proof in support of AMT according to Witzel in the book “The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History” [pp. 369-370, publication year: 2005]. Now, this is gone conclusively. But OIT linguistic evidences remain, and thus, the theory is stronger and likelier. For linguistic proofs in support of OIT, including to Eurasia, please read: https://www.brownpundits.com/2020/06/27/iran_n-chg-ancestry-and-the-genetic-origins-of-the-proto-indo-europeans/#comment-64866

“Ratha” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratha] word is mentioned in Old Rigveda (books 6,3,7,4 and 2, minus the Redacted Hymns)[https://talageri.blogspot.com/2019/10/dravidian-connections-with-harappan.html]. This means that chariots were known to IE migrants from the very beginning. Simplest explanation is OIT not AMT.

“population admixture of 10-30% from a steppe group into the northwest subcontinent plausible on the face of it… This would mean the population displacement is actually higher in demographic terms.”

Genetics people…

So I recall the AASI component is also higher than the math would show since the Onge are being used as a sample population and they would have split from Indian AASI the same time they split from Proto-East Asian hunter gatherers.

If steppe and AASI are both underestimated, does this mean IVC related ancestry in Indians is lower than the estimates by a significant amount?

The main takeaway from the text is the sentence:

“Indo-Aryan and Iranian seem closer to the Slavic clade”,

This is an exact thing which makes obsolete the most of what is written in the comments. Also, one picture from Vinca (the oldest wheel is found there) should be enough to prevent some meaningless conversations. But it seems that this word is proscribed and everything what comes from there is pushed under the carpet. As usual, OIT shows some signs of autistic behavior and cannot see anything further from the own nose.

I should refer briefly on the young guy here who invests a lot of efforts to deconstruct AMT. Based on my own experience, I feel sorry for him if he intends to waste a lot of his future time on compiling supporting evidence for OIT and fighting AMT. He starts from the political agenda, not as a future scholar who investigates all evidence and makes conclusions based on them. Because of his tender age and his greenhorn status, everyone tries to be gentle with him. For his good, I think that Razibishka should be more brutal with him and send him to do a half-day preparatory crash reading course about Vinca/Lepenski Vir or to do astronomy apprenticeship with Nilesh or to assign Anan, although he is busy, to be his buddy for a month or two.

The evidence points less to an invasion, and more to a religious replacement. Note that the highest percentages of steppe ancestry are found in Brahmins, though they are of heterogeneous ancestry, not amongst the warrior and ruling caste populations.

We don’t have much evidence for what the religious landscape of Northern Indian looked like in the aftermath of the Cemetery H culture, but Vedic practice (at least as attested from circa 1000 BC) seems to focus on the idea of religious knowledge and spiritual power being imparted and found in the far wild places.

The most parsimonious explanation is that the post-IVC peoples had a religious system that valued distance from farming settlements, perhaps in the form of “wilderness experiences” or another form of nature based cultus/praxis. The steppe domination would have come from a religious imposition, where the proto-Vedic forms of worship would have fit easily upon the existing beliefs of the local population.

My personal theory is that the post-IVC population followed some kind of religious practice in which there was in inner enclosed and “controlled” spiritual space (anything from a village, to a sacred site, to even tilled fields and pastures), where local gods/spirits where benevolent, and a wild outer space where the powers above were uncontrolled and could go either way (think of the Rudram, where Rudra is a God of the wild forests and mountains, and can either be really nice to you, or bring down disease and disaster). Some Vedic hymns seem to point to the idea that the Ṛṣis were able to call upon and bind the Gods into doing their bidding, and I think this element was what assured their dominion.

Because their language was the language of prayer, it easily spread throughout the population, and explains why rivers and other geographical features have Indo-Aryan names. That said, we don’t actually have much when it comes to a historic linguistic map of India. Looking at Gondi, for example, it seems clear that into the historic period a larger portion of Madhya Pradesh would have been Dravidian speaking before they shifted to early Hindi. It also needs to be noted that Prakrit seems to have been attested earlier in areas that later came to be Telugu or Kannada speaking, so we cannot make too many assumptions about how South Asia transformed linguistically, or what were the predominant languages prior to the 1500s.

I wonder if the lack of Indian aDNA makes the IVC population appear far more monolithic than it really is, with a northern Bactrian component, a Helmand Civilization component, an IVC component, and finally a yet unexplored central Indian and AASI-like component all existing on a cline but representing distinct cultures.

Brahmin groups seem to be enriched not only for R1a Y-DNA, but often for R2, J2, L relative to F & H. I wonder if this is indicative that, rather than a pure male-dominance dynamic, a fusion between northern IVC/Helmand Culture and Steppe cultures created the Indo-Aryans, somewhat like the fusion between the Aesir and Vanir shaped Norse society. Of course, I could be misreading the genetic story here, so would appreciate anyone setting me straight if so.

Sadly, by the time the RV was written, this fusion had already happened and the Indo-Aryans were planted in the Punjab, so we only see it after the fact. But this culture is already pretty distinct and unique — Brahmanical practices are quite distinct, epic poems turn from Indra’s war stories to meditations on the self — it’s almost as if the great engineering cultures of the IVC and Sintashta become obsessed with the question of how to cultivate a self-moving soul, independent of webs of default causality.

I don’t live in India so I don’t understand the emotions around Hindutva, Marxism, OIT, and AIT. I’ve definitely found the genetic record surprising — I didn’t expect as much of a component from the Urals and was really shocked to see the Indo-Aryans had no BMAC component.

But ancient Indian civilization was really cool. It’s a shame that the story of a civilization that gave the world so much in terms of philosophy, mathematics, and epistemology, is so obscured by politics. But there’s so much depth there and I hope this encourages people to get deep in the literature, philosophy, linguistics, and archaeology of the period.