Here is hoping for a better 2021!
Massive migrations from Steppes to Bronze Age India was indeed a myth. We have gathered Ancient DNA evidence now. The findings will be out next year. Thanks to the great efforts of scientists from India, USA, UK and others. Warm Greetings for upcoming 2021!
— Niraj Rai (@NirajRai3) December 30, 2020
Lots of questions about this tweet. I like Niraj Rai and Gyaneshwer Chaubey personally. But, I’m pretty skeptical of how people are interpreting this. My own views are pretty straightforward, and outlined in my post the “Aryan Integration Theory”.
I believe that about 14% of the total ancestry in South Asia derives from the Central Asian steppe ~3,500 years ago. These people derive from a “reflux” migration from Central Europe of a Corded Ware related people (“Battle Axe Culture”).* The fraction is higher in Pakistan, 20-30%. Much lower in southern India, ~5% or so (excepting Brahmins). Whenever this is a “massive migration” is up to you to interpret.
I do think they brought R1a and lots of aspects of Indian culture, such as Indo-European language. On the other hand, most of the ancestry and a lot of the culture was “indigenous.” The Indic culture we see in the Iron Age is clearly a synthesis, which was present even in the Vedic corpus.
Also, in the annals of self-promotion, I had some free posts on my Substack before Christmas:
The Age of Genetic Engineering Begins
* Something I point out to people is that this assumes that the steppe people arrived from Khorasan unmixed. If the Indo-Aryans who arrived in the Punjabs already mixed with Iranian peoples in their sojourn then the fraction is an underestimate, though I doubt it is 2-fold.
The assertion that Steppes people brought an “IE language” to India is the softest “belly” part of your post. Mixed into that jam is another hidden equal claim (imo) – that there was no IE language in India before their arrival. Is that correct?
Hindu Tarka posits that truths derived by prathyaksha (witnessable evidence) have greater Valence than those derived by anumana (inference). In other words, empiricism is better than rationalism. Somewhat like the Vienna school.
The only clear fact is that modern Indians possess Steppes DNA which a individual in the Mature Harappan Phase did not possess.
The Vedic corpus provides multiple strong terminus ante quems against that 3500 ybp date. Insisting that the Steppes people brought an IE language exclusively weakens your argument in multiple ways and opens it to falsification on evidence already available.
The assertion that Steppes people brought an “IE language” to India is the softest “belly” part of your post. Mixed into that jam is another hidden equal claim (imo) – that there was no IE language in India before their arrival. Is that correct?
What are you claiming here? Are you seriously claiming that Indo-European languages were not a Steppe import?
Indo-Aryan languages have common features that other Indo-European languages tend not to have (retroflex consonants for example, which they share in common with Dravidian languages), so the most plausible explanation is Indo-European language family originated outside India and then picked up these sounds when they arrived in India and came into contact with Dravidian speakers. The alternative would be that every other Indo-European branch underwent those changes independently, which is implausible.
That’s why people hypothesized the Aryan Migration Theory long before we knew anything about genetics, based purely on linguistics.
I’m not too well-versed in this, but I think OIT proponents argue that Dravidian imports (including retroflex) into Indo-Aryan happened AFTER various out-migrations from the subcontinent (carrying the European lineages west). The timeline or plausibility of this may not have been given enough attention.
Here’s one of the OIT proponents, who grounds all his arguments on linguistics and contents of the Vedic texts: https://talageri.blogspot.com/2018/
@ Hector St Clare
The retroflex consonant argument is old hat. It has been comprehensively debunked. The Roma people have no retroflexes in their tongues today. And they left India just 700-1000 years ago.
Linguists are stuck in a time warp unwilling to move on from 40 years ago. They supposedly solved the puzzle, built a grand tree and are now refusing to climb down from that tree.
Please look up the 2019 paper of Belyayev, a Russian linguist. He has formulated a long list of Dravidian loanwords and substrate in Lithuanian, Russian, German, Irish and Greek. Now give me an explanation on how this could have happened in the AIT/AMT universe.
The assertion that Steppes people brought an “IE language” to India is the softest “belly” part of your post. Mixed into that jam is another hidden equal claim (imo) – that there was no IE language in India before their arrival. Is that correct?
the sintashta brought the ancestor of the indo-aryan languages. as for the supposition there was no IE before them, that’s possibly true, but likely not definitive. the sintashta are late arrivals. the afanesevio/yamna culture was around central asia way earlier and may have have ‘outriders’ south.
also, you use quotes really weird. “IE language” and “belly”? must be an indian norm? (americans use quotes kind of sarcastically)
The only clear fact is that modern Indians possess Steppes DNA which a individual in the Mature Harappan Phase did not possess.
this is false. there are lots of clear facts, many of which you do not know, because like many indians you live in the bubble of india and refuse to take into account other facts.
There are equal amounts of inconvenient facts which are swept aside by the AMT/AIT camp.
Primary one being the description of Saraswati in the Vedic corpus – a river that is now established as being extinguished by 4000 ybp. This coincides with the onset of Meghalayan Age with the 4.2 kiloyear aridification event.
Paradoxically, we finally almost came to the general consensus agreement. We all (including common sense OIT guys) agree that some people (you can all them Aryans, steppes, reflux, whatever) came to SA, we almost agree that they brought their, let’s say ‘Indo-European’, language (Razib gave a concession that this may not be 100% than 95% probability) which localized version became Sanskrit. A synergy of newly arrived and local mythologies we can leave for the next round of discussions.
And, here we go – we made it, a great success in just the 2nd day of the New Year which I expect will be very successful.
Personally, I would specify who exactly these Aryans were and which actually was this ‘Indo-European’(meaningless term) language but I do not insist so as I did not in a case if Aryans had moustaches or not. Now is up to the local researchers to take over and build on this foundation.
Go girls and guys, Happy New Year!
One of the most interesting things to me a ihr the aryan migrations to South Asia is that the Yamna people didn’t slowly come to SA from north of the Caspian Sea at the same time that they migrated westwards to Europe around 5,300 years ago.
Instead, the Yamnas gave rise to many other IE groups about 6,000 years ago. One group went to Central Europe, and became the corded ware culture.
One thing that boggles my mind is that from Central Europe, some of these Corded Ware people was that a subset went BACK TO THE EAST and became lighter in complexion (as evidenced by how much EHG genes they picked up from 5,300 years ago to around 4,300 years ago). One subset were the Sintashta who lived north of where mongolia and Kazakhstan meet in modern day Novosibirsk at 55E and 55N. These folks were the proto-indo-Iranians, and they were lighter in color to the yamnas.
I have all kinds of questions:
1. How do we know that some IE migrated from Central Europe to the east, and when did we know this?
2. Does this mean that my Punjabi and Marathi friends were correct when they stated that NI are “from Switzerland/Sweden?”
3. There are quite a few similarities between all IE religions. Are there more between the Germanic pagan religions and Vedic Hinduism, and if so, would this have anything to do with the eastward migration of the IE back to the steppes
4. Why wouldn’t this eastward expansion not leave a linguistic legacy eastwards in the form of Baltic-Slavic in Kazakhstan?
“ . Does this mean that my Punjabi and Marathi friends were correct when they stated that NI are “from Switzerland/Sweden?”“
Punjabi perhaps, Marathi not so much, Jats most certainly.
Btw did u know we UP-wallahs are from Jupiter ?
“There are quite a few similarities between all IE religions. Are there more between the Germanic pagan religions and Vedic Hinduism, and if so, would this have anything to do with the eastward migration of the IE back to the steppes”
Idk if you’ve ever visted this blog by Manasataramgini, some of his posts on the greater IE-sphere are quite illuminating
A post on possible Visnu cognates in the Norse, Celtic and Indo Iranian pantheon:
https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2020/01/02/the-roots-of-vai%e1%b9%a3%e1%b9%87avam-a-view-from-the-numerology-of-vedic-texts/
Some common motifs in the Hindu and Iranian epic traditions: https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/indo-iranica-epic-ruminations/
Visnu (or Vishny) came from Serbian language. It is still used, especially as a reference to God in church services, and its meaning is – The Highest. We will talk more about this in our next discussion round – mythology.
so the yamna flourished btwn 3300 and 2500 in the altai as the afanesevio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasievo_culture
they were exact same people. i have some ‘inside’ sources and researchers have found yamna ppl on the volga who are ‘thrid cousins’ genetically to afanesevio people in the altai. this means that culturally they were probably the same even though they were separated by a huge distance
Instead, the Yamnas gave rise to many other IE groups about 6,000 years ago. One group went to Central Europe, and became the corded ware culture.
the first CW sites date to 2900 BCE in north-central europe. these ppl have r1a1a. they are ancestral to the reflux movement back into the forest-steppe and the volga (which led to a succession of cultures culminating in the sintashta and andronovo-horizon of 2000 BCE or so).
1. How do we know that some IE migrated from Central Europe to the east, and when did we know this?
becase ‘european neolithic’ ancestry is distinctive. not really found on the steppe/yamna zone until after CW. the sintashta ~1800 BC look very similar to the CW (some subtle changes, and a few admixed individuals with east asian, siberian, and more iranian ancestry in the mix by then tho).
then there is the cultural succession that russian archaeologists have worked out. sintashta clearly descends from a set of societies that kept moving further east…
2. Does this mean that my Punjabi and Marathi friends were correct when they stated that NI are “from Switzerland/Sweden?”
that is false. CW core zone is basically like poland? the ones who went west became something different. the nordic societies are distant cousins of indo-iranians, not ancestors.
4. Why wouldn’t this eastward expansion not leave a linguistic legacy eastwards in the form of Baltic-Slavic in Kazakhstan?
indo-iranian and slavic are probaby somehow related either through common ancestry or contact. but iranian used to be dominant much further north and west than today. so that’s the reason slavs were not far east. in fact, a lot of the present slavic range in the east is recent expansion (last 1000 years)
There are a couple points between the lines. One is that ‘whiteness’ was ‘picked up’ in Europe by ‘steppe’ people and carried back to the east to SA. I already provided the general framework and I will repeat couple relevant things. This ‘whiteness’ is coming from Vincha people, in particular I2 women, because the male I2 was subjected to the genocide and decimated. It’s been done by Yamnaya people who came from Russian steppes and they are today’s West Europeans (Americans, Australians). They were R1b people and they were NOT Aryans although it was some kind of returning back (reflux) to their homeland. It means that the original future West Europeans were not white(!). They lived in steppes as nomads and could NOT develop sophisticated language neither culture nor technology. They learnt technology in urban Vincha before they conducted this genocide. They could not have strong cultural influence and could not form IE cultural groups.
Their language was not this which is named ‘Indo-European’ (what is ‘Indo’ in Russian steppes?). The ‘Indo-European’ language is actually Vincha’s (proto)Serbian language which was later carried to SA. Nordic I1, which also originated in Vincha, also contributed to the ‘whiteness’ of future WestEU. It is interesting and insufficiently explored the relationship between R1a and R1b. R1a were less aggressive, in friendly relationship with I2 people learnt them to fight R1b. In few 000 of years R1a and I2 created Slavic people, I2 is more present on the west (Serbs – 40%) while R1a was more on the east. R1a adopted the language of higher cultural I2. Very Asian looking R1a in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are probably those, very east R1a, who did not have much or any contacts with Vincha people. It means that it was not ‘reflux’ of Yamnaya R1b people who came to SA as Aryans. It should be explained this strong distinction and animosity between R1a and R1b which lasts since Yamnaya up to today.
New year lies by @Milan Todorovic and their busting:
1. Haplogroup Y-DNAs I and R1a does not exist in PIE as Hittites — with zero steppe lineage — have J2 haplogroup and derive descent from Iran_N/CHG ancestry.
2. Yamnaya (R1b haplogroup) is not PIE as Hittites have J2 haplogroup and 0 steppe ancestry.
3. Mycenaeans were Greek speakers and have been present in Greece at least from the 17th century BC.
4. Also, Vincans — primarily having Anatolian descent — have the following Ydna haplogroups:
G2a2a1, G2a2a1a, G2a2a1a2a, G2a2a1a, G2a2b2a1a, H2
5. Speculation for PIE: According to Reich, only Armenia and Iran qualify for PIE as both primarily descend from Iran_N/CHG ancestry. AMT believers go with Armenia as they don’t believe Harappa to be IE speakers; while OIT believers go with Iran as PIE because Harappa also has Iran_N/CHG ancestry.
A couple of posters on Quora who’d make for interesting podcasts:
1. https://www(dot)quora(dot)com/profile/Dima-Vorobiev – Formerly worked in Soviet intelligence, writes up a lot on Russia and Russian affairs
2. https://www(dot)quora(dot)com/profile/Emmanuel-Francis-Nwaolisa-Ogomegbunam – A Nigerian history student, writes on African history and politics
3. https://www(dot)quora(dot)com/profile/Susanna-Viljanen – A Finnish researcher, writes on many different topics, but special point of interest in on how intelligent people are treated by society. She was among the first female officers in the army and that affected her views.
4. https://www(dot)quora(dot)com/profile/Spencer-Alexander-McDaniel – History student from Indiana, has a ton of interesting takes on past events, he’s also on twitter.
Razib – Did the battle axe males carry the Z93 variant of the R1a haplotype? Some reading on wikipedia suggests they carried the Z283 variant – is this difference relevant in your view?
the difference i think highlights the split btwn indo-iranians and everyone else. there are some stray z93 in parts of europe. perhaps Scythians? i believe the sbruna individual is z93.
z93/z283 split must be defined after the split between western and eastern CW societies
What I struggle with is why there isn’t any r1b in central and south asians. If yamnaya contributes 75% ancestry to corded ware and sintashta comes from eastern corded ware then there should be lots of r1b in central and south asia no?
I’m obv missing something. Maybe it’s something like there is genetic contribution from reflux eastward migration but the male lineage is separate?
You probably have a much better understanding.
https://twitter.com/NirajRai3/status/1345267690940768257?s=20
Good to see our last statement reaching a lot of people. I would like to clarify a few things:
1. Our upcoming work doesn’t contradict much from what we have already published (Narasimhan, Patterson et al. 2019, Shinde et al. 2019).
2. It is also in agreement with ancient Indo-Aryan textual data & South Asian archaeological data.
https://tinyurl.com/yapeq6qp
Happy 2021 everyone!
Based on the events of the past couple of years, it seems clear that what animates Hindu nationalists and their sympathizers is that Islam (and perhaps Muslims too) must be banished from India. Because it’s foreign, and we must not have foreign things in India (this schizophrenic attitude is held by lots of people who either live abroad or depend on goods and remittances from abroad).
So accepting a theory whereby even some portion of Hindus and Hinduism came from outside the pitrabhumi/punyabhumi seems to be unacceptable.
On the evidence of Niraj Rai’s tweet, I see 2021 as being worse than 2020, 2022 being worse than 2021, and so on. Covid or no Covid.
Because it’s foreign, and we must not have foreign things in India
And yet Parsis are seen as a model minority by the right.
You know well where the disdain for Islam stems from and it’s nowhere close to being as simple as “we must not have foreign things in India”, cut your crap lmao.
Eh, Parsis voluntarily migrated to India eons ago, adopting Indian clothing and language while retaining their separate religious rites. Hardly that foreign!
And I’m perfectly aware of why one would be resentful and upset about Muslim rule of India in medieval times. The question is why that generates such anger in present day Hindus towards present day Indian Muslims. Hindu ascendancy in India has never been higher since the days of Muhammad bin Qasim, and the power and influence of Muslims never been lower since those days, but the anger and outrage over the same set of beheadings, forced conversions and temple demolitions that happened 100s of years ago seems to drive more and more people up the wall.
It’s quite similar to how BLM activists in the US seem to get more and more outraged about black peoples’ conditions and civil rights even though there is progressively less and less to get outraged about.
Numinous Saab, if you say that Hindutvavadis are acting based on unwarranted/false historical comparison and insufficient appreciation of their current clout, aren’t you undermining your own earlier comment which said instead that their motivation was the foreignness of Muslims (which is exactly what IsThisReal questioned)?
And it is not clear to me why you think Hindutvavadis consider Parsis less foreign than Muslims.
Hindutvavaadis aren’t exactly models of consistency. If you live in India, you know how much craze exists today for indigenous stuff: food, medicine, etc. (though I think most of it is lip service.) Hence my tongue-in-cheek comment (which was itself not intended to pass a theorom prover’s consistency check!)
Medieval Muslims tried to impose their will in India rather than finding their niche and assimilating into local society. Or at least the ones we keep talking about did (the rulers and warlords). The average Muslim peasant in UP and Bihar was probably not very distinguishable from his Hindu neighbors until the late colonial era.
Parsis weren’t like that, so they raise no ire. Plus everyone knows why they are in India (they were escaping from Muslim domination in their own homeland), so they are allies.
On the other hand, if AIT/AMT is true, then the old Vedic people seem to resemble medieval Muslims more than assimilating Parsis. At least in the minds of our nationalists. Though plausible models exist for some steppe immigrants bringing in the IE language while creating the Vedic religion in situ, such theories haven’t percolated into the Hindu-nat-verse, who seem to be stuck with the theories of Mortimer Wheeler and such.
It’s a means of forging a unified polity in a land where everyone has been deeply divided by caste for thousands of years, said division being reinforced by feudalism etc. Urbanised upper castes may think caste is becoming less and less relevant, those lower down the pecking order would most likely not. Muslims are a group who can be ‘othered’ without any consequence to internal Hindu relations and there are plenty of real and imagined grievances that can be used against them. A key one being that they were ‘invaders’ despite predominantly being local converts. That grievance obviously gets undercut if Hindu society itself was formed by a people who ‘invaded’ the sub-continent.
No one bothers Parsis either in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as they aren’t a threat and don’t get involved in religious activities.
> A key one being that they were ‘invaders’ despite predominantly being local converts.
No, if Muslims admitted that they are local converts, half the problem would be solved.
I once asked my college classmate – Dude, why don’t you guys just admit that you were local converts as opposed to descendants of people from West Asia. (Dude is from Latur with a lastname pretty common amongst both Hindus and Muslims). He didn’t talk to me for a month till I apologized.
No one bothers Parsis either in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as they aren’t a threat and don’t get involved in religious activities.
How many Parsis are there in Pak today though? Found some online data saying that there were 1.6k in 2012. And Pak still hasn’t released the data on religion from the 2017 census.
> Hindu ascendancy in India has never been higher since the days of Muhammad bin Qasim, and the power and influence of Muslims never been lower since those days, but the anger and outrage over the same set of beheadings, forced conversions and temple demolitions that happened 100s of years ago seems to drive more and more people up the wall.
Because our history books lied to us. We were taught that Sher Shah Suri built the Grand Trunk Road. Like how? He barely ruled India for 10 years. We can’t build a Delhi-Mumbai highway in 5 years and he built one from Patna to Peshawar, with all the caravan sarais along the way? (Nobody told us about the Uttar-Path, Dakshin-Path that even Megasthenes(?) mentioned).
Not to mention the countless temples that were razed. My father mentioned to me about Sikandar Butsikhan (I believe he knew that because he studied in a Marathi school that was founded by Lokmanya Tilak), my teachers didn’t tell me. If this is the case in Maharashtra, imagine what would have been in places like Delhi, UP – where the rulers considered themselves as successor of the Nawabs.
Add to that electoral politics – a movie made on Savarkar wasn’t released for ~10 years because of Congress government in Maharashtra/Centre while we were peddled Tipu Sultan propaganda on official on DD National (only TV channel available then). The likes of Digvijay Singh launching books like – 26/11 RSS ki saazish.
Then there are the Pakistanis with their – we ruled over you for 1000 years – dude, your lastname is Gujjar. You didn’t rule shit.
At least in the case of Pakistan, we knew what happened but in the case of Bangladesh – nothing, nothing at all!! It is only in the last 3 years that I have come to understand the history of East Bengal. The Pakistani Islamists are in your face, the Bangladeshi ones just escape scrutiny. I watch some Bangladeshi news like Somoy TV, Jamuna TV, Ekattor TV and the comments section of YouTube would put Pakistanis to shame.
When you look at Indian history in terms of ”Hindu and Muslim”, then why are you surprised that Pakistanis will use the whole 1000 year Islamic rule in India and rub it in. When any common Muslim says ‘we’ when referring to the past, they are talking about their co-religionists, not their ancestors. Ancestor worship is just forbidden in orthodox Islam. It’s something Indian Hindus just cannot wrap their minds around since their identity and religion is rooted to ancestry and caste. Visit any mosque and they talk about “we ruled Spain” or “we ruled India” no matter where in the Muslim world you go, regardless of ethnic makeup. That’s not a reference to some great deeds of one’s own ancestors or tribe, but that of the Muslim nation. And while this pan Islamism does not always translate into lived experience of most Muslims, because most Muslims aren’t ‘good Muslims’, it certainly is always alive in the mosques.
@S Qureishi
I think your retort makes much sense This idea of Umma esp in the context being topdogs has it’s flip sides. While it can gives a sense of community, it acts against nationalism esp territory based nationalism and any other extra-Umma loyalties That is why there is Islamist separtist movement in far away places like thailand or Philippines or even in the Caribbeans . Even in western countries where Muslims have immigrated in large numbers , their loyalty had to be bought with good job prospects or lax police or turning a blind eye to thousand other cultural practices which go against native cultures . When there is a crunch in economic or other factors people will be sick of buying loyalties , which is expected as a matter of course in any nation state
@S Qureishi
> Visit any mosque and they talk about “we ruled Spain” or “we ruled India” no matter where in the Muslim world you go, regardless of ethnic makeup.
So doesn’t this validate the Hindutva concern that Muslims don’t want to be equal citizens but want special rights OR once the Muslim population attains a critical mass they will demand another separate homeland in India.
The arguments Muslims politicians give is also – duplicitous – to say the least. For e.g.: Owaisi says that most Muslims didn’t vote for partition, only the elites did. But most elites stayed put in UP. They didn’t go to Pakistan. So – chit bhi meri, pat bhi meri. And not to mention the Congress and other Muslim political parties in India like SP, RJD etc. There have been request (which have been met) that only Muslim police officers, judges in Muslim areas (Exactly what happened before partition).
It is good that the Hindu populace is letting go of Indian secularism. It is a lose-lose provision for an Indian Hindu. If you live in a Muslim dominant area, nobody is going to listen to you. (e.g.: Mukhtar Ansari – Mau – (this happened close to home)- https://www.brownpundits.com/2021/01/02/open-thread-01-02-2021-brown-pundits/#comment-79758). Not the police, not the judiciary and not the politicians.
If something broke the Indian consensus on secularism, I think it the pan-Islamism that grew in India 1980s onwards.
The Muslim elite Owaisi is talking about certainly left India in masse for Pakistan, but not all of them left though. However I don’t know much about Indian internal politics. I am just telling you about the Muslim identity, which extends to Indian Muslims as well and its something many Hindu Indians don’t understand.
There is literally no reason for Indian Muslims to say their ancestors were ‘local’. The upper class Muslims might actually have significant foreign ancestry, whether that’s from 1000 years ago or 3500 years ago. The lower or middle class Muslims may not have any significant foreign ancestry, but their Hindu ancestors were not exactly top dogs either, just lower caste Hindus who had shit lives even under upper caste Hindu rule. Associating with powerful Muslim ruling dynasties and adopting Muslim history gives them a lot of pride, and India’s casteist milieu, much more power than they would otherwise have.
@VijayVan
All loyalty is bought, especially in a modern nation state that is not based on ethnic or linguistic lines.
@S Qureishi
> I am just telling you about the Muslim identity, which extends to Indian Muslims as well and its something many Hindu Indians don’t understand.
> Associating with powerful Muslim ruling dynasties and adopting Muslim history gives them a lot of pride, and India’s casteist milieu, much more power than they would otherwise have.
So what is the common ground then? Who is a citizen of the Indian state?
There is no common law, special privileges for minorities (minority institutions – both Christian and Muslim), state control of Hindu religious institutions. No wonder the Hindu populace is fed up. Unless there is a massive upheaval like a devastating war or economic meltdown, the India right – Modi et. al. will keep on rising.
The Indian state has been fairly benign till now (barring Kashmir), it will only get more authoritarian here onwards (like CAA, NRC, UCC etc. etc.)
Why does ancestry matter when it comes to being citizen of India? Is India an ethnic state? I don’t see why ancestry would matter in multi ethnic states.
I don’t have an opinion whether there should be a uniform civil code or not in India or whether it should be secular or a Hindu Rasthra. The reality is that Muslims already have a legal/civic code in the form or Shariah, while the Hindus/Dharmics have borrowed it from the British. So Hindus can’t exactly blame Muslims for importing their laws from Persia while they have themselves imported their laws from much further: Britian.
This is something for Indians to resolve between themselves. I don’t think Hindus themselves can agree on one thing as to what they want India to be, ”otherizing” the Muslims just gives a common ground to all Hindus who would not agree with each other otherwise. And I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to dominate 200 million Muslims.
It is a combination of many factors,but the most important one is that people want to feel special by reminiscing the Past.
Now,the past may or may not have been good,but it was certainly not all flowers and rainbows.No times are all flowers and rainbows and every age has its own challenges.
Since proving the AMT can lead to many repercussions in India:
1.It may increase the frictions between North and South India.
2.It will surely increase the tensions between upper and lower castes.
3.It will shut up those crackpots who like to imagine that their ancestors are the origin of all races and religions in the world.
4.It will also pose the question that if Islam and Christianity are foreign,then Vedic Religion is too.
I was a staunch OIT believer earlier but after a time I be became somewhat agnostic.
Then after the Rakhigarhi DNA results,I decided to read more books and then I realized that I was indeed wrong!
I now honor all of my ancestors for what they are be they AASI,Gedrosian Farmers or Steppe Pastoralists.
I also realize that this theory,if proved,can pose some really tough questions to Indians.
But such tests are indispensable for the growth and maturity of all civilizations.
Also,I have full faith that in the end the Upanishadic Doctrine of “All is Brahman” will emerge victorious.
Thanks. 🙂
I do not find this believable. AIT/OIT is an intellectual exercise for a small subset of people. After all, Savarkar formulated “Hindutva” while fully accepting “Aryan Invasion”. We are talking about events of 3000+ years ago. Even in Razib’s view, IEs came to india, got Indianized significantly and then composed RigVeda. At best, AIT provides one (among many) argument to the evangelicals for converting lower castes. I don’t think its a big deal either way politically (except for an active subset on twitter/internet). If science can eventually produce a consistent story across multiple dimensions, that would satisfy most. (and the ones it doesn’t are not influenced/affected by it that much. They will look for other arguments, and/or keep arguing even after science is truly settled.)
\Based on the events of the past couple of years, it seems clear that what animates Hindu nationalists and their sympathizers is that Islam (and perhaps Muslims too) must be banished from India\
This is recency bias. What animates Hindnats is the chorus of pro-TucoMongol rule and rulers by various liberals and academia , who are asymmetrical with respect to treatment of Hindus in newly created Muslim countries i.e. ethnic cleansing and the basic live and let live w.r.t to Mulsims attitude in india. This is esp true in north and northwest India. The enemy of HindNats is not muslims , it is western liberals and their Jalras in India. Jalra is a percussion instrument , hand cymbals used as accompaniment in south Indian music.
So this is an entirely internet- and social media-created angst? Pardon me for being ignorant of it then.
The opinions I write here are based on talking and listening to older Indians of conservative (and often Hindu nationalist) dispositions, including my Dad. Both in the 90s and the 2010s (I spent the ’00s in the States, so missed the discourse in India during that period.)
If it is internet- and social media-created angst , it can’t be converted into electoral payoffs . There are many factors in electoral paoffs , and the distrust of liberals symbolized by Nehruvian vision is an important one
@Numinous
“On the evidence of Niraj Rai’s tweet, I see 2021 as being worse than 2020, 2022 being worse than 2021, and so on. Covid or no Covid.”
Since Niraj Rai has just blocked me on Twitter because I used to counter most of his tweets, I kindly ask you or anyone else to forward his future Aryan-migration-related tweets to BP so that I can read them! Thanx.
Sorry, I don’t have a Twitter account. I was just referring to Rai’s tweet linked by Razib.
@Milan Todorovic
“Their language was not this which is named ‘Indo-European’ (what is ‘Indo’ in Russian steppes?).”
Since languages belonging to this phylum were historically spoken from the European sub-continent to the Indian sub-continent, the phylum itself was christened “Indo-European” based on geolinguistics. Is that so difficult to understand for you?
Ciao Francesco! It is difficult. I was accustomed to ‘Indo-Germanishe’ for almost 100 of years and I still cannot adapt to this unexpected change. (btw, I may have some linguo-questions if you don’t mind and don’t block me but not right now).
Can anyone tell me the thought process behind this tweet:
Of course it would be great if further comments about the correctness or falsity of the idea can be given, but to begin with I don’t even understand the mechanism being proposed.
spandrell is an NRx midwit, as that tweet exemplifies. don’t pay attention to him.
@principia, Thanks, aware of his view on India and his obnoxiousness. But precisely because he is a midwit rather than a dimwit, I would like to understand the argument before (very likely) ignoring it. Perhaps, having seen so many subtle forms of obnoxiousness, I have developed some sort of liking for people who are non-subtly obnoxious 🙂
Hare are my tweets posted to counter Niraj Rai’s most bombastic tweets:
https://twitter.com/frabrigh/with_replies
Judge by yourself why he has from now on prevented me from replying to him on Twitter (without never ever providing at least an idea about what his genetic data, allegedly supporting the Hindutva-inspired “Out-of-India Theory”, would consist of!). Rai typically “attacks from under cover”, just spreading rumours on the Web — an unpleasant political tactic which goes against science. He plays this game only on Twitter and in politicized symposia held in India; his Indian and Western collegues may be unaware of that.
on the facts i am probably pretty close to you, but your tweets do come off as aggressive. niraj’s tweets went viral so he’s probably engaging in a lot of false positive blocking.
on the facts i have a hard time finding big gaps btwn me and niraj&chuabey but the interpretation is always very different
Bravo!
I don’t get it, are they trying to “Prove” that Sanskrit is Native to India using Genetics? The only way for Sanskrit to be Native to India is if its the oldest European Language, which it isn’t. Indo-European languages older than Sanskrit(For ex:Anatolian) existed outside India.
Out of India theorists go out of their way to dabble in genetics because they know that they have no case in linguistics. But you can’t “prove” Sanskrit is native to India using genetics. Millions of Indians speak English without having any English DNA..
If we could easily trace native tongue of people using DNA, we would’ve found out exactly which Y-DNA is Dravidian by now. South India is a hodgepodge of various Y-DNA clusters. Which is the original Dravidian ancestry, is it Haplogroup H or L or J or G? Nobody knows, its all guesswork because there is no trace of ancient Dravidians outside India except for Brahui(Who BTW are genetically not related to Dravidians of India).
A limited list of studies that AIT/AMT campers keep away from – archaeology, hydro-geomorphology, archaeo-astronomy, fluviology, animal genetics, metallurgy and traditional Indian literature.
The burden of proof is on OOI theorists to explain how Sanskrit is the “mother” of all European languages, despite it not being the oldest recorded European Language. I arrived at AMT using Occam’s Razor. I don’t want to explain how Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages and from the looks of it, neither does anyone else lol
If you want to
examinedestroy OOI Theory, you can dive into archaeology&literature and find absolutely ZERO evidence of IVC being Vedic. Vedas was written by pastorals who offered Cattle,Milk&Horses to Gods via Fire(Yagna) and rode around in chariots. We do not find any of that stuff in the 5000+ old IVC. Also, Horse was domesticated by Steppe Pastorals some 6000 Years ago, this explains where the Chariots in the Vedas came from.IVC people were urbanized farmers, why would they revert back to being a nomadic pastoral culture? Why does the Vedas not mention anything about the Indus Metropolis? It would be like Romans “forgetting” Ancient Greece’s history, despite ruling Ancient Greece.
As much as i love IVC, the rational part of my brain suggests that IVC people most likely never recovered their language&culture, much like how the great Sumerians vanished into obscurity.
I would call it mythology about mythology.
RV and Avesta was undoubtedly created by sedentary agricultural / pastoralist highly developed (for its time) peoples. There are no specific references to the nomadic lifestyle in the RV (many people have a vague idea of what it is). Nomadism is not just a lifestyle, but also a level of development. A rich vocabulary of ancient Indo-Aryans and Iranians, containing sophisticated philosophical concepts, describing astronomical phenomena and having authentic terms for urban culture is not compatible with nomadic lifestyle (can you imagine authentic gypsy astronomy?).
Is my speech scientific evidence ?No. But this is a problem of probability. Authentic philosophy and astronomy of nomadic gypsies? Maybe in theory, but unlikely (where are the analogues?)
The Steppe nomads did not have rudiments of philosophy and astronomy even in the Middle Ages (despite the fact that they were undoubtedly more developed than the people of the Bronze Age). I repeat : even in the Middle Ages. Scientific knowledge cannot greatly outpace economic development.
One word, Ex – Vincha!
Gobekli Tepe is apparently all built by hunter gatherers (or at least nomads). This was before pottery or agriculture or animal domestication.
So, who knows what people are capable of. We just have our modernity bias to measure everything against our notion of progress.
Vincans — primarily having Anatolian descent — have the following Ydna haplogroups:
G2a2a1, G2a2a1a, G2a2a1a2a, G2a2a1a, G2a2b2a1a, H2
@Enigma
On the contrary, it’s the AMT/AIT camp that is marvellously imprecise. For over 70 years, they have been repeating the same script ad nauseam. Probe a bit further for details and they draw a blank.
Since you are apparently convinced do enlighten us on the land route these people took into the Northwest – was it via Bolan or by hugging the Baluch coast? No published papers exist with even a smidgeon of archaeological evidence.
Which place was populated at first by these migrants? Saurashtra, Punjab or Kashmir? Point me to any papers – even speculation is fine.
The AIT/AMT camp has a very low grasp of archaeological verification that borders on illiteracy. The whole bell beaker incursion into Europe became mainstream only after 40 years of excavations. In India, the entire archaeological establishment is unanimous – there is no field evidence showing any material or cultural intrusion.
Sepoys yelling about Hindu Nationalism and Hindutva is not a substitute for thoughtful and measured acceptance of criticism.
Dude, i’m willing to reject ATM when a more compelling theory emerges. OOI Theory isn’t saying “ATM IS FAKE” over&over. You have to outline the ancient migration patterns and provide evidence that supports Sanskrit leaving India and into Europe.
Every Linguist&Historian worth his/her salt considers OOI as Crackpot and AMT as the plausible one. Are they all on the payroll of the Ummah?
What if Steppe Pastorals brought Sanskrit to India? Why are you so terrified by that proposition? If it wasn’t for Aryans, Europeans would still be speaking non-aryan languages like basque. Aryans left their mark on both Europe&India, who cares where they came from? All Humans come from Africa and everyone’s cool with that but someone suggesting that Aryans came from Steppe? U N A C C E P T A B L E
Don’t call ATM camp “Sepoys” just because your OOI theory isn’t Convincing anyone, including most linguists&historians around the world.
@Enigma
Disclaimer: I have tried to be as objective and factual as possible in answering the doubts of @Enigma.
1.I don’t want to explain how Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages and from the looks of it, neither does anyone else lol
Sanskrit is not the mother of all IE languages; no IE language is actually. On the other hand, along with Greek, Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested IE language. Now, all the languages derive from PIE, which is unattested. All IE languages developed on their own after separating from each other; that is why the PIE location before moving away matters. If OIT is true, then PIE was spoken in India before separation; otherwise, if AMT is true, then PII (unattested) probably was the earliest IE language spoken in India.
2. If you want to
examinedestroy OOI Theory, you can dive into archaeology&literature and find absolutely ZERO evidence of IVC being Vedic.a. Archaeology in India is against AIT; that is why AMT was formulated.
b. Vedic literature does not mention a foreign homeland.
c. Parts of Iran, Central Asia, and Harappa had a shared culture and spoke a related language according to archaeology.
d. Linguistic proofs against AMT/AIT:
d1. No Dravidian word in Old Rig Veda.
d2. All place/river names in North India have IA toponyms.
3. Vedas was written by pastorals who offered Cattle,Milk&Horses to Gods via Fire(Yagna) and rode around in chariots.We do not find any of that stuff in the 5000+ old IVC.
a. Horse remains have been found in India dating to Harappan times.
b. Dairy, milk, and cattle remains have been found in Harappa.
c. Indian cattle genes starting from ~2200 BC are found across Near East, from Central Asia and Iran to the Caucasus and Mediterranean shores of the southern Levant.
d. Chariots have been found in India before Steppe Pastoralists are hypothesized to be present in India.
4. Also, Horse was domesticated by Steppe Pastorals some 6000 Years ago, this explains where the Chariots in the Vedas came from.
There were no horses in PIE Urheimat. genetics has proven that.
5. IVC people were urbanized farmers, why would they revert back to being a nomadic pastoral culture?
They did not; the post-Harappan period was also urban; India never became pastoral. AMT asserts that Vedas were composed when India was urban; crazy stuff isn’t it. Now, according to OIT, Vedic composition should have started before or around early Harappa.
6. Why does the Vedas not mention anything about the Indus Metropolis? It would be like Romans “forgetting” Ancient Greece’s history, despite ruling Ancient Greece.
a. Vedas are religious texts; any historical information present in them is only incidental. Their purpose is mainly ritualistic. Furthermore, Puranas and Vedas do record some history, e.g., Kings’ list, mythological stories, etc. Some OITers like Talageri, Koenraad Elst have done research on Vedic history if you are interested to know more about the topic.
b. With regards to Greeks, they actually forgot about Mycenaean Greeks, i.e., the earliest attested Greeks; and they remembered those people and that period as a mythical golden age. This is just like India, where Indians too remember the Vedic period as some golden age.
I think caricaturing is counterproductive. Social media arguments tend to pick on ignorant loud voices on the other side to attack the saner arguments. Lets not do that here.
So: No, the argument of serious OIT people is not Sanskrit is the original PIE language, but rather Vedic Sanskrit (which itself is different than classical Sanskrit) is a daughter language of PIE. But they argue that PIE developed in India; or more nuanced version: india and eastern Iran (should be obvious… thats why it is called OIT).
And that genetics cannot unequivocally decide language (and your example of English) is OIT people’s favorite argument too. Lingusitic case, in their opinion, is not conclusive. Textual evidence (Rig Veda) is argued in favor of OIT (cf Talageri).
In fact, as an aside, has anyone seen a good recent counterargument to Talageri’s recent work? (2001 Witzel is too old and ignores recent strong arguments by Talageri).
adopting Indian clothing and language
As if most Indian Muslims still speak in Arabic.
The question is why that generates such anger in present day Hindus towards present day Indian Muslims. Hindu ascendancy in India has never been higher since the days of Muhammad bin Qasim, and the power and influence of Muslims never been lower since those days, but the anger and outrage over the same set of beheadings, forced conversions and temple demolitions that happened 100s of years ago seems to drive more and more people up the wall.
You really think this divide exists merely due to events from the past?
Old comment of mine explaining what drives most right-wingers:
1. Fear of what’ll happen as the muslim pop. grows
2. The current state of non-muslims in PAK and BAN (and the history of islam in the subcontinent) and incidents in India
All those debates about the past mainly tend to crop up once in a while, either during some festival or when someone has a controversial take, or when someone simply starts lying.
History just further helps the right validate their cause, their main focus and talking points are still everyday incidents though.
> History just further helps the right validate their cause, their main focus and talking points are still everyday incidents though.
There were riots in Mau during (~2005), Mau has a sizable Muslim minority. Yadavs(!!) started protesting against Mulayam/Akhilesh – Mulayams inaction is what gave him the name – Mulla Mulayam. (SP MLA had a major part in the riots (as did the BJP leaders))
(Mau/Azamgarh were once the a larger Azamgarh district. Many from the Akhilesh Yadavs family have been elected from Azamgarh.)
Thing is, there was little to no mention of these riots in national papers.
NOTE: Akhilesh is a MUCH better leader than Mulayam. He reigned in the likes of Mukhtar Ansari. The Akhilesh Samajwadi still panders to Muslims but is nowhere near as brazen as Mulayam.
https://twitter.com/JoeAgneya/status/936354401035337728
Bitcoin hit a new high $32923. Even though I have been watching it and hearing intelligent people talk about the cming rise of bitcoin for the last 6 months, I have not acted with alacrity ; trying to catch up. In 3 montsh, it has gone up from abt 10K$ to 33K$
I suspect people from Sintashta looked somewhat like Pamiri Tajiks, i.e a population that contains some individuals who appear European but many who would not.
Pamiri tajiks are a population that South Asians would consider “white” but may not be seen as such by modern Europeans.
It is believable that this type of a group could admix somewhere in modern day Afghanistan with IVC like populations to form the Indo-Aryan groups described in Hindu religious texts.
i’ve looked deeply into the genetics of this. my conclusion is sintashta would be on average ‘swarthy whites’ https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/09/12/the-sintashta-were-swarthy/
some were blonde and blue eyed, but not many. some were pretty dark probably.
i’ve looked at the loci in the pre-sintashta people, and saw the same. selection for the ‘nordic phenotype’ seems to postdate the diversification of the original indo-europeans, though the turanian indo-aryans would no doubt be called white by modern indians
I have a really good pashtun friend (I live in Canada where this is possible for a South Indian and Afghan to become close friends).
He has very light pigmentation and blue-green eyes and he certainly looks different in our friend circle of mostly Indians and Sri Lankans.
We would classify him as ‘white’ compared to us but he also doesn’t look ‘European’. There is clearly something distinct about these populations.
It really isn’t far fetched at all that people who looked like this (and still do in pockets of Central Asia) could have intermixed with IVC populations.
Also Kalash and nuristanis have/had religious practices that are clearly related to vedic Hinduism. They also seem to share similar phenotypes to pamiri Tajiks and some pashtuns. It all just can’t be a coincidence.
My only thing is why there is no r1b in any of these populations. Whatever corded ware intermixing there was, the lineage was different. Maybe fatyanovo males only accepted corded ware females and not the other way around?
Maybe the distinctiveness we are noticing (ie swarthy whites or whatever you want to call it) is related to this.
Good logic Moh, pls read my above comment. Re r1b – good conclusion, reflux cannot be Aryans.
“We would classify him as ‘white’ compared to us but he also doesn’t look ‘European”
Have u checked further? He might be a Jaat.
No but we also do have a Jat friend in our group. He looks most different of all. His name is Chrispreet Singh Hemsworth. Amazing physique and incredible masculinity. He was in some of the Marvel movies if you recall. He played Thor.
He was also in a popular Bhangra video recently – Jatt di Thor
I would say ur freind might make Thor look Dravidan, bruh.
My only thing is why there is no r1b in any of these populations. Whatever corded ware intermixing there was, the lineage was different. Maybe fatyanovo males only accepted corded ware females and not the other way around?
corded ware mostly r1a
Corded ware is an archeological complex. But it appears that there are several different paternal lineages that dominate depending on region (r1b to the west, R1a-z283 in central and east, and r1a-z93 in the far east and south near kazakhstan). There has to be some explanation for that no?
The indian archeological complex for example shows cultural continuity but we know there were significant intermixing happening from 2000bce to 1000bce. Maybe corded ware had similar things – we see corded ware pottery everywhere but maybe these different lineages had different relationships with each other.
Conclusion:
I will no longer tolerate equating my glorious fatyonovo ancestors with the common losers over at team z283 or, shudder, r1b! May Lord Parjanya smite those insolent dasas! Let us drink mead (medhu) and prepare the chariots. These eurozone dasas won’t see us coming. Ride forth!
The indian archeological complex for example shows cultural continuity but we know there were significant intermixing happening from 2000bce to 1000bce. Maybe corded ware had similar things – we see corded ware pottery everywhere but maybe these different lineages had different relationships with each other.
we know bell beaker as a practice arose among non-indo-europeans in iberia and spread to indo-europeans in c europe (western corded ware). so material culture has an imperfect correlation with ethnolinguistic groups.
corded ware seems too extensive to be a single culture imo. so there were substituent groups. the yamna are all r1b, so we are not sampling a parallel r1a group somewhere around there?
the corded ware arose in 2900 in east-central europe. bell beakers arrive in british isles and spain 2500 (or later in spain, but before 2000). is this all enough time for the deep ethnolinguistic differences we see among indo-european groups by 500-1000 BC? perhaps there’s a lot of indo-european structure within the original yamnaya-corded ware zone?
“bell beakers arrive in british isles 2500 >>>> Vincha’s I2 were there for 3000 years before that (remember – B.Gates, Chuck Norris, Davy Crocket…)
“(or later in spain, but before 2000). is this all enough time for the deep ethnolinguistic differences we see among indo-european groups by 500-1000 BC? >>>>> definitely not, even if they had TV and internet.
“perhaps there’s a lot of indo-european structure within the original yamnaya-corded ware zone?>>>> I read this as – Vincha was there for 000 years with their language before Yamnaya arrived.
>>>>>> Btw, I am a bit surprised that none reacted on the assertion that Yamnaya people (future West Europeans, Americans, Australians) were not white and they, as someone mentioned above, ‘picked up’ the ‘whiteness’ in ‘Old Europe’ (i.e. Vincha)
According to genetics, Vincans — primarily having Anatolian descent — have the following Ydna haplogroups:
G2a2a1, G2a2a1a, G2a2a1a2a, G2a2a1a, G2a2b2a1a, H2
These haplogroups have nothing to do with PIE or IE or Slavics.
@Razib: “the corded ware arose in 2900 in east-central europe. bell beakers arrive in british isles and spain 2500 (or later in spain, but before 2000). is this all enough time for the deep ethnolinguistic differences we see among indo-european groups by 500-1000 BC? perhaps there’s a lot of indo-european structure within the original yamnaya-corded ware zone?”
Anatolian broke off earlier, plausibly around 4000BC. So the divergence of Hittite is less of a problem.
Rate of language change isn’t static. At best, we can say that it has upper and lower bounds. Icelandic has been nearly static for the last 1000 years, but modern English speakers will have an easier time decoding a text in French than one in Old English. Nobody knows why the rate of change differs so much. Part is probably tied to the internal structure of each language, part to social and cultural circumstances.
Anyway, 1000-1500 years isn’t beyond the realm of plausibility to produce the kind of differences we see between Sanskrit and Greek. As William Jones would say, anyone intimately familiar with both languages can’t help but see the similarities. In most ways the comparison between French and Romanian is similar – mutually unintelligible, highly diverged, relatively little shared vocabulary (at least before 19th C. Romanian reformers borrowed a ton of French words), but still clearly related. The time depth is virtually the same too.
This is a good ‘engineering’ approach which is rarely used in linguistics. Before jumping into specifics, a common-sense logic should be used. For example, how much time is needed for the development of pra-language and how much time is needed for one language to be fully formed? Specifically, how much time was needed for Sanskrit to be formed before in 2000BC it came to SA? Subsequently, one should answer where the specific language could be formed and by whom? The speed of formation and the richness of the language depend if it originated among nomads or in an urban environment, what were technology, cultural and mythology levels of that society, etc?
Re: Greek and Sanskrit. When and where Greeks and Sanskrit speakers met? Similarly, what was the link btw English and Sanskrit? The original Greek language (did not have this name at that time) came from Egypt/Middle East to Europe and it was NOT so-called Indo-European. They adopted the language of indigenous Balkan people, learnt to speak only using their mouths not throats what is typical for MEasterners and voila – their language became IE. Plato wrote about borrowing words from Brigians (i.e. Phrygians) in his Cratylus (I already presented some examples and will present another one or two).
Re – French and Romanians – Romanian language (and Romanian nation) is an artificial language which was implemented 160 years ago by French Jesuits who were present there since 1700. The original language was Dacian-Serbian and they have the same genetics as Serbs. Romanians officially belonged to the Serbian Orthodox Church until 1924 and all medieval frescos were written in Serbian. All toponyms were Serbian and during ‘romanisation’ many were changed but still there are about 9000 Serbian words in their language. Because some call Romanian – Esperanto on Serbian base. The Jesuits ’East Latin Project’ was introduced to separate Russians from Serbs by creating an artificial nation in between. These geopolitics is still actual. About 160 000 Romanian soldiers died under Stalingrad. Jesuits took thousands of Romanian youths to Paris to teach them this newly invented language which they later taught back in Romania. Vlad Tepes ‘Dracula’ was a Wallachian Serb.
“When any common Muslim says ‘we’ when referring to the past, they are talking about their co-religionists, not their ancestors.”
Nah, plenty of them actually specifically use the word ancestor. I’ve seen the co-religionists types that you’re talking about, but there are tons and tons that very clearly mean “OUR ancestors ruled over YOUR ancestors”, as if they were all genetically different groups of people. It’s quite common, especially on FB and Twitter. These are the ones that have never heard the words Turko-Mongols/Turko-Persians.
Funny thing is we’ve already actually had this conversation on here-
https://www.brownpundits.com/2020/10/24/open-thread-10-24-2020-brown-pundits/
Just posting a comment from ESPNCricinfo’s FB page (comment had almost 140 likes)- https://postimg.cc/rKKsjHxp
“these players” refers to Pak’s cricket team
I can add more screenshots if you still don’t think it’s common.
@IsThisReal Please add more screenshots if you can.
Modern genomics is going to be like GangaJal – sab pavitra kar dega – 🙂
@Brownpundits folks (or anyone who can answer), in a given area – say rural eastern UP – is it possible to traces ancestors going back 4-5 generations using DNA samples of people belonging to same caste in the same district/taluka but from different religions. (Apologies if this is a naive question).
The ‘Nat Community’ (नट समाज) (musicians/singers/dancers in weddings) is borderline Hindu/Muslim, however, there is a fair amount of difference between – say a village of predominantly Yadav caste and the surrounding Muslim populace. So, in a district/taluka, would it be possible to find common ancestors of such a caste.
1) There are those whose ancestors actually ruled over your ancestors,
2) then there are those who think their ancestors ruled over your ancestors, but in reality they are wrong about their ancestors
3) and then there are those who know their ancestors got ruled over by everyone else and chose to forget about them because why would anyone care about their ancestors if their ancestors had no achievements?
All three parties above *also* adore other ancient co-religionists as well who had great achievements in the past because those achievements are considered part of Islamic history.
I think this sums it up nicely. I don’t know what is so complicated here to understand.
Don’t bother. The fake ethnic supremacy and/or Indus larps +/- Buddhist oppression stuff is a deep delusion of the NW islamoapologist hinduphobic gang. You can use facts, logic, concrete examples, etc. It won’t change a thing. Trust me, I have done it over and over again. Just isn’t worth it.
Halal haleem Owaisi.
That is all.
“indian civilization was fundamentally transformed by the aryans. i believe the indo-aryan languages do descend from dialects spoken in the volga region 4,000 years ago”
It would be interesting to see all of the changes in the general ivc zone, the aryan change was merely the last one in the twilight of the pre-aryan period which culminated the said period. There might have been layers of influence from the near east as well, since the earliest layers of south Asia’s neolithic has local wild grains, but certain near eastern imports end up becoming more popular by the bronze age. And I am not just talking about grains when referring to imports.
There is literally no reason for Indian Muslims to say their ancestors were ‘local’. The upper class Muslims might actually have significant foreign ancestry, whether that’s from 1000 years ago or 3500 years ago. The lower or middle class Muslims may not have any significant foreign ancestry, but their Hindu ancestors were not exactly top dogs either, just lower caste Hindus who had shit lives even under upper caste Hindu rule. Associating with powerful Muslim ruling dynasties and adopting Muslim history gives them a lot of pride, and India’s casteist milieu, much more power than they would otherwise have.
muslims are almost always representative of their regions. there isn’t a strong caste bias outside of some exceptions. i’m not speculating, i’ve looked at a lot of the genetics.
the vast majority of upper class muslims do not have foreign ancestry. i’ve looked at that too
“1) There are those whose ancestors actually ruled over your ancestors,
2) then there are those who think their ancestors ruled over your ancestors, but in reality they are wrong about their ancestors
3) and then there are those who know their ancestors got ruled over by everyone else and chose to forget about them because why would anyone care about their ancestors if their ancestors had no achievements?”
This paradigm is also just as cringe as his implication of any significant foreign ancestry in even upper caste muslims, an implication you just once again for the umpteenth time disproved. Lol, even funnier is the “3500” years ago thing. whether it is 5% or 30%, that’s still a minority and it is damn old enough to be considered just as “Indian” as anything else. And the 1000 years old stuff didn’t even leave a dent besides some royal families who outmarried with nobility from the Middle East, a tiny tiny sliver of all S Asians Muslims.
He has a very S Asian cultural view on history for being from Canada. Ancestral pride seems to be a very big deal for him, especially his perception of his ancestors being from an upper class. This is suggested strongly in his third assertion. If my ancestors were cleaning shit or ruling lands, why does it matter in terms of honoring them, as long as they weren’t doing truly morally reprehensible (in an era-neutral sense) things.
African Americans do not actively try to “forget” their slave ancestors. They honor them the same. Unless one’s ancestors did truly heinous known acts, maybe some mild shame could be in order. But shame in a low societal position within a ruthless feudal system? Or pride in coming from the upper echelons, when you had nothing to do with it or it was done on the backs of others in an anti-meritocracy? Regardless, once again, taking too much pride in one’s ancestral achievements just shows inadequate belief in one’s own ability to achieve, especially when one lives in a first world society with so much upward mobility potential. It shows the origins of one’s self esteem rely heavily on factors that they themselves had no direct involvement in. It’s a little bit sad.
//Ancestral pride seems to be a very big deal for him, especially his perception of his ancestors being from an upper class. This is suggested strongly in his third assertion. If my ancestors were cleaning shit or ruling lands, why does it matter in terms of honoring them, as long as they weren’t doing truly morally reprehensible (in an era-neutral sense) things.//
LOL! You can try to spin it whatever way you want, but fact is, there is only one group in the subcontinent that is obsessed about ancestry, and it is not the Muslims.
This is what I was referring to when I said Indian Hindus just don’t understand this paradigm.
If you go back far enough, you may find that we all have ape ancestors. Should we revere them too?
I couldn’t care less if I had upper caste, lower cast, mid caste, untouchable caste ancestors. What I and most other ”Muslims” care about first and foremost is Islamic history, Islamic rulers, Islamic personalities. Infact I may be the odd one out amongst my circle of 100-150 friends and family that actually cares about pre-islamic Indian history.
And this is why people destroy a newly discovered temple or statue in Pakistan that was built by their ancestors. Because they don’t give a shit about it.
And this is why people destroy a newly discovered temple or statue in Pakistan that was built by their ancestors. Because they don’t give a shit about it.
this is a misleading way to state it. the history of temple destruction in a proactive senes has a 5,000 year history, and it indicates when people do give a shit. destruction of the temple marks their values, and their turning back on the demonic past
otoh, sometimes temples are repurposed or material reused. these people don’t care. this happened after the extinction of paganism in the roman world, as temples were turned into churches, or marble was recycled.
if muslims didn’t give a shit they would turn temples into mosques, or reuse temple stone for mosques. my understanding is instead there is performative destruction, which is the opposite
Muslims have turned both temple into mosques, as well as destroyed temples and made mosques over them. This isn’t really sanctioned in the religion per say but to do so has not been considered an outrageous act historically speaking.
I should have clarified, I was referring to something like this:
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/constructions-workers-pakistan-destroy-ancient-unislamic-buddha-statue-found-while-digging-1702000-2020-07-18
Here is a newly excavated Buddha statue, which was destroyed right away, without much thought about its historical value. Several such examples in Pakistan of newly excavated Buddha statues being defaced or destroyed. The point I am making is that these actions are borne out of a culture that most certainly shuns pagan ancestor worship, **unless** the ancestors were Muslims. Having high regard for ancestors is common human practice found in every society, including Muslim ones, but when Muslims generally have to choose between Pagan Ancestors from the past vs Great Muslims of the Past, they will chose the Muslim side almost every time.
5. Speculation for PIE: According to Reich, only Armenia and Iran qualify for PIE as both primarily descend from Iran_N/CHG ancestry. AMT believers go with Armenia as they don’t believe Harappa to be IE speakers; while OIT believers go with Iran as PIE because Harappa also has Iran_N/CHG ancestry.
i wouldn’t take david as writ on these sort of things. david is a friend, and he asks me frankly what i think, because he’s open to differing views and unsure on a lot of things. (the first time he did this i was shocked, cuz it’s “the” david reich, but he’s a pretty humble person in a lot of ways)
I inherently trust Reich the most (and you too to be honest) because I know he doesn’t have a dog in the PIE fight. So when he suggests something, it has slightly more credibility to my ears. That’s why I come to this blog as well – an atheist Bangladeshi-American is likely to be more fair in this situation than a Hindu Indian or a European.
I can see that someone like Eurogenes has a lot of technical knowledge but his bias is obvious. And lets not even get started on the list of OIT clowns that embarrass themselves regularly. I like Niraj Rai though – he’s more like Eurogenes to me – biased but scientific.
THE PALEOLITHIC CONTINUITY PARADIGM
FOR THE ORIGINS OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
An Introduction in progress
Last Updating: December 2016
by Mario Alinei & Francesco Benozzo (‘Ciao Francesco’!)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1.3 The Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP)
The main points of the PCP on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, as well as on language origin and evolution are the following:
1.3.1. Continuity as the basic working hypothesis on the origins of IE languages
If the demonstration of continuity, as James Mallory has had to admit, is “the archaeologists’ easiest pursuit” (Mallory 1989, 81), then it follows:
(1) that also for the question of European origin, the easiest working hypothesis is the continuity model, and no other alternative;
(2) that consequently the burden of proof now lies on the (Chalcolithic or Neolithic) invasionist’s shoulders, and not on the anti-invasionist’s;
(3) that as long as no alternative theory provides irrefutable counter-evidence, the Paleolithic Continuity can be considered as the winning theory.
++++++++++++++
(C) Independent geneticists working on DNA have recently ascertained that that 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans goes back to Paleolithic (e.g. Sykes 2001, 2006).
++++++++++++++++++
(A) there is absolutely no trace of a gigantic warlike invasion, such as to have caused a linguistic substitution on continental scale, as envisaged by the traditional IE theory; and
(B) all Neolithic cultures of Europe either are a direct continuation of Mesolithic ones, or have been created by Mesolithic groups after their Neolithization by intrusive farmers from the Middle East.
So that, again, a language substitution of the imagined scale would be altogether unlikely. There is, instead, every possible evidence for demic and cultural continuity, from Paleolithic to the Metal Ages. Continuity is now universally considered the basic pattern of European prehistory. As already said, even James Mallory, probably the last archaeologist who defends the IE invasion theory, has had to concede: “the archaeologists’ easiest pursuit [is] the demonstration of relative continuity and absence of intrusion” (Mallory 1989, 81).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The totally absurd thesis of the so called ‘late arrival’ of the Slavs in Europe must be replaced by the scenario of Slavic continuity from Paleolithic, and the demographic growth and geographic expansion of the Slavs can be explained, much more realistically, by the extraordinary success, continuity and stability of the Neolithic cultures of South-Eastern Europe (the only ones in Europe that caused the formation of tells) (Alinei 2000a, 2003b).
+++++++++++++++++++
FULL PAPER:
http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/india-successfully-cultures-uk-variant-of-coronavirus-strain-icmr/article33481941.ece/amp/
Coronavirus | India becomes first country to culture U.K. variant strain
I fell off following genetics of AIT/OIT to get all the nuances. But one question keeps bothering me that I’m afraid i won’t be able to understand without following a lot more recent pubs. Any response is much appreciated.
Aside: I use “quotes” to take its meaning based on technical usage and not common usage, similar to how quotes are used to write-out acronyms. (I think this is @ugra’s tendency too where “belly” in quotes is expected to be taken as underbelly of an argument rather than someone’s stomach – ESL speakers problems)
QUESTION:
How did someone decide that ancient Indian is AASI? Because I keep seeing people ask where is “Indian” signal in genetics for OIT? But what is “Indian” Signal if IVC were having very low AASI themselves.
1.Given low sample size of IVC aDNA and high variation of Iran-neo and AASI combinations, there is decent (>50%) probability of “pure IVC Iran-neo” people at IVC. Is this false premise?
2. If AASI admixture to “pure IVC Iran-neo” typically happened in conjunction with Steppe (which I think is reasonable inference since Steppe+AASI proportions are on a cline with jati status), why can’t “pure IVC Iran-neo” be original “Indians”. If so, is it even possible to separate out this component from aDNA of Yamnya and other CWC?
3. If possible to separate out that “pure IVC Iran-neo” from aDNA, did anybody try and not found it to be the case? That is , there is no contribution from “pure IVC Iran-neo” to any aDNA from sinhasta etc.
Hope somebody looked into it and have some answers.
My own position (to avoid side-tracks on politics and trolls):
Once ANI-ASI division ended up being three-way split, it was clear that many more questions need answering before one can conclusively say how IE language entered India. Knowing location of PIE would be a great outcome from all aDNA work. Any other inference related to India seems kind of premature without resolving PIE location given such abundance of aDNA from everywhere else and paucity of it from pre-IVC.
Also, I don’t believe the sample size arguments about having millions of base-pairs in one aDNA. That may be the case, but if I ended up being dug out from Canada in 3000 years, I don’t think it would be informative about majority of Canadians in this time period. Even my current neighbors won’t be much help either. So, aDNA in India has sample size issues as I think “types of ancient Indians” > # of available aDNA skeletons from India. (This should also be reasonable inference given the variety of Y and mtDNA lineages)
1.Given low sample size of IVC aDNA and high variation of Iran-neo and AASI combinations, there is decent (>50%) probability of “pure IVC Iran-neo” people at IVC. Is this false premise?
in genomics every individual is sampling a whole genealogy. so the sample size is not low. you’re getting a good representation of whole populations. there perhaps are some very high iran-neo ppl…but it looks like AASI ancestry is there are low levels everywhere. probably (possibly?) the iran-neo ppl moved further east and absorbed a wohle aasi tribe.
3. If possible to separate out that “pure IVC Iran-neo” from aDNA, did anybody try and not found it to be the case? That is , there is no contribution from “pure IVC Iran-neo” to any aDNA from sinhasta etc.
there are west iran farmers and east iran farmers
the west iran farmers have some ‘anatolian’ ancestry. this group is a posibble donor population to yamna, which is donor majority to sintashta
the east iran farmers have no anatolian ancestry, but do have some siberian/ancient north eurasian
Also, I don’t believe the sample size arguments about having millions of base-pairs in one aDNA. That may be the case, but if I ended up being dug out from Canada in 3000 years, I don’t think it would be informative about majority of Canadians in this time period.
this is not a sample size consideration. this is a representativeness consideration.
if there were a bunch of black africans in IVC and you sampled 250 of them from a single tribe you’d hvae a large sample size. but they may not be representative of the IVC
1 million SNPs from a genome is a huge sample size. but it may not be a representative genealogy
The eastern Iranians who moved to India may have done so before farming started in that region, so I think east Iranian farmers/HG would be more appropriate at least for now.
@DaThang
Where do you think Iran_HG moved from?
I think that they came from somewhere in eastern Iran.
I think that they came from somewhere in eastern Iran, IDK about any further geography specific details.
Thanks Razib ? for taking time to answer.
I agree about sample size vs. Representativeness. There is temporal variation and spatial variation among individuals. One aDNA provides temporal variation in that person’s genetics but can’t capture spatial/regional variation. This isn’t a big deal in homogeneous populations (e.g. one Japanese same as other if sampled at random—Ainu notwithstanding). But in population with known variance, it is misleading to be conclusive with one or two aDNA samples.
Four skeleton samples seem too low to get representativeness of all IVC population in 2000 BCE (just to fix a time point) given their cosmopolitan nature (I.e. trade posts) and geographical extent of civilization. It would have been fine if all had 10-15% AASI (as an example) but known variation was 10-70% AASI (from
Narasimhan et al. even if we bin the time interval a bit generously), which made me question representativeness of currently available aDNA for whole of IVC.
This point always gets lost in the simplification that IVC had no steppe or all IVC had AASI in 2000BCE. That’s why I wanted to know this with more clarity. Thanks for the response.
“Language and languages are much more ancient than traditionally thought. Consequently, also the record of their origins, change and development must be mapped onto a much longer chronology, instead of being compressed into a few millennia, as traditionally done, and as the NDT (MT: Anatolian) also obliges to do. While traditional linguistics, by reifying language, had made change into a sort of biological, organic law of language development, the extraordinary tempo of it would fit the short chronologies of the recent invasion or of the earlier Neolithization, the new, much longer chronologies of language origins and language development impose a reversal of this conception: conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception, being caused not by an alleged ‘biological law of language’, but by major external (ethnic or social) factors, i. e. by language contacts and hybridization, in concomitance with the major ecological, socio-economic and cultural events that have shaped each area of the globe” (Alinei 1996).
++++++++++
Vincha (Iron Gates, Danubian civilisation) is the only place that can satisfy the above assertion.
Alinei established that neither kurgan nor Anatolian can do this.
Vincha is the birthplace of the future Sanskrit.
How can somebody lie after giving reference?
The paper [1] (The Paleolithic Conctinuity Paradigm for the origins of Indo-European Languages) linked by the fraudster @Milan Todorovic has no mention of Vinca, and has got nothing to do with it. Furthermore, according to genetics, Vincans — primarily having Anatolian descent — have the following Ydna haplogroups:
G2a2a1, G2a2a1a, G2a2a1a2a, G2a2a1a, G2a2b2a1a, H2
These haplogroups have nothing to do with PIE or IE or Slavics.
With regards to Alinei [1], a sound rebuttal to the hypothesis has been published by Asya Pereltsvaig in the paper (Paleolithic Continuity Theory: Assumptions and Problems). Chief among them are:
1. The author avoids discussing linguistic data
“””
This underscores a larger problem with Alinei’s proposal: he does not engage with any linguistic evidence brought up to support the Steppe theory or even the Anatolian hypothesis. Instead, Alinei attempts to discredit his competitors by calling their key claims “alleged”, “extraordinary” and the like.
“””
2. Contradicts Uniformitarian Principle, which is:
“””
we can constrain our hypotheses about the structure and history of languages of the past only by reference to what we know of contemporary language structures, linguistic behavior and changes in progress, since the recoverable information about any language or speech community of the past is always far more limited than what we can known about languages whose native speakers we can still observe […] Positing for any time in the past any structure or development inconsistent with what is known from modern work on living languages is unacceptable, and positing for prehistory any type of long-term development that we do not observe in documented history is likewise unacceptable… (Ringe)
“””
3. Assumes that language remained same for multiple millenia.
“””
There is not a single documented example of a natural, living human language that has not changed at all in the last 100 years, let alone in the course of millennia, as Alinei presupposes. Therefore, the central claim of the PCT, that of “antiquity and stability of language and languages”, in the words of Ringe et al. “posit[s] for prehistory [a] type of long-term development that we do not observe in documented history” and is therefore unacceptable. While no one can deny that language change happens, Alinei tries to bury it as an insignificant, marginal phenomena, contrary to observed facts.
“””
4. No explanation for sudden diversification of IE languages:
“””
in addition to being factually erroneous, Alinei’s claim that languages remain stable except when contact and hybridization cause change is also internally inconsistent: if Europe was blanketed by a stable and immutable Proto-Indo-European language for millennia, what could cause its sudden change and diversification into daughter languages and ultimately into some 400 modern languages? What possibly could it be in contact with?
“””
Regarding Niraj Rai’s tweet, let me quote from a recent post of Razib:
In other words, most “agreeable” westerners, even when they see Beard’s disingenuity, are happy with just privately disagreeing with her.
What Niraj Rai tweeted was merely the Hindutva analogue of what woke or (often just woke-signalling) academics do regularly and with impunity. Unlike our good agreeable friend Numinous sir, most agreeable westerners mostly don’t see Sparta or portend an evil 2021 when a craven western academic spins results to help further ensconce wokery.
So it is but natural that Hindutva folks will not only tolerate but even feel entitled to put up a similarly dishonest fight to promote their cause.
Classical liberals may largely disagree with woke academic research but at the end of the day simply let them be, so do you seriously expect people following other ideologies to take all this lying down with the superstition that “truth” is going to liberate them and give them a level playing field?
i just finished a substack essay of 6,000 words basically saying this (specific reference to AIT). it’s gonna be paid so not too many ppl will being seeing it, but that’s OK 🙂
I just realized I used “truth” with quotes kind of similarly to how Ugra used “belly”, but probably wasn’t questioned because Violet had given an explanation which, though not conformed to by my usage, expanded the scope of its acceptability. 🙂
Unlike our good agreeable friend Numinous sir, most agreeable westerners mostly don’t see Sparta or portend an evil 2021 when a craven western academic spins results to help further ensconce wokery.
I don’t understand this sentence but I’m not sure I really care. I despise wokery and in some of my comments try to illustrate how the Hindutva people have adopted the bad practices and principles of the woke. But if you want to adopt the cartoonish vision that Hindutva is the antithesis of wokeness (because one has the label “right” and the other “left”), that’s your choice. (Equally stupid and juvenile is the habit, which I see a lot of people around me in real like exhibit, is assuming that any criticism of a Modi/BJP policy must mean that one is a Rahul Gandhi worshipper. Limited minds!)
As I mentioned in another comment, I stay away from social media, so I don’t even know what peoples’ pet obsessions are there, let alone participate in them. I often get the feeling that people like you don’t bother responding to a specific commenter or comment but rather a category they have observed on social media.
On categories:
1. Judging aggregate or average behavior of Hindutvavadis, Islamists, Wokes, Classical Liberals etc. and even of Hindus, Muslims, men, women etc. *as a group* – generally kosher (whether right or wrong). This I did (rightly or wrongly).
2. Telling someone “You must believe this because you belong to such and such group” – not kosher. Your comment is sort of implying I did that to you, while I didn’t. Not fair. If anything, you came close to it by talking of “people like you”.
3. Bringing in that analogy of people making the “Rahul Gandhi worshipper” assumption – that is nothing like anything I wrote, and is a probabilistic version of #2 above, being just a misplaced analogy that probabilistically triggers unfair subconscious associations. I would say it is actually nastier than #2, because it comes with plausible deniability.
This Open thread is something else. LOL
My 2 cents AIT-OIT stuff importance is exaggerated on Hindu-Muslim relations or Hindutva politics in general in India. Because in the engine of Hindutva (N-India) its mostly accepted that Hindus are native while Muslims are not.
Now that’s out of the way, we can resume our fights.
If only the partition was done right we could’ve settled this AIT/ATT/OIT longtime ago. Partition done right in the sense, the same thing happened with indian Muslims what happened to pakistani hindus( most of then got kicked out and states chose their respective religion as state religion).
AIT doesn’t automatically imply that Hindus are not native either, though many people (colonial era Europeans, Dravidian nationalists, some Muslims?) have interpreted it that way.
Hindu nationalists seem to be desperately seeking something (a polity) akin to what Europeans were seeking after the Thirty Years War. But they either forget or don’t seem to care about all of the progress made in the West since that time, which has pretty much made the Peace of Westphalia moot today. (On the Hindu nationalists’ timelines, we are going to be perpetually 3 centuries behind the West.)
My biggest bugaboo with all of this is that the things these poeple obsess about (temples and mosques, what to eat, what not to eat, what to wear, etc.) is all useless BS. I wish they would spend whatever brain cycles you possess in trying to solve outstanding math and scientific puzzles, building innovative technology (rather than wallowing in the glory of the Ram Setu) and medicine.
\Hindu nationalists seem to be desperately seeking something (a polity) akin to what Europeans were seeking after the Thirty Years War.\
Even in the 20th C , the same dynamic of Thirty Years war has taken place. In early 1920s, Greek and Turks living in Turkey and Greece were exchanged. After WW2, Germans were expelled from czechoslovakia by the liberal regime of masryk . Poles and germans were moved westwards to fit in with new borders. These are better known examples of ethnic homogenization due to international treaties. Lesser known, informal and unrecorded are many more like that of Pakistan doing away with Hindus and Sikhs
Even in US of A, Crown Loyalists were expelled after War of Independence.
History is neurosis
When it had suited the liberals have turned a blind eye to massacres during Cold War .
I think a pure and ancient origin is very much integral to national myth-making, particularly for rising, aspiring nations. The AIT/OIT debate is not just because of Hindu-Muslim thing, this is a core part of building Hindu nationalism. Yes, Savarkar and such accepted outside origin of Aryans, but they still regarded Aryans as a pure and superior culture from a distant land. The Chinese also believe distinct origin of Chinese people, they have a ‘Chinese Eve’ project going on for decades. German nationalists before WW2 tried to build up an ancient origin of German civilization also. Himmler spent lots of state resources in highlighting atone age artefacts found in Germany. Hitler on the other hand had no illusions about ancient Germans, who he regarded as barbarians. Hitler’s racial view was Darwinian, not pure and ancient. He held that nations attain greatness through survival of fittest struggle with other nations, not because they have some ancient heritage.
AIT/OIT debate to Hindus is a little bit like the greatness of civilization-building of Muhammad and companions to Muslims. It is a core part of Islam’s specialness. I think it is a big testament of relative Hindu progress over Muslims that they still have open debates about this very sensitive national myth narratives. However, this openness may be gradually receding. Cultures diffuse from neighbors.
\AIT/OIT debate is not just because of Hindu-Muslim thing,\
Hindu-Muslim thing has nothing do with AIT/OIT.
AIT/OIT is the desire to take one’s racial or ethnic definitions in one’s own hand. The western liberal attitude is ‘we will define what are the races and who are they and it is upto third world like India to solve attendent problems in nice ways’
@Razib Khan
Do we have any remnants of the cattle type that Indo aryans brought with them (whether skeletons or a genetic component of some zebu in colder areas (Himalayas)). Do you have any idea about when they started using the native cows. I am asking because some people think that the notion that cows are sacred was brought to India by them (though taboo surrounding consuming its and other meat is post buddhist) but they didn’t even use the same type of cow. This belief could have developed after the fall of IVC among ASI. I dont know much about the Vedas so what I’m saying could be disproven by something written in it but that thing could also be something that was added from asi/aasi peoples philosophy.
looks like they didn’t bring any cows that lasted. also, i bet they were more focused on sheep and horse in turan. the lit i’ve seen on pastoralism is that these cold climate cattle are not the best for central asia
So u mean to say this debate will go on , till the cows come home 😛
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/fairy-tale-on-field-the-significance-of-mohammed-siraj/cid/1802439
“‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’ was the slogan coined by the South African Council on Sport in its campaign against apartheid in South Africa. It was both a powerful slogan and a simple truth. India doesn’t formally discriminate against Muslims on the same scale as apartheid South Africa did, but the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Register of Citizens and the love jihad laws suggest that institutionalized discrimination is on the near horizon.
When majoritarianism distorts a country’s democratic institutions and forces them to diverge from the basic fairness that sustains the meritocratic structures of sport, the minority sportsman in a national team finds himself representing a nation that treats his co-religionists as second-class citizens. As citizen-spectators, we are then forced to reckon with the tension between glorying in Siraj’s achievements on ‘our’ behalf and reconciling that pride with the increasingly brazen persecution of Muslims in India. To look at the cricket and look away from the rest is one option. To look at the cricket and then hold politics accountable to the same standards of fairness that we expect of sport is the other.”
It was amazing that we reached consensus that ‘some people’ (reflux or Aryans) came from outside to SA and brought their language. I think that for this was crucial goodwill from all sides plus Razib’s concession that they ‘probably’ (95%) brought that language.
It would be astonishing if we make a step further and make agreement that (based on above comments) these people came from Vincha where their language originated. I think that this annex is much easier to be accepted by ‘common sense OIT’ people (considering that their fulmo wing is hopeless) which we can brand as – ‘IT’. I am also ready to make some concessions.
Let’s say, I propose the formulation – “future Swedish/Suisse came to SA from Vincha and brought with them their Vincha language”.
If this formulation is accepted, it would mean that the long running feud and dilemma AMT vs. OIT, came to the final, historical resolution.
After that, instead of ‘AMT/OIT’ we will have simple – ‘IT’.
@Expert
“There are no specific references to the nomadic lifestyle in the RV (many people have a vague idea of what it is).”
No idea? So, for example, what does the term grAma stand for in the RV?
Francesco, could you pls explain if you know the meaning of RG? This is one of our outstanding tasks in our linguistic topics list. Thanks.
For @Milan Todorovic and his moronic Vincan Theory:
RG derives from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ŕ̥kʷs, from *h₁erkʷ- (“to praise”). It is cognate with Old Armenian երգ (erg, “song”), Tocharian A yärk, Tocharian B yarke (“worship, veneration”).
Grāma (ग्राम) derives from PII *grā́mas (“village, town, community”).
@Milan
“Ciao Francesco! It is difficult. I was accustomed to ‘Indo-Germanische’ for almost 100 of years and I still cannot adapt to this unexpected change.”
“Indo-Germanische” is a Germanocentric linguistic term created in the nineteenth century to highlight the alleged racial superiority of the German people within the ambit of the peoples speaking IE languages. It has been rejected by most of German linguists themselves after WWII. “Indo-European”, on the contrary, has no racist overtones, it’s just a linguistic term based on geolinguistics (just like “Afroasiatic”, “Austroasiatic”, etc.).
https://www.opindia.com/2021/01/grooming-love-jihad-bareilly-hindu-girl-molested-threatened-gun-point-convert-to-islam-marry-complaint/
Crazy stuff
the problem with the love jihad stuff is the same problem i have with stories depicting nazi-like behavior of hindus in india. in a nation of 1.3 billion ppl how easy is it to find a crazy story? so the question is the prevalence
True, but anti-love-jihad crusades now have the force of law in our biggest state, so perhaps we should take them more seriously than, say, the occasional cow-related killing (thankfully, no state has passed a law prescribing the death penalty for cow slaughter yet).
I’ve always disliked the term ‘Indo European’.
I also don’t see how Europe should be a continent. It looks like part of Asia to me. The division is clearly artificial – you can tell by the fact that say the Middle East of South Asia aren’t classified as continents.
@Mohan
“I also don’t see how Europe should be a continent. It looks like part of Asia to me.”
Exactly! Indeed, what I have written is that IE languages “were historically spoken from the European sub-continent to the Indian sub-continent.” Europe is a sub-continent of the Eurasian continent, just like the Indian sub-continent is.
this spree of idol breaking in andhra is causing concern. hope sanity prevails.
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readings/aoc_print_2004.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3lE6SFIj40IVhK7ZAbRWclRtaOuQG5gBIlj6ljw8eMW7AqwFJZlAkUQEM
One of Ambedkar’s essays on caste. Short but a good read.
@fulto
“Grāma (ग्राम) derives from PII *grā́mas (“village, town, community”).”
No, it does not. It is a reflex of PIE *h2gr-om-/*h2gr-em- ‘to gather’ > PIIr. *(H)grāma- > Ṛgvedic Sanskrit grāma ‘train, troop’ (compare grāmajit ‘winning trains, conquering troops’, grāmaṇī ‘leader of a troop’, saṃgrāma ‘troop, coming together of two armies, battle’). Iranian cognates: Sogdian gr’m’k ‘riches’, Middle Persian grāmag ‘wealth, property’, Parthian gr’mg ‘riches’. IE cognates: Old Church Slavonic gramada ‘heap, pile’, Russian gromada ‘mass, bulk, pile’, Lithuanian grumulas ‘lump’, Latin gremium ‘armful’.
Vedicist Wilhelm Rau while discussing the term grāma says that its denoting the inhabitants, as in “grama has come/grama has gone” is undoubtedly the oldest and the only one attested in the earliest strata of Vedic literature. The coming/going grāma comprised cattle, ox-wagons, carts and chariots.
Rau’s etymological hypothesis affirms that Skt. grāma originally referred to a temporary nomadic settlement (earlier on, ‘a crowd’, ‘a mass’, ‘a heap’ with the idea of gathering together). For Rau grāma in the RV primarily means ‘a wagon train’, ‘a train of herdsmen’, roaming about with cattle, ox-carts, and chariots in quest of fresh pastures and booty. Subsequently it came to denote a temporary camp for such a train, made of bamboo poles and reed mats that could be quickly assembled and taken apart. Grāma denotes ‘village’ for the first time in late Vedic, that is, after 700 BCE, and continues to be used in that sense today.
The derivative grāmya in the Vedic texts refers to domesticated animals, whereas in the later texts on food regulations the term usually refers to animals living in the village, which are forbidden, and not to farm animals, which are permitted. The differing meanings of grāmya in the Vedic and post-Vedic classifications of animals may also reflect the changing meaning of the term grāma. Although it refers to a settled village in later Sanskrit, during the Vedic period it is likely that the term refers to a roving band of pastoral people who moved about with their animals. In this sense, the grāmya animals would clearly refer to these domesticated animals.
‘Old Church Slavonic’ is one way regularly used to supress the Serbian name (serbophobia is widespread globally including this blog). This language is Serbian. OCS was the name for the Serbian language which was used in medieval church service which was frozen in church books and more archaic in comparison with daily spoken Serbian language. For this purpose is also used the term Slavic even in ancient history although it was created fairly recently. It would be similar if we say that Soviets invaded India 4000 years ago. (Btw, ‘gramada’ is good)
The term ‘Indo-European’ is also political when power of balance changed and Anglo-Frenchs asked for a ‘piece of action’ and the replacement of ‘Indo-Germanishe’. The term IE can be used as a classification bookmark for languages in last 3-4000 years (after Aryan’ arrival) but not before. It cannot be used as THE language which Yamnaya people brought to Europe. THIS language should be given a specific name and follow its evolution. But, this kurgan theory is wrong anyway so, so-called IE language brought by them is also non-existent. Even more meaningless is the term ProtoIE. It would be equivalent if we say that we speak Proto-Martian because some people in 1000 years will live on Mars. It should be used Pra-language or Pra-specific language, where ‘specific language’ directly evolved from this pra-language and later got its specific name.
@Francesco Brighenti
The question you asked was its meaning in (Vedic) Sanskrit, and not its meaning in PIE, which is immaterial. The meaning in Vedic Sanskrit is what matters. Its meaning in PIE only shows how the word came about. In historical linguistics, the meaning of the word that is attested is only used to derive inferences, so on this basis:
Source: Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries: Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary
1) Grāma (ग्राम):—m. an inhabited place, village, hamlet, [Ṛg-veda i, x; Atharva-veda; Vājasaneyi-saṃhitā] etc.
2) the collective inhabitants of a place, community, race, [Ṛg-veda x, 146, 1; Atharva-veda] etc.
3) any number of men associated together, multitude, troop ([especially] of soldiers), [Ṛg-veda i, iii, x; Atharva-veda iv, 7, 5; Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa vi, xii]
So, the meaning village, place, community is valid, and exists in Rig Veda.
Furthermore, I urge you to consult authoritative sources to derive historical inferences, otherwise, there is a chance to be misled. Now, for PII and PIE social condition (according to Mallory):
“””
The reconstructed lexicon provides a very general picture of the residences and architecture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Nevertheless, we can at least make an attempt at translating some of the vocabulary into features that might be recoverable from the archaeological record. To begin with, it seems fairly clear that the Proto-Indo-Europeans occupied substantial houses rather than flimsier shelters. For example, among the fourteen terms for dwelling or settlement reconstructed to the largely mobile hunter-Wshers of the Uralic language family, we Wnd terms such as the *śarma ‘smokehole of a tent’, *ude-me ‘sleeping tent’, and even the IE loanword *ket- ‘room’ yields the Uralic *kota ‘tent, hut, house’. In contrast, Proto-Indo-European possesses sufficient terms for house, room, and upright timber constructions to suggest a more solid dwelling structure.
The reconstructed lexicon also indicates some form of nucleated settle-
ment, i.e. a group of houses, rather than the type of dispersed settlement
that one often encounters on the western periphery of Europe during the
Neolithic.
“””
Therefore, If PIE itself had “group of houses” and showed “substantial settlements”, then obviously Vedic Sanskrit will have a word for denoting village, town. Furthermore, according to Mallory the word for brick exists in PII
“”
among Indo-Europeans who employed bricks in construction, as in Proto-Indo-Iranian *išt(y)a- ‘brick’ (>Av ištiia-, Skt ı́s t akā-),
“”
Moreover, you can also consult these reconstructions if you have any doubts, and would like to further study the topic:
1. Etyno Greek: https://etymologeek(dot)com/psu/-/17779065
2. Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/grā́mas https://en.wiktionary(dot)org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/gr%C4%81%CC%81mas
Don’t call ATM camp “Sepoys” just because your OOI theory isn’t Convincing anyone, including most linguists&historians around the world.
ATM??? too much pr0n…
@Razib
Please confirm if there is or no Steppe component in the R1a sample found in Roopkund lake. In twitter, a lot of OITers are saying that. Even Iosif Lazaridis (https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1345071089320341512) has come out and confirmed that there is no Steppe component in the medieval sample. Is it true? How is this possible? If true, why is there no Steppe ancestry in Roopkund’s R1a sample? What does it mean?
i don’t know if this is true or not. but it wouldn’t surprise me. three points
1) there is a 50% chance that 8 generations down the line you will have no DNA segments in a descendent. e.g., if my r1a1a son marries a chinese woman and his children marry chinese, it is possible in the year 2200 i have a direct paternal descent who carries my y chromosome who has no segments of non-Y DNA from me! ~50% probability in fact!!!
2) the chenchus have 26% r1a but don’t have steppe https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC379225/ i assume it’s a similar dynamic as above. a prestigious individual carrying this Y intermarried into the tribe, but his genes were mostly lost
3) a nonindian case. the r1b haplo is present at 20-80% around lake chad. this is clearly eurasian. but the whole genome is only a few percent west eurasian. it’s due to dilution over thousands of years, but selective prestige of r1b clans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6240361/
@Razib
Your explanation makes sense but doesn’t fit in the overall scheme of a supposedly male mediated Steppes introgression into India at 3500 yBP. If no females came over at all from the Steppes, then all that Steppes component should have been bred out of existence in over 75 generations.
Doctors in the OIT camp are claiming that for such a strong Steppes signature to show in modern Indians, the admixture must have been very recent (less than 40 generations or 1200 years ago)
The alternative is that almost all the Indian males in the Indian subcontinent were wiped out at 3500 ybp leaving only Steppes males procreating with local females. That rules out AMT. A very violent Aryan invasion. But there is no archaeological evidence for this.
@Razib
The Roopkund Man (one among many individuals), whose bones were found in the lake in Uttarakhand at 16470 feet has been dated to between 7th and 10th century CE. He has been securely determined to be of South Asian stock by PCA. He is the earliest Indian man unearthed to have R1a.
The Roopkund Man does not have Steppes aDNA
I am unable to provide you with a technical paper now but OIT Twitter camp is suggesting that this is partly driving Niraj’s claims.
Do you agree that the Steppes people were not present in India before the 10th century AD, if this piece of news turns out to be correct. After all the sample size with the Shinde/Reich paper wrt Rakhigarhi woman is exactly similar. Your thoughts on this unverified piece?
Facts (AFAIK, please correct me if I’m wrong):
1. Ancient DNA from Swat ~12th century BC contains steppe DNA.
2. Most modern-day Indians have some steppe DNA.
#1 indicates that there was steppe DNA in our region latest by 1200 BC, though the spread may have been limited at the time.
If one person who lived between the 7th and 10th centuries AD doesn’t have steppe DNA, that doesn’t make the DNA identified in #1 magically vanish. Your Rakhigarhi analogy is bonkers, as inference made from her DNA (even if it be one sample) is deemed useful because we haven’t found anything older yet.
as inference made from her DNA (even if it be one sample) is deemed useful because we haven’t found anything older yet.
Wrong. If the reason was that we hadn’t found anything older yet the best course would have been to suspend judgement and not take a stance. Instead, as Razib argues above, “in genomics every individual is sampling a whole genealogy. so the sample size is not low. you’re getting a good representation of whole populations.” In other words, “one individual” does not mean “sample size of just one”.
What you are saying isn’t contradicting what I’m saying. What I got from Razib’s quote (which you mention above) is that a single person’s DNA can accurately paint the genetic picture of an entire population.
This is a separate question from what mix of populations existed in a given region at a given time. All I implied in my earlier comment was that if we discover ancient DNA with R1a in the general IVC region that’s older than Madame Rakhigarhi, that will imply that there were both IVC (“Iranian farmer”)-descended populations and steppe-descended populations in the area. This would muddy all the existing theories.
I guess the Roopkund guy’s DNA would also depend on the community to which he belonged to ? We don’t know the community of that individual. Not everyone carry the same components.
Having relinquished ‘O’ from their name, ‘IT’ is shifting the battlefield lines on reserve positions – defend that SS (Suisse/Swedish) have nothing to do with Vedas despite they were written in their language. Poor Talageri, he was abandoned far behind enemy lines with his linguistic. There is a dilemma – will IT organise the saving of private Talageri?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbctv18.com/business/lenovo-to-begin-manufacturing-tablets-in-india-7887221.htm/amp
Lenovo to begin manufacturing tablets in India
@Razib,
It seems like AIT/OIT eco-system is a gift that keeps giving on Twitter. I don’t use Twitter but only suggestion is to acknowledge Indra’s weapon for what it is – a Thunderbolt (to be like European cousins) or at least stick to that diamond-spine (more real and scary that a human spine is weaponized).
What’s with bullsh*t of Indra’s trident? So common place from Shiva to Neptune using one, seriously ?. Put on a good show if you’re going to do it. Don’t make your kids shake their heads at the lack of accuracy. 🙂
I assumed that that picture was an improvised rib cage.
The picture is correct one but Razib called it trident in his tweets. It needs a more awesome name than that. I don’t know what would be an awesome English translation of Vajrayudha!
India seems to have defeated the corona virus in open battle.
Steadily declining cases and mortality. Lax social distancing if the reports are I have heard are correct.
In short herd immunity?
I know many old people who got the virus. One died (fluid in lungs followed by a fatal stroke). All others recovered without much ado.
Such a rate of sickness and death is something Indians are used to as a matter of course. So perhaps everyone’s just taken the disease in their stride. If the coronavirus hadn’t caused so much damage in rich countries, likely it would have been a minor story in India all year, and our focus at the end of the year would be more on dengue fever (which is an annual ritual).
It’s normal for both right and left to post dumb shit and embarrass themselves from time to time, but I can’t believe this has 22k likes (also, his bio says “investigator”)-
https://twitter.com/SaketGokhale/status/1342672569565020160
https://spacenews.com/india-aims-for-reusable-rockets-advanced-propulsion-in-decadal-spaceflight-plan/
India aims for reusable rockets, advanced propulsion in decadal spaceflight plan
https://zeenews.india.com/india/china-provokes-india-again-as-it-deploys-tanks-opposite-indian-posts-at-lac-2334181.html
China at it again
https://www.opindia.com/2021/01/mumbai-malwami-muslim-goons-encroach-hindu-homes-exodus-details/
More dalit oppression. This time from Islam angle.
OH MY FUCKING GOD YOU ARE SO BATSHIT STUPID
see why i appreciate Jaydeepsinh Rathod? he doesn’t say stupid/false things.
normally i wouldn’t respond to midwittery, but i’ll do so once so i don’t have to again
in turn:
Your explanation makes sense but doesn’t fit in the overall scheme of a supposedly male mediated Steppes introgression into India at 3500 yBP. If no females came over at all from the Steppes, then all that Steppes component should have been bred out of existence in over 75 generations.
there are several models
1) steppe guys come into india, kill native males, take their women. 15% of the children who are steppe. guess what, these children are both male or female. i have a daughter. being r1a doesn’t mean you only have sons.
daughters have mtDNA from their mothers (very little steppe mtDNA), but they are 50% steppe. the Y chromosome would be 30% steppe though.
2) a model we see in latin america is a continuous flow for men for several generations. they marry the women who are products of earlier immigrants and natives. this is how argentina is more than 50% indigenous mtDNA, but more than 80% european in ancestry. the original female indigneous ancestry gets diluted.
Do you agree that the Steppes people were not present in India before the 10th century AD, if this piece of news turns out to be correct. After all the sample size with the Shinde/Reich paper wrt Rakhigarhi woman is exactly similar. Your thoughts on this unverified piece?
there is steppe ancestry in the swat river sample going back to 1000 BC with steppe ancestry you fucking moron. it is in the narasimhan paper.
as i always say to you you don’t even know the underlying research.
how am i supposed to engage reasonably with such idiocy?
finally, the steppe admixture in indians is quite old. if it was as recent as 1000 AD it would be clear genetically. my east asian ancestry dates to 500 AD. this is quite clear genetically. i am 15% east asian. my steppe ancestry doesn’t give a valid statistic. that’s because recombination has broke it apart over many generations. it’s definitely older than 500 AD, but we have weak power to detect its age. the ancient DNA in the narasimhan paper though allows some inference with new methods.
Specifically, we estimate the date of admixture into the Late Bronze
Age and Iron Age individuals from the Swat
District of northernmost South Asia to be, on
average, 26 generations before the date that they
lived, corresponding to a 95% confidence interval
of ~1900 to 1500 BCE. This time scale for the
arrival of Steppe ancestry in the region is consistent with our observation of six outlier individuals in Turan who lived between ~2000 and
1500 BCE and carry this ancestry in mixed form
(Fig. 2)
rathod would know this. you don’t even know the material you want to argue about
Here is what I think will happen: the steppe MLBA proportion will be a minority for all of the samples that Niraj Rai’s group will publish. Hence it isn’t a “massive” migration like 30% to 50% Yamnaya EBA estimates from 2015, and so there was no “massive” migration, but we know this already. The goalposts will be shifted so much that OIT will ultimately end up where AIT is in it’s content, with the difference being that the description will be more indirect for the new OIT.
DT, Yamnaya R1b (future ‘westerners’) were NOT Aryans, neither as a reflux nor as a mainstream.
…Btw, yes, we did a couple corner cuts to synergize the AMT/OIT dispute into IT (‘Suisse/Swedish came from Vincha and with 95% probability brought their Vincha language’). Some think that it was a rotten compromise, but I disagree. This is just a former OIT’s chauvinistic fulmo wing which is still at large and whom Razib put in bold.
@Milan Todorovic
There I put it in bold for you:
Truth #1
Vincans — primarily having Anatolian descent — have the following Ydna haplogroups:
G2a2a1, G2a2a1a, G2a2a1a2a, G2a2a1a, G2a2b2a1a, H2
Truth #2
No R1a/I in Hittites(J2) or Mycenaean Greeks(J2).
Truth #3
Serbian is a branch of Slavic that is a branch of Balto-Slavic.
Truth #4
Neither Alexander nor Plato, or any Greek you want to steal spoke Serbian.
Truth #5
Byzantines record the arrival of Serbs. Go and read Wikipedia’s entry on Sclaveni. As soon as they arrived, they were mentioned in Byzantine records, such as:
“”
Procopius gives the most detail about the Sclaveni and Antes.[3] The Sclaveni are also mentioned by Jordanes (fl. 551), Pseudo-Caesarius (560), Menander Protector (mid-6th c.), Strategikon (late 6th c.), etc.
“”
@Razib
Well I wouldn’t know what Rathod knows. But I can see what you are not taking into account – capacity studies for the Sintashta, Andronovo and Steppes habitats.
There are ample archaeological studies that show up the ridiculous constructions of geneticists.
Alan Johnson estimates the maximum population of the Sintashta culture at 10000 or whereabouts. Kohl and Sharapov concur with above findings.
Andronovo is estimated at a max of 12000 individuals.
The entire capacity of BA cultures in the Steppes maxes out at approx 50K individuals based on a analysis of dwelling, faunal remains, pottery usage and crop patterns.
In South Asia, Kenoyer estimates Harappa ALONE to have housed 80k people. Possehl estimated the entire IVC population at 1.5 million inhabitants or so. BB Lal thinks the full population of the Indus and Gangetic plains was closer to 5 million people during the Bronze Age.
These upper constraints should be the starting point. Even if all the 50k people in the Steppes frog marched into the subcontinent without any losses, they would barely be making any impact on two million people. I am being generous here with the upper limit of numbers.
This is the reason why we are not finding Steppes DNA in either BA or medieval Indian samples. The swat valley falls squarely in the mleccha areas as described consistently in the Vedic corpus. Why should we even be considering that as a Aryan catchment area?
Keep ignoring the accumulated archaeological body of knowledge at your own peril.
These upper constraints should be the starting point. Even if all the 50k people in the Steppes frog marched into the subcontinent without any losses, they would barely be making any impact on two million people. I am being generous here with the upper limit of numbers.
i think you are a quantitative moron, as evidenced by your earlier assumption that steppe ancestry would get diluted. am i wrong?
your make reasonable points actually which would have brought up in 2009 (and did). but the empirical evidence is pretty clear of massive population collapses of early agriculturalists along with huge radiation from small census sizes for some groups. in biology this is called reproductive skew and it happens with male mammals. the hazara are a classic illustration of this, as the 40% of their ancestry which is mongolian is from a much smaller source group than the 60% that is iranian.
you are stupid. but i appreciate your comments since it’s good to know what stupid people think. i can’t even reply to you intelligibly since you lack the basic cognitive tools to integrate what i’m saying (“what is this reproductive skew? don’t populations just mix?”)
This is the reason why we are not finding Steppes DNA in either BA or medieval Indian samples. The swat valley falls squarely in the mleccha areas as described consistently in the Vedic corpus. Why should we even be considering that as a Aryan catchment area?
also, you fucking moron or liar, there’s plenty of steppe ancestry in lots of the roopkund samples: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11357-9
any idiot who looks at the india cline will see that. are you stupid, or are you purposely lying? i’m close to banning you if you are lying, but judging by your earlier comments are you actually stupid enough to not even read the paper you are talking about.
My comment was in the context of R1a individuals from the 7th-10th centuries. Roopkund_A group is from the 7th to 10th centuries. Roopkund_B is from the 17th century onwards and belong to the Mediterranean group. Roopkund_C is an outlier from East Asia. As far as I can read, the steppes-heavy samples aren’t R1a.
Doctors in the OIT camp are claiming that for such a strong Steppes signature to show in modern Indians, the admixture must have been very recent (less than 40 generations or 1200 years ago)
The alternative is that almost all the Indian males in the Indian subcontinent were wiped out at 3500 ybp leaving only Steppes males procreating with local females. That rules out AMT. A very violent Aryan invasion. But there is no archaeological evidence for this.
these ppl are either liars or morons
1) there is lots of ‘indigenous’ Y lineages. H for example. R1a is ~25% or so.
2) i have run the statistic myself. they are lying. or they don’t know how to run the statistic. north indian brahmins would show admixture withn 1200 years in their LD decay pattern. they don’t. it’s much older than 1,000 years. (depending on various parameters really it seems 2000 years is kind of the edge of statistical power with classical methods, though newer ones can do interesting thigns)
I think I’m one of the few Y DNA H on this website. Dat jungle lineage. Lot of people announce R1a here.
the problem with the love jihad stuff is the same problem i have with stories depicting nazi-like behavior of hindus in india. in a nation of 1.3 billion ppl how easy is it to find a crazy story? so the question is the prevalence
Hard to determine the prevalence of love jihad, but the asymmetry, given the fact that M’s are a minority, is still an alarming factor imo (obv. not saying that Hindus should go out and do the same, forced conversions shouldn’t be happening at all)
https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog/status/1345876618372329476?s=21
“ Dems open congress with a prayer that ends “amen and awoman.” Amen is a Latin word that means “truly” or “so be it.” Awoman is a nonsense word that means nothing. Dems find a way to make everything stupid and nonsensical. Utter clowns, all of them.“
Minor Correction to that tweet: it’s not Latin word but came to Latin via Greek from Hebrew. It might even be older than Hebrew, possibly from old Egyptian.
Awomen to that
Question to Razib,
In Cosmos: Possible worlds (S3, E13), natives of the Indus Valley (MohenjoDaro) were depicted as sub-Saharan Africans, how close is this depiction to “reality”?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/cosmos-possible-worlds
https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=209070487092001&_rdr
Bullshit
Brown baloch
Being a person from tech/science areas the series was fantastic in those two disciplies imho. However, the last episode ruined it for most of the S.Asians. I was surprised that the director/editors would allow such a glaring hole.
@fulto
(Sorry for the long post.)
“So, the meaning [of the word grAma as] ‘village, place, community’ is valid, and exists in Rig Veda.”
As regards the original Sanskrit meaning of grAma, that can only be found in the Rigveda, in which the term occurs 13 times. Monier-Williams’ dictionary entry “grAma” limits the meanings ‘an inhabited place, village, hamlet’ to occurrences of this term in Books I and X.
Admitted that Monier-Williams already said the last word on the meaning of grAma in the RV back in 1899 (which I personally don’t believe, but maybe you do…), today I’ve done an exercise and checked the verses from Books I and X (as also some from II, III and V), both in the original and in Griffith’s (1896) and Jamison-Brereton’s (2014) English translations. Here are translations of the word grAma given by those authors:
RV I.44.10: Griffith ‘battle-strife’; Jamison-Brereton ‘settlements’ (which could have been mobile ones);
RV I.114.1: Griffith ‘village’; Jamison-Brereton ‘settlement’, which can be substituted by ‘horde’ as the term grAma is here compounded with puSTa ‘wealth, property (esp. of cattle)’;
RV I.100.10: Griffith ‘hosts’; Jamison-Brereton ‘horde’;
RV II.12.7: Griffith: “[Indra,] under whose supreme control are horses, all chariots, and the villages, and cattle;” Jamison-Brereton: “[Indra,] under whose direction are the horses, under whose the cows, under whose the nomadic bands, and under whose all the chariots.” Which of the two translations looks more self-consistent?
RV III.33.11, gavyan grAmaH: Griffith ‘warrior band’; Jamison-Brereton ‘horde seeking cattle’ (cp. Macdonell & Keith’s translation: ‘horde desiring cows’);
RV V.54.8: Griffith ‘troop’; Jamison-Brereton ‘roving band’.
Also in most of the hymns from Book X in which grAma occurs (27.19; 62.11; 107.5; 127.5) the term is translated as ‘horde’ / ‘roving band’ by Jamison-Brereton. Together with ‘troop, train (of herdsmen)’, this is nowadays the default translation of the Rigvedic term grAma, especially after W. Rau wrote his influential article “The Earliest Literary Evidence for Permanent Vedic Settlement” (in _Inside the Texts and Beyond the Texts_, vol. 2, Cambridge 1997), in which he maintains that the interpretation of Rgvedic grAma as ‘a train of herdsmen’ or ‘a temporary camp of such a train’ is the only one attested in early Vedic literature. And this meaning is still known to Patanjali (c. 150 BCE), see Mahabhasya I.59.202: “There is [the case where grAma] denotes the people (i.e. the inhabitants), as in [the sentence]: ‘the grAma has gone; the grAma has come’.” What could this “coming/going grAma” be if not a mobile people unit?
@Francesco Brighenti
What you say could be another meaning of grama. There is enough ambiguity as you pointed out.
Visit any mosque and they talk about “we ruled Spain” or “we ruled India” no matter where in the Muslim world you go, regardless of ethnic makeup. That’s not a reference to some great deeds of one’s own ancestors or tribe, but that of the Muslim nation.
@Qureishi. this observation is factually correct. subcontinental muslims seem to live in the delusions of grandeurs of *other* muslims. but what benefits has it brought them?
ask any subcontinental muslim who has worked in the gulf, and they will tell you how arabs treat them as doormat. arabs don’t even seem to make any effort to differentiate between a subcontinental muslim and a hindu, a difference pak muslims are so keen to emphasize. even turks and iranians look down upon them. the love for ummah is primarily a one-sided love affair.
may be it is not such a bad idea to put religion on the back burner for a while and bask in the glories of the ancestors for a while.
turks and iranians are more classically racist than arabs. i think arabs just have superiority cuz islam is ‘their religion’ as well as some racial stuff.
ISIS famously made indian recruits be servants. lol.
Many of the most devout Haleems have stockholm syndrome. Granted, similar stuff can be said about dalits.
Just as hardcore hindutva ppl tend to be less casteist. I do think hardcore islamists tend to be less racist.
The average people are normie. They do a bit of religious identity driven chest thumping here and there when it suits them. But mostly follow the path of least resistance and do whatever maximizes social benefit.
The issue is when the social benefit is maximized by espousing dysfunctional viewpoints.
Just as hardcore hindutva ppl tend to be less casteist. I do think hardcore islamists tend to be less racist.
yes is my experience
As someone who lived sometime in Saudi Arabia (90’s) and extensively traveled in UAE (Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi) recently, I think I can speak to how ‘Arabs’ treat South Asian Muslims: they generally treat them better than other South Asians would in their own respective countries.
Arab treatment solely depends on the level of education and wealth, most South Asian laborers are dirt poor and get the same treatment as any rich employer would treat poorer servants in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, where there is a lack of any labor rights.
However not all South Asians are treated the same. There is a hierarchy, the educated South Asians (engineer, doctor primarily) and the wealthy (mostly businessmen, investors) are respected, much more than other Arabs from not so rich Arab countries. There wouldn’t be hundreds of thousands of educated Pakistanis or Indians living there if they were treated like slaves.
The uneducated class gets most of the bad treatment, but even here there is a hierarchy. You will find that uneducated Pakistanis will be generally treated better than uneducated Bangladeshis and will have the better jobs (transport, security etc). And uneducated Bangladeshis will be treated much better than uneducated Indians. If you don’t believe me, just drive around Abu Dhabi during the day when it’s 45 degrees, and see who is working out manicuring the grass alongside the roads. Those are mostly (non-Muslim) Indians. Even black Sudani or Somali Muslims are considered above the uneducated Hindu worker in GCC.
Regardless, the Arabs just got new found wealth, but keeping aside the Oil Sheikhs and their thousands of spawns roaming around, most Arabs, even in the GCC countries are quite down to earth and quite humble. They don’t have some 5000 year old civilization to brag about like the Iranians, and they can’t brag about Islam as they can’t claim it was an ethnic project.
// the love for ummah is primarily a one-sided love affair.//
The concept of ”Ummah” exists on a deeper level, and surfaces from time to time when needed. However your view maybe warped because of Pakistani zealotry in promoting the Ummat. Pakistan does that as a matter of statecraft, and in my opinion it works for us but will look a bit silly to others in the Muslim world. I don’t have experience traveling in Iran so can’t say what they think, but a significant amount (dare I say majority) of Turks are also on this Ummah train, so are the Arabs, perhaps not to Pakistani levels of enthusiasm but it exists nonetheless.
Which is why it’s funny to see Indians thinking they will ever have better relationship with the Arab world or the Turks at the cost of Pakistan. On a diplomatic level, maybe. But on a deeper level? Not until India’s optics with regards to Muslims improves.
“Not until India’s optics with regards to Muslims improves.” More like Hindu idolators are all converted to Islam! Finishing the unfinished millennia old conquest!
Hindus- The only solution to this slow coercive conquest is for them (Hindus) to become evangelical and smash the caste discrimination and re-start the civilization.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/if-the-farmers-agitation-is-mishandled-it-could-provideopportunity-for-some-anti-india-elements-including-the-isi-gbs-sidhu-1755798-2021-01-04
Reasonable points. Don’t totally agree
@ Francesco
RG, please!
Rationale: ‘RG’ as an old and minimum consonant group indicates that its origin was not far from pra-language. From this minimum consonant group, few dozens of words are organically created. If some language has only one word with this (or other) consonant group, it means that this word was arbitrary or borrowed from other language (I illustrated this before with GL/KL consonant group in Latin and Serbian). I think that the language which has the most (or many) of words with RG is the best candidate to be the Sanskrit’s mother.
Here, let me help @Milan Todorovic so that the *waste of humanity* can *stop* having lying wet dreams:
Rg is derived from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ŕ̥kʷs, from *h₁erkʷ- (“to praise”). Cognate with Old Armenian երգ (erg, “song”), Tocharian A yärk, Tocharian B yarke (“worship, veneration”).
By the criterion of this brainless fellow, we can conclude that Slavic/Serbian or whatever is not the mother — not that it makes sense in any way. The fact is that all IE languages are descended from PIE, and evolved in their own direction after separation.
This is my other question that I tried hard to parse from Eurogenes about what is “AASI”. Would anybody help me understand what is this person saying in plain terms? (Not to take everything in eurogenes comments as true but Matt is consistently trying to be technically accurate, so wondering about this response to Matt’s question about “split” of Iran_N and IVC_Iran_N).
**** comment***
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2020/12/fully-automated-graph-exploration.html?showComment=1609632323016#c1004432607315582293
Blogger Seinundzeit said…
Matt,
“I get the impression that, if there were a hard split between Iran_N like ancestry of present day Iranians/Middle East and South Asia…”
In conceptual terms, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best descriptive approach. I know you’re not trying to convey the impression of “tree-like branching” in a completely literal sense… but I think you’re still partaking of it.
In this case, I really don’t believe in actual hard splits; it seems that CHG, Iran_N, and IND_periphery belong to a family of peoples among whom the relationships appear to be structured in relatively clinal patterns. There’s a shared “core” (for lack of a better term) of genetic ancestry across all three groups (and all three “groups” are certainly abstractions from what would’ve been more or less continuous genetic variation across space), but the affinities that differentiate them are clearly a function of geography.
Brass tacks though, IND_periphery sans “AASI” is much less “basal” than Iran_N, and about as “basal” as CHG. But the non-“basal” genetic affinities are quite unlike CHG, but very similar to Iran_N, with the only distinction from Iran_N being a stronger shift towards MA1/AG3.
^ That’s really it; it didn’t split off from Iran_N… it just has a very different ratio of “components” (there are much better/more technically accurate ways to say what I’m trying to convey, but I’m a tad bit lazy today), due to being from the very eastern edge of the range for this family of ancient peoples, and thus closer to the geographical source for the non-basal ancestry seen in the ancient Iranian plateau (southern Central Asia).
^ For what it’s worth though, this is all assuming there’s a true model out there of Indus_perhiphery sans AASI. It might not be so simple.
For example, the Dzudzuana pre-print has Iran_N as being partially Onge-related.
To me, this is an indication that “AASI” isn’t as simple a concept as we’ve tended to think. There’s a lot going on here, and we simply don’t have the aDNA to even begin a solid appraisal of the relationships.
Speaking of G25 though, a while back I constructed a West Eurasian ghost based entirely on Indus_perhiphery… and it was quite distinct from Iran_N, and produced very tight fits for South Asians.
^ I’d be interested in comparing our ghosts, to see how they differ. We could post the scaled coordinates?
PS: There are West Eurasian mtDNA lineages in South Asia not found in Iran, nor in the aDNA record. These are all very, very deeply rooted (based on the estimates we have). And as Tigran noted, yDNA haplogroup H obviously has West Eurasian affinities, and yet it’s wholly restricted to South Asia and surrounds (with the exception of the lineage seen in Neolithic Europe). So the uniparental data does gel with the notion of IVC-related West Eurasian distinctiveness (in relation to Iran_N).
January 2, 2021 at 4:05 PM
I don’t think that yDNA H is related to Iran_N. The presence of H is much older than that, I think it came from a late Levantine, maybe Levantine Aurignacian or the Antelian culture.
It is true that OIT never had any scientific credibility. Their positions were against common sense. But still I had some sympathy towards them considering that they pretended to be the strongest India’s patriots and protectors of its culture. I also had correspondence with their leading proponents which are good guys and sometimes we as a matter of courtesy, sent each other texts which support the opposite standing or comments before their publishing. But, their position could not last forever and the most of them caught the last train before sliding to lunacy. They threw out OUT and dispersed among general IT population. However, some could not make it. They remained on the roof of the former OIT embassy while the last overcrowded chopper was leaving. I feel a slight guilt because I modestly contributed to their dismantling. They were my most loyal readership. But I always remember of the ancient proverb – Amicus Fulmo, sed magis amica veritas (i.e. Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend). The progress is unstoppable. An old Suisse/Swedish sentence says – ‘Dogs are barking but caravans are passing’. OIT was already sliding into decadency, they probably got more and more frustrated especially seeing Razib’s calculation where: OUT = (-1) x (14%/220 million). They totally lost a plot wrongly assigning me, and infringing Mr Iyer’s copyright, his anthological BP contribution – ‘Ancient Serbs were Chinese and they had the same moustaches’ which left even the Top Boss (and #MA too) laughing. The worst, they lost all their ethical ground and decency. We should stop for a second and think about those hopeless dumbas fallen on Wiki fire lines.
Let we forget them! Awomen!
@fulto, @Milan Todorovic
“Rg is derived from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ŕ̥kʷs, from *h₁erkʷ- (‘to praise’). Cognate with Old Armenian erg ‘song’), Tocharian A yärk, Tocharian B yarke (‘worship, veneration’).”
Here is a better etymological explanation:
The meaning of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h1erkw- > Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hark- was not only ‘to praise/sing’ but also ‘to shine’ (compare Old Irish erc- ‘sky’):
“The word-form ṛg-veda is not the standard usage adopted in this text because only its components are attested: ṛ́c- ‘hymn; verse’, and véda- ‘knowledge’. Ṛ́c- is a feminine root-noun from the verb arc- ‘to shine, glitter; to glorify in song’ (compare masculine noun from the same root – arká- ‘a ray; brilliance; sun; laudatory song’). These etymological connections suggest that the notion of a hymn was associated with the idea of light and brilliance; in other words, IT WAS A CONCEPT CONNECTED WITH VISION” (T.E. Elizarenkova, Language and Style of the Vedic Ṛṣis, Albany, NY 1995, p. 14; emphasis mine).
However, the meaning ‘to shine, be brilliant’ (cf. arcā́- [f.] `brightness, radiance’, arcí- [m.] ‘ray, flame’, arcín- [adj.] ‘shining’, arcís- [n.] ‘ray’, all attested in the RV) is rare in Vedic, while the noun ṛ́c- is quite well-documented in the RV, in both its singular and plural forms. The noun ṛ́c- is derived from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hrk-/Hrč- (< Proto-Indo-European *h1rkw- ‘song of praise’, a derivative of the verb *h1erkw-), whose only possible reflexes in Old Iranian are some personal names in *ṛk- attested in external (non-Avestan) sources or “side-traditions”.
Thanks for your effort, Francesco. I saw some of these explanations, but I am not satisfied with them. I wrote before that VEDA does not mean directly the KNOWLEDGE than SIGHT, VISION (vid – in Serbian), but in ancient time the ‘knowledge’ was that you have seen with your eyes. Even, now we use expression – ‘seeing is believing’. That is exactly what you emphasized, i.e. VEDA=VISION=KNOWLEDGE. Btw, you may know for Serbian ancient deity Svetovid or Vid from which Italian name Vito was formed. Vid’s Day is one of key Serbian holydays since the beginning of time which Christianity also adopted. Very famous Svetovid’s temple was located on the Rugen island (Baltic Sea, Germany/Denmark) where ancient Serbs lived, and which was destroyed by Germanic tribes.
Those who just say that Veda=Knowledge should explain this equation. I believe Talageri who estimates that Rg Veda was composed 3500BC. It could be a bit earlier or later. How probably is that RG meant ‘verse’ or ‘hymn’ at the time when the language was still in a formation phase, not far from pra-language. What ‘Old Irish’ has to do with this at that time? Also, ‘Indo-Iranian’ – Sanskrit came to SA 2000BC probably long time after the Rg Veda was composed. RG VEDA cannot be discussed out of the context and disconnected from people who brought it to SA and their language. There is a consensus that they were so-called ‘Slavic’. Your emphasis confirms this. So, the meaning should be searched in this direction and at that time. The place of creation is also important because it would be unbelievable that moving nomads created such epic.
In sum, for me is unbelievable that some people 3500BC decided to make the first in the world epic, to ‘praise the knowledge’ and to do this in ‘verses’. I think that it must be something much more basic and primal. I will publish soon, exclusively for BP readers, my version. Btw, I found some connection with the name of the city of BeRGamo (you probably know for many Serbian toponyms in Italy, including Milan, Pescara, Novara, Bologna, Roma-Ruma, Verona and couple dozens of villages around Verona). Stay cool.
An interesting observation of English renderings and transcriptionsof Indian words
https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/spell-it-out-should-english-transcription-of-indian-words-be-reformed/
Funny thing is 19th C Englih renderings and transcritions of Indian personal names and town names were retained for a long time, many Indian states are changing that to what they consider to be real names- sometimes this “realisations” become too puritanical
For example a town with tamil name, Thirichirappalli was called Trichy and even now most Indians use Trichy , even though in official government records it is Thirichirappalli . The port Thuththukkudi was called Tuticorin and the latter is preferred unthinkingly by most people unless you are a local with strong attachment to original name
Good article this mildly bothers me with the pronunciation of “yoga”, “asana”, “karma” etc.
Also mildly annoying when English speaking Indians start to pronounce Indian and Sanskrit words the way they are written in English despite knowing the traditional pronunciation.
There are bigger problems in this world than pronunciation of words.
@fulto
“What you say could be another meaning of grāma. There is enough ambiguity as you pointed out.”
Ah, so you get away like this, with only citing in your alleged support the entry “grāma” in Monier-Williams’ 1899 dictionary? And this, nota bene, after I posted two long and detailed messages dealing with this Old Indo-Aryan etymology within this Open Thread – respectively, on Jan 3 (8:11 PM) and Jan 4 (11:08 PM)?
I think the allegation about “having lying wet dreams” you have (rightly) made to Milan Todorovic (Jan 5, 3:24 AM) can be equally addressed to you. Your own “lying wet dream” consists in believing uncritically that the Sanskrit term always had the meaning ‘village’ from the hoary antiquity. You seem to have a dogma that Rigvedic Aryans could never ever have led a nomadic lifestyle, and that they always lived in permanent (agricultural?) villages since the beginning of their history in NW South Asia. My two posts cited above show that modern Vedic scholars opine the opposite is actually true – that is, that Rigvedic Aryans, even after their immigration into the Greater Panjab region, were still nomadic.
From T.Y. Elizarenkova, Words and Things in the Ṛgveda, Pune 1995, p. 6:
“But even when the Vedic Aryans had to stop for a longer time (to fill their food supplies by means of agriculture), this stop was temporary and lasted no longer than half a year, from sowing to cutting crop (yava-), and therefore the very form of settled life implied its temporary character, which also limited the increase of the material worked. Nevertheless, it was just during these short days that a social group of people, forming a kind of community the members of which were relatives united by a common cause and common fate, acquired its special and economic projection in the form of settlement – grāma – ‘a village’, that is strictly speaking ‘aggregate of people living in a village’, and earlier ‘a crowd’, ‘mass’, ‘heap’ [ PIIr. *(H)grāma- ‘troop, horde, train (of herdsmen)’] with the idea of gathering together.”
To Francesco Brighenti.
So? There are no direct references to the nomadic life in RV? There are only attempts at a subjective interpretation of the word “gramas”. Let’s leave this word alone. Elizarenkova says that Vedic Aryans were sedentary between seasonal migrations. There are references to a sedentary lifestyle in RV, but are there references to seasonal migrations, which are an important seasonal event in the life of nomads?
Pretty disappointing Francesco. Can be more specific in your qualification? In addition, while ignoring at the moment less relevant things, you may tell us for e.g. who Aryans were and where Sanskrit came from?
@Francesco Brighenti
Don’t interpret what you think is true and assign to me what I never said. Firstly, since you categorically ask, I believe Aryans were *rural* people at the beginning. You know, rural also can have *pastoral* characteristics. In India, now also rural areas are pastoral; yet, they also know agriculture — a feature of settled life. Even — your favorite source — Rau believes that Aryans knew agriculture since the beginning, which you *conveniently forgot* to mention. You know, they must have settlements for some period (whether permanent or temporary) for agriculture.
Secondly, you wanted to ask Grama’s meaning in Rig Veda, and I provided a source for my assertion. Why should I take your source to be true while the other source to be false just because you *believe it is so*?
Thirdly, I am neither pro AIT/AMT nor OIT. Also, here is a fact for you: India remained urban even in the post-Harappan phase; this is what the archaeological finding is. Pray tell me how does AIT/AMT work with your assertion? While with mine it actually makes some sense.
Fourthly, I cited PIE social conditions from Mallory, to say it is *impossible* for them to be totally mobile, which you conveniently *forgot*.
Fifthly, since this is a competition between authorities — according to you —
Kuzmina (Otkuda prishli indoarii? [Whence the Indo-Aryans Came From?] 1994) also believes grama stands for village. Kuzmina must also be having *wet dreams* that you accuse me of.
Sixthly, I have always been *polite with you* because you don’t *lie*, while @Milan Todorovic does. Go through what he has posted, and tell me if it is not wrong.
Seventhly, I also gave you proof from Mallory that the word for brick existed in PII that you *conveniently ignored* so that you can satisfy your urge to berate me for no reason.
Eighthly, from Bryant’s “Quest for Origins of Vedic culture” in which western scholars were also having *wet dreams like me:
“”
Some Western scholars have also been struck by discrepancies between the Vedic landscape and a nomadic one. Basham (1989) comments: “It is surprising that the Aryans, who at this time had never organized a settled kingdom or lived in a city, should have conceived of a god like Varuna, the heavenly emperor in his glorious palace, with innumerable messengers flying through the cosmos at his bidding” (12). As far as Singh is concerned, if one is looking for nomads in the Rgveda, one will find nomads.
“”
Ninthly, Witzel who also was having wet dreams states that the possibility of Aryans of knowing urban centers cannot simply be dismissed.
Tenthly, B.B. Lal(1997) who was also having wet dreams“Just as there were cities, towns and villages in the Harappan ensemble (as thereare even today in any society) there were both rural and urban components in the Vedictimes. Where then is the ‘glaring disparity’ between the cultural levels of the Harappanand Vedic societies?”
Eleventhly, since this is competition for words (Bryant):
“”
Of the seventy or so words Singh has extracted connected with cities and dwellingplaces, brhantam mdnam sahasradvdram grham Very large house with a thousand doors’and sahasrasthiina grham ‘house with a thousand pillars’ are of particular interest, sincethey suggest to him acquaintance with monumental structures.57 Likewise, from anotherlong list of words associated with navigation, dasaritra ‘ship with ten oars’; sataritra’ship with hundred oars’; and Vasistha in a ship in midocean make his best case. Singhhas compiled numerous words connected with government, thereby arguing the exist-ence of quite a sophisticated system of organization involving rastra ‘kingdoms’; a vari-ety of types of rulers: raja, ekardj, samrdj, Janata/, jyesthardj, and so on; and variousterms for assemblies, and similar gatherings: sarhsad, sabhd, samiti, and so on
“”
At this point, I can go on ad infinitum, but it is meaningless.
In summary, that is why I chose to politely state that there is some *ambiguity* as different experts say different things. But a megalomaniac and egoist can never accept that of course. And everything from experts like Witzel, Kuzmina, B. B. Lal, etc. to archaeology is wrong because I, Francesco Brighenti say so.
@Francesco,
You are a nice guy, and I am sorry that I had posted a vicious and long reply (I hope it does not appear even though it is informative but is written in bad taste). Please forgive me for that. I am neither pro nor against anything. Also, I don’t really believe that Aryans knew urbanism since the beginning — just they were rural.
Someone I know wrote this blog post about changes he’s seen in his home district of Sitamarhi in Bihar.
“I heard stories firsthand about how an alcohol ban and a small initiative like giving a bicycle to a girl child has transformed things. Any many instances, a sister would carry their young brother as well to school in a pillion. Some of those girls are full-time government employees, teachers, because of this little initiative.”
https://atuljha.com/blog/2021/01/05/development/
India stays in a state of permanent turmoil but on-ground realities keep trudging on.
(may be not a pace ambitious people in Mumbai and Bangalore want them to and hence the frustration on social media)
@Expert
While I’m still waiting for some of you to explain away the meaning of the Vedic phrases “grāma has come/grāma has gone” (grāmo gato grāma āgata), still known to Patanjali at c.150 BCE (see my previous posts in this thread), and certainly not applicable to a rural village (and not even to the whole of the inhabitants of a rural village), I will illustrate another philological/linguistic example re: Aryan nomadism.
Yogakṣema is an ancient expression (RV X. 166, 5) that in early Vedic times referred to the ‘yoking/harnessing (of draught animals used to pull vehicles )’ (yoga) and ‘temporary restful settling’ (kṣema) of semi-nomadic tribes. Yoga and kṣema are the two aspects of life of the semi-nomadic Aryan people: the mobile life associated with war, cattle-raiding, the quest for better pastures, etc. is yoga, whereas the restful life is kṣema. Vedic scholars have established for this specialized use of the term yoga the general idea of ‘active life on a journey (made by a train of herdsmen)’ and for kṣema ‘reposeful life at a temporary camp (where some agriculture could be practiced)’. The alternation of wandering and resting is called yogakṣema (generally explained by later commentators as a dvaṃdva or compound meaning ‘acquisition and preservation of property’).
Griffith’s translation of RV X. 166, 5 (where a Vedic rājan proclaims his triumph over his rivals and their utter humiliation):“May I be highest! Having gained your strength in war, your skill in peace [a rendering of the compound yogakṣema] my feet have trodden on your heads.”
Jamison & Brereton’s translation of the same verse: “Having taken for myself your yoking up [= war] and your peace, might I become the highest. I have trampled on your head.”
@Expert
I have finally found through a Web search an article by M. Palihawadana that masterfully discusses several Rigvedic lexical usages pointing to Vedic nomadic lifestyle. It’s here:
https://tinyurl.com/yys5hglc
Hadn’t you asked me for references to the nomadic life in the Rigveda? Here they are!
I would call it Tilak’s style: it is an attempt to find there something that is not there.
Here is a typical nomadic life style (nomadic cycle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadic_pastoralism
—
Often traditional nomadic groups settle into a regular seasonal pattern of transhumance. An example of a normal nomadic cycle in the northern hemisphere is:
Spring (early April to the end of June) – transition
Summer (end of June to late September) – a higher plateau
Autumn (mid-September to end of November) – transition
Winter (from December to the end of March) – desert plains.[15]
The movements in this example are about 180 to 200 km. Camps are established in the same place each year; often semi-permanent shelters are built in at least one place on this migration route.
—
The nomadic vocabulary has special terms for winter / spring / summer / autumn migrations, as well as for winter and summer settlements. These terms are not even in English.
Contrary to the claims in this article, nomads usually migrate along predetermined routes within the same range. Relocation to a completely new place is fraught with inter-clan or inter-ethnic conflicts for them.
Halal haleem owaisi
https://mobile.twitter.com/abhijitmajumder/status/1346117771050979328
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/indias-vaccine-colossus-is-a-model-for-the-world-to-follow-11609930891
Jai hind
One of my friends moved to Canada recently and is looking for jobs there.
She tells me that she finds the recruitment process too odious. She’s expected to have make-up on, not put perfume,not wear shirts with any prints, change her Linkedin DP to be in business formals etc etc.
She isn’t some highly qualified finance or tech person. Just applying to normal jobs.
Folks who have worked in both countries, do corporate Canadians not have chill?
(or conversely, are Indians too lax)
What do you mean by ‘normal jobs’? It can refer to a plethora of things depending on the socio-economic situation of the applier.
“What do you mean by ‘normal jobs’?”
HR, admin roles in regional offices of MNCs. Also some design firms.
(She used to be an interior designer but had taken a break from that for a few years.)
Anything customer-facing or PR / HR related will need applicants to at least be presentable, what she should be doing is looking at other candidates who successfully get those jobs and do what they’re doing w.r.t. effort.
If she’s adventurous, I’d recommend her taking a 3 month or so crash course in French and applying for positions in Montreal, where being bilingual is seen as a big plus.
Entirely depends on the industry she is applying to.
Tech industry, no one gives a shit. Retail no one cares. But if she is in finance or law, then yeah she has to dress accordingly in business formal when giving interviews.
I think it’s less the dress and more the fact that she doesn’t have Canadian work experience. Canadian employers look for that first and foremost and many times, that’s the deal breaker.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/01/actress-preity-talreja-assault-threats-husband-fake-nikah-mosque-claims-police-apathy/
More jihad
Indian wokes in USA are trying to find connections b/w India and US with the recent events at capitol hall.
They should instead look at nations where coups are a run of the mill kinda thing.
https://twitter.com/vrsrini/status/1346693049347264513
“Where is our @staceyabrams in India? This is the kind of progressive leader our country needs – a dedicated, change-focussed hard worker who manages to turn the tide in a polity where the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against progressives. #Georgia”
Dravidian wishing a dalit Stacey Abraham to dismantle the Hindu ‘white’ nationalistic empire in India.
Too bad Modi is no Trump.
What? Modi allowed an even more idiotic long term protest into the capital and allowed the minority, yet extremely vocal, radical khalistanis run wild
https://www.lawfareblog.com/pakistan-tale-two-very-different-political-movements
Is Yamnaya ancestry the exact same thing as AANI ancestry?
I’m thinking that AANI (or ANI) is very similar to Yamnaya, but it’s “less pure” and represents genetics picked up along the way to South Asia.
Moreover, I’m thinking that the AANI/ANI had a lot of Yamnaya genes, but the Yamnaya didn’t have any AANI/ANI genes, simply the Yamnaya existed about 6,000-7,000 years ago, and they gave rise to the AANI/ANI.
https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1347009724789653508?s=21
Modi has tweeted on the dc riots. Foreign policy wonks feel that if he wants a good relationship with Biden he had to. I feel It was unnecessary considering that most world leaders haven’t. If u scrutinize others, u open urself to criticism yourself.
To all pundits who today celebrate Orthodox Christmas according to Julian calendar – merry Christmas with a traditional greeting – Hristos se rodi!
The truth is that it has nothing to do with Julius Caesar and we will explain this in one of the future comments considering that the ‘calendar’ is a Serbian word. Vaistinu se rodi!
Christmas bloodshed:
https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/1346969147503116288
https://araingang.medium.com/
Indus Ancestry….HAHAHAHAHAHA
yes point well taken, bollywood idolize west eurasian looks too much and light skin. But it is funny with the Indus Ancestry cope, that too not even including the whole valley (they hate Gujarat lol). Bollywood needs more diversity of darker and less west eurasian people in big roles. This will come in due time. If you look at old pics of deepkia, kajol, hell even salman khan before the heavy makeup and lighting +/- roids, they pass fine among the “general indians.” Araingang continues his larp which doesn’t even have internal logical consistency. SAD. lmfao. And look at pics of Karachi, Lahore, Siakalot, Multan, etc. The locals also do not resemble the on screen actors in terms of west eurasian appearance and color. It is less pronounced perhaps but still there. All of S Asia has this issue. Probably the best industry is Tollywood for avoiding this issue among men but they still like to import N Indian actresses.
There is no where in the world where onscreen actors look like the average person on the street. Good looks are a primary requirement in the industry, but also important are acting skills that include versatility, relevant accent, pronunciation & enunciation of dialogue. British actors for example punch above their weight in Hollywood, probably because many of them have a theater acting background while lends to versatility.
However Bollywood is unique where neither acting skills matter, nor versatility, nor language skills /accent for becoming successful. One can go far if they have West Eurasian looks that come along with fair skin and if they know the right people. For the life of me, I could not understand why for example Katrina Kaif became popular, but the public demands fair skinned eurasian features. This trend may only recently be changing with the spread of Netflix and Prime where independent productions are getting more coverage and some really good Indic actors are making a mark, but I’m not sure if mass market still prefers those type of productions as they are still not big money earners.
You continue to draw false equivalencies between India/Pakistan here. Pakistan does not have a proper movie industry, it’s a joke these days. However it does have a decent drama serial industry. Most actors in either case are drawn from local groups. Urdu media has majority Punjabi/Muhajir drawn from Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad, because this is where Urdu is spoken as a first language. You also don’t see Pakistani Punjabi film industry or Sindhi serials importing Pasthuns despite Pasthuns forming 25% of the pop. Funnily enough there was a time in 80’s 90’s and even 2000’s where there were more famous Khans in India than in Pakistan. Bollywood even imports Afghan actresses with questionable Hindi/Urdu to act in item songs or as eye candies in several movies. This is what the market demands. No need to draw false parallels when they don’t exist. This is a uniquely Indian problem.
I 100% agree in Netflix having better quality and more N India typical appearing indic actors. Some of it goes a little far along the “woke” spectrum for SWJ points for Western audience. But overall the phenotypic representation is far better.
The few Khatri families have turned bollywood into a mess and the audiences are dumb enough to keep eating it up. They are the Gandhis of the movie industry. Corrupt with some talented individuals but more nepotism than anything else. I hate Karan Johar and his dumb fucking “launches.”
Guju drama and play industry is like Pak one, if what you say is true, in terms of good local phenotypic representation. Bollywood sucks
1. Bollywood was always partial to NW looks because of the industry being dominated by Khatris and general Indian liking for lighter skin but the deep obsession with West Eurasian looks is recent. The last couple of decades, I’d say. Ever since the item number craze took off.
For the longest time, lead actresses were preferred to look ‘Indian’ if slightly lighter in complexion – Hema Malini, Wahida Rehman, Madhuri, Rekha, Sridevi, Kajol etc.
2. You can blame the West Eurasian fixation on mass media and internet where western beauty standards got adopted wholesale. I’d wager that because of the influence of black artists in the west and BLM, the next decade will see Indians becoming more enamoured with hip-hop, twerking etc.
3. The core market of Bollywood was always the metros and some of the larger cities in rich states like Punjab and Gujarat. More specifically the upper class/upper caste among them. So the lead actors were only slightly less representative of this group compared to the unwashed masses.
The core Hindi belt was for the longest time not considered important. Most of these folks were not even paying audiences and only watched movies on re-runs on Zee Cinema or other such channels. So they ate whatever crap they were fed. Shouldn’t read too much into what this means in terms of ‘demand’.
4. This began to change over the last decade or so as prosperity reached pockets of Rajasthan, western UP and then slowly other parts of the region. So you now see more and more movies being made that are rooted in these places.
Omkara, Ganga Jal etc followed more recently by Gangs of Wasseypur et al.
There’s also a booming Bhojpuri film industry. The actors here are generally more representative of their audience in terms of looks. Females are however often imported from elsewhere, like the actress Nagma.
You don’t hear much of Bhojpuri entertainment but it probably has a larger audience base than Punjabi movie industry. It is not as rich yet, though.
There’s also the prevalence of extremely lewd lyrics in Bhojpuri music so it’s considered “downmarket” and usually only played ironically among the urban crowd.
(Bhojpuri is perceived to be crass even by other cultures in Bihar. My Hindi teacher from Mithila background used to call it an “ashleel” language.)
I am hopefully that with increasing prosperity in the region, they’ll clean up their act and provide an alternative source of entertainment to Bollywood and Punjabi stuff.
Also, look out for Haryanvi music which is doing crazy numbers on YT and other platforms.
5.
“However it does have a decent drama serial industry. Most actors in either case are drawn from local groups.”
Comparing like for like, the actors on Indian TV shows are also generally more representative looks wise.
The most famous show on TV right now is ‘Taarak Mehta ka Oolta Chashma’ where the protagonist is a portly Gujarati fellow.
6.
“Funnily enough there was a time in 80’s 90’s and even 2000’s where there were more famous Khans in India than in Pakistan.”
None of these Khans look Afghan in the least. The tallest among them is Salman Khan at 5’8.5″. Shouldn’t read too much into their surname that way.
All of them also have Indian mothers.
7.
“Bollywood even imports Afghan actresses with questionable Hindi/Urdu to act in item songs or as eye candies in several movies. This is what the market demands. No need to draw false parallels when they don’t exist.”
Considering Pakistan didn’t have a functional movie industry for the longest time and Bollywood was the primary source of entertainment for most folks wouldn’t it imply that the Pakistani market demands this kind of stuff as well?
Not drawing false equivalences and not interested in arguing too much about this point. I don’t know much about Pakistan but I have spent enough time on the internet to see Pakistani guys thirst over white women almost as much as Indian guys.
It can’t be just Islam that’s behind the appeal of Turkish actresses surely?
So curious to know how you view this.
Good answer. Very informative
1) Salman Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan – they would fit right in Peshawar or Karachi if they grew a beard. They do look Pasthun even if they do have Indic features. Pasthuns themselves are quite diverse and lot of them have Indic features especially ones originating from the Pakistani side. Kader Khan or Feroz Khan, just looked 100% Afghan. Saif Ali Khan, Yusuf Khan (Dilip Kumar) also look pretty Pasthun, etc Amjad Khan on the other hand looked more like Hazara.
2) I would not think that Bollywood caters to the Pakistani market save for a few Karan Johar type co productions. Pakistan for the longest time had a Indian cinema ban, so most movies were pirated anyway. The reason why Bollywood was popular in Pakistan is because they spoke Urdu for the longest time, quite different to even modern Hindi. I remember first time I actually met Indians in real life and was shocked to see they could not speak proper Urdu/Hindi (they were Gujratis however) but then realized the Urdu/Hindi style of Bollywood is quite a niche dialect that not even most people in UP or Bihar speak like that. One of the reasons why Bollywood is declining in Pakistan is also because of more Shudh Hindi usage that is slightly becoming more common.
3) There is a fair skin bias in Pakistan as well, but I am not sure if there is a West Eurasian feature bias. Different local movie industries have different standards.. I watched a lot of Punjabi films made in Pakistan, the actresses were mostly other local Punjabi with no real discernable features from the common population except skin color and body composition.. it seemed like the audience did not care about the facial features as much as they did about fair skin and the actress being extremely voluptuous. This even seeped into ‘Lolywood’ where some actresses were just outright fat. There is a BBW fetish in Punjab, perhaps it existed before but perhaps it was perpetuated by Punjabi mujras.. I am no expert on this but this exists.
4) White women are just more in demand globally amongst all groups if dating websites and apps have any data to go by. It’s not just in Pakistan or India. Could be inherent beauty, could be because of media brainwashing, or could be because women in richer countries (that are predominantly white) are also considered more attractive because they can spend that money on diet and makeup. (I don’t want to argue on this point). I personally don’t find Black or East Asian women less attractive when compared to Eurasian ones.
5) Turkish TV shows have been in Pak since early 2010’s. They just have better dramas seeing that they have the second largest TV show exports in the world after US. They also did not supplant local productions, only Ertugrul became pretty famous because 1) Islamic TV show 2) Govt promoted it and put it on state TV to increase reach.
I do watch Pakistani TV fron time 2 time , i concur with Quereshi for the most part.
Only thing i differ is all the Khans are more Indian looking than Western looking. They dont stand out. Its actually newer actors like Hrithik, Tiger etc who stand out. If they dont seem out of place in Karachi or Peshawar has to do with the fact that those region still has some Indian-looking folks. Especially Karachi. I dont think they would pass of as a tradition Pashtun. For example, Irfan Pathan , ex Indian cricketer would not pass off , even though he was a Pathan.
Well Tiger Shroff is of Indian, European and Central Asian descent, so he is not a good example of average Indian phenotype. I agree with your point on Hrithik Roshan looking Western shifted despite having no recent foreign ancestry.
“I watched a lot of Punjabi films made in Pakistan, the actresses were mostly other local Punjabi with no real discernable features from the common population except skin color and body composition.. it seemed like the audience did not care about the facial features as much as they did about fair skin and the actress being extremely voluptuous. This even seeped into ‘Lolywood’ where some actresses were just outright fat.”
Haha. This is exactly true for Bhojpuri, Malayali, Telugu etc movies as well.
What the Indian guy in small towns or villages wants is a big bosomed curvy lady who dances like Sapna Chaudhari.
There’s a whole ‘Mallu aunty’ genre of porn that’s insanely popular.
The likes of Katrina Kaif, Disha Patani, Deepika Padukone are meant for the aspirational urban crowd who have Cult Fit memberships and Instagram their holidays from Greece.
(or would like to live that way)
Prats
There’s a whole ‘Mallu aunty’ genre of porn that’s insanely popular.
That explains a lot. I almost never see skinny or slim Indian women in porn,
Starting to see slim Sri Lankans and dark into the bargain, nice
Prats, always with the great cultural references ?
Mallu aunty was a rage during our generation. Is it still going on with this generation? Not sure.
Khans to me look closer to mid to upper caste N Indians than they do pashtuns outside of saif ali.
Gujaratis are a terrible example to go off of for Hindi speaking. They understand a lot more than they can speak. Most can only speak Gujarati well.
West Eurasian features are a huge deal in Pak. There is a reason a common insult there is that someone “looks Indian,” if they are ugly. I have heard and read enough times that mohajirs are considered the ugliest people of Pak. The main difference between indic Pak and N India is like 10-20% more aasi-aka E Eurasian (if you compare birdari Punjabis to common N Indian), closer to 10 for upper and middle castes and negligible comparing mohajirs and upper caste N Indians, outside of the small minority of Indian mohajirs with true foreign ancestry of non negligible quantity.
You have stated that Mohajirs blend well with Punjabis and Sindhis. I agree they can just like most N Indian mid castes and upper caste because of overlap of looks gradient. That being said, on average the looks will be more aasi shifted and thus the reputation seems to fall that way. You are amkng the few who state they are basically indiscernible in any meaningful way even on a group level.
If you hang out on racial forums too much you will hear tripe mostly. The ”Indian” insult is usually reserved for dark skinned ones, and as I said: fair skin is still valued highly in Pakistan. This has very little to do with West Eurasian features. And you will only hear this from Punjabis who you are arguing with online because they will say it to piss you off. I don’t subscribe to this ‘AASI’ shifted looks theory here because the difference is so minimal its just useless to argue. I have never heard in real life that Punjabis considering Muhajirs ugly, the two communities regularly intermarry the most in Pakistan to the point that its kinda hard to find any Muhajir family which doesn’t have at least one sibling that has out-married.. The only thing that comes up online is a perception that Punjabi women > Muhajir women in terms of sexual attractiveness because they are more voluptuous. But then Muhajir women > Punjabi women when Punjabi women start speaking.
TBF All women > Punjabi women when Punjabi women start speaking.
This reminds me of my Pathan friend in college, who could dress up and look pretty good on occasions but his inner Kanpuriya came out whenever he opened his mouth.
One thing people are neglecting here is the most light skinned, west Eurasian looking actors actually play the villains in Bollywood.
So for eg. Aditya Pancholi, Neil Nitin Mukesh
Play negative roles in movies as villains.
Bollywood protagonists are relatively light skinned (bottom 50% melatonin for North India).
But the antagonists are often even lighter. Implying some sort of more north western origin.
Worth mentioning that Aditya pancholi and Neil nitin Mukesh are gujju / up not Punjabi / Afghan.
But when a you are a paknationalist every thing reaffirms Pakistani exceptionalism.
The antagonists being lighter skinned comment correlates well to the trend I’ve noticed in the past decade of Tamil film antagonists being N Indian, though this is also coterminus with Tamil film heroines increasingly being N Indian as well – make of that what you will!
Definitely a weird recent trend all over the country – as white or half-white actresses start making their presence felt in Bollywood, N Indian actresses start moving into S Indian film industries
“I’ve noticed in the past decade of Tamil film antagonists being N Indian,”
Past decade only? Really? LOL
https://twitter.com/audreytruschke/status/1347234333971644417?s=21
“ I begin teaching History of South Asia II (Mughals to Modi) on Jan 19, one day before the inauguration.
One of my opening images will be this, from DC yesterday, with the question — What do we need to know to explain why there is an Indian flag here?“
Audrey tai milking the moment
As they say, never waste a crisis
Lol. I had no idea this had happened.
Considering Trudeau and Biden, it seems Modi has lost north America for the next decade.
Also, I wonder what kind of non-sense Trushkey’s students are going to spout once they graduate.
Getting the economy back in order ought to be the top priority.
The way the world is moving every country has lost each other. I would say modi best bet is to revive internal demand and leverage the internal market.
The days of tiger economies are gone. Perhaps smaller countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam can still make it. But the world has no space for another export behemoth.
Seeing reports on Twitter that the dude (or at least one of them) was an Indian-American Christian named Vincent Xavier
Pretty unsurprising if true-
https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/10/14/how-will-indian-americans-vote-results-from-2020-indian-american-attitudes-survey-pub-82929
Second, Indians of all religious faiths prefer Biden to Trump, but with important caveats.25 Muslim support for Biden (82 percent) is considerably higher than Hindu support (67 percent), which in turn is considerably higher than Christian support (49 percent). The latter community is also the most supportive of Trump (45 percent).
The guy flying the Indian flag was identified as a Mallu Xtian
Vincent Xavier.
Will any of the woke Desi and woke Desi adjacent people who were throwing around dumb accusations about about this grand Hindu-Trump nexus on Twitter will apologize or admit their mistakes ?
@Sumit
Most of the time mallu xtians are hardly acknowledged to exist by even the “woke” desis american community at large, and when we are it is to make passive aggressive remarks at us as if we are all right wing evangelical christian republicans. But I think that is part of the answer, it’s already consider default, as seen in the excerpt from the article below @IsThisReal provided:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/10/14/how-will-indian-americans-vote-results-from-2020-indian-american-attitudes-survey-pub-82929
“large section of Indian Americans view the Republican Party as unwelcoming. Indian Americans refrain from identifying with the Republican Party due, in part, to a perception that the party is intolerant of minorities and overly influenced by Christian evangelicalism. Those who identify as Republicans are primarily moved to do so because of economic policy differences with the Democrats—with particularly marked differences regarding healthcare.”
So it is not that they think there is a a Hindu=Republican/Trump equation, it is WHY would Hindus support republicans in light of the above information. It seems more of a incredulity that they do, not due to their Hinduness that automatically makes them trump supporters, I think it is more that it should be the opposite. What I get from this article is that minority of Hindu americian support is only because they are of a richer socioeconomic class, but in other source they will attribute the apprearance of Trump’s anti-muslimness, which inspires fellow travelers in hindutva tinged circles,
I find difference between bollywood and average indians to be overblown tbh , I have seen many north indians and bulk of bollywood stars hardly look that different from groomed north indians , just better looking on average like everywhere else in world. Even in UP/bihar region you can find lot of people who dont look that different. You have to realize that in south asia the well being and grooming faciliites difference between haves and havenots is huge , way bigger than anyother region. You can easily seen it in armed forces where pakistanis from all groups look much more similar to each other when equal oppurtunities are given.
Bollywood is over analyzed simply because it is a famous brand now and provide good gossip material for 24/7 internet, you can see the same with now famous turkish cinema , people are saying all the time how turkish actors have balkan ancestry.
Wasn;t there that controversy that even Ataturk was of Balkan descent
Ataturk’s father was from Bitola, former Yugoslavia, where we worked as a bridge guard before moving to Thessaloniki where Ataturk was born. He was a crypto-Jew, a follower of the Sabateai Zevi Jewish sect who ostensibly converted to Islam, Zevi proclaimed himself the new prophet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcBCMHggno&ab_channel=HWNewsEnglish
Editorial with Sujit Nair: US Capitol Hill Siege- Will It Impact India?
Deepak from Patent Yogi explains Nikola Tesla’s $1000 Aircraft (4 min):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYDtBFonhCc
“Something I point out to people is that this assumes that the steppe people arrived from Khorasan unmixed. If the Indo-Aryans who arrived in the Punjabs already mixed with Iranian peoples in their sojourn then the fraction is an underestimate, though I doubt it is 2-fold.”
@Razib,
Can we now assume that South Indians(Non Dalits) have the highest direct ancestry from Indus valley people, as their steppe ancestry is almost negligible.
It seems we are getting real questions regarding Aryans arrival to SA. One of them is if Aryans were nomads or city sleekers. It was a naïve attempt to prove that they were nomads based on only one word with multiple meanings which was drawn out of context. It would be unbelievable that some traveling nomads created Rg Veda, developed sophisticated language which influenced the whole EuroAsia and respective complex mythology and achieved high technology levels. It seems that we can develop a litmus test (LT-21) to detect undercover dumbases based on the question – is the term ‘Indo-European’ meaningless or not? I already answered the above dilemma with one word only – Vincha. Many pundits don’t know much about this and that is ok, some even never heard about anything out of India what is repetitively irritative to Razib. Extremely rarely, the mentioning of this word causes a psycho-moronic attack when incriminating psycho immediately forgets his own promise that he would mind his own business and keep his mouth shut.
Well, let see what is with this place where was Europe’s biggest prehistoric civilization, where the first World Industrial Revolution happened, where young women were beautifully dressed, like today’s girls in short tops and mini-skirts, used make-up and wore bracelets around their arms, where the oldest alphabet was invented and where many other elements of their culture were carried couple thousands year later by Aryans.
(2 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyEcUR_wnsU
(1/2) RE: The Vinča Culture – Europe’s biggest prehistoric civilization (1/2)
– point to a metropolis with a great degree of sophistication and a taste for art and fashion
Long before the flourishing of Greece and Rome, even earlier than the first cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt, at the downstream of Danube River lived a nation ahead of its time in trade, arts and craftsmanship. During its efflorescence the “Old European” civilization had been one of the most advanced cultures in the world. In his book “The mysteries of the Danube Civilization” Harald Haarmann proves that the Balkans were inhabited by the civilization that developed the first written language. Haarmann calls this culture “Old European”. The center of the first civilization, in known World, was located in Serbia. The town of Vinča itself was just one of several metropolises, with others at Divostin, Potporanj, Selevac, Pločnik and Predionica.
Vinča culture
In 1908, the largest prehistoric Neolithic settlement in Europe was discovered in the village of Vinča, just a few miles from the Serbian capital Belgrade, on the shores of the Danube. Vinča was excavated between 1918 and 1934 and was revealed as a civilization in its own right. Indeed, as early as the 6th millennium BC, three millennia before Dynastic Egypt, the Vinča culture was already a fully-fledged civilization. A typical town consisted of houses with complex architectural layouts and several rooms, built of wood that was covered in mud. The houses sat along streets, thus making Vinča the first urban settlement in Europe, but being far older than the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And the town of Vinča itself was just one of several metropolises, with others at Divostin, Potporanj, Selevac, Plocnik and Predionica.
Archaeologists concluded that “in the 5th and early 4th millennia BC, just before its demise in east-central Europe, ‘Old Europeans’ had towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists, weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, and other artisans producing a range of sophisticated goods. A flourishing network of trade routes existed that circulated items such as obsidian, shells, marble, copper, and salt over hundreds of kilometres.”
The Vinca culture flourished from 5,500 (2) to 3,500 BC (4) on the territories of what is now Bosnia, Serbia, Romania and Macedonia. It got its name from the present-day village of Vinca, 10 km east of Belgrade on the Danube river, where over 150 Vinca settlements have been determined. There is no evidence of war or defences in the townships, and it appears that the Vinca were a peaceful society combining low-level agriculture with foraging and trade. They produced the first known European examples of a ‘proto’-script and were the first people in the world known to smelt copper. They existed in a similar state for almost 2,000 years, following which they appear to have dispersed around the Mediterranean and Aegean.
(2/2) RE: The Vinča Culture – Europe’s biggest prehistoric civilization (2/2)
Vinča settlements were considerably larger than any other contemporary European culture, in some instances surpassing the cities of the Aegean and early Near Eastern Bronze Age a millennium later. The largest sites, some more than 300,000 square metres may have been home to up to 2,500 people. (2) We are told that they lived in spacious housing and separated their dead in nearby necropolis. They had workshops, which means skilled labour. They worked with several styles of pottery and had their own particular artistic fingerprint which is seen in both early Cretan and Sumerian cultures, which rose following the demise of the ‘Old Europe’ heartland.
They lived in houses which had very complex architectural layouts and several rooms. The houses faced northeast – southwest and were separated by streets. Vinca people had stoves in their houses, preceding the Romans in using of these devices. They used special holes only for rubbish, and had the same tradition as we have, to bury people in cemeteries.
Among unearthed artifacts, there have been found a large number of figurines made of clay and other artefacts depicting worshipped deities and women in miniskirts, short tops, wearing jewellery. It is hard to believe that women that lived several millennia ago wore miniskirts, unless, the cult of Mother Goddess was very widespread and reached both south-east part of Europe and ancient India. Similar, made of ceramic clay, figurines of Mother Goddess, were found in excavations in Mohenjo-Daro, located along the Indus River in ancient India (present-day Pakistan). This would mean that women wore modern cloth at least 7,500 years ago!
The Vinca Culture – Europe’s biggest prehistoric civilization – point to a metropolis with a great degree of sophistication and a taste for art and fashion.
The first known form of a writing system
The first known form of a writing system anywhere in the world was created in the Vinča culture, with about 700 characters and symbols, mainly carved in pottery goods. Various styles of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figurines are hallmarks of the culture, as are the Vinča symbols, which some conjecture to be an early form of proto-writing. Some of the historians and etymologists nowadays believe that Vinča language was actually at the same time proto-Serbian language, but the future analysis and further findings will certainly put more light on it. They certainly represent the earliest form of writing ever found and predating ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing by thousands of years.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/01/pakistani-journalist-admits-pakistan-trains-sikh-separatists-against-india/
As expected
today jagan did bhoomi puja for reconstruction of 9 temples. public outcry especially on the net was strong. this will be the way forward.
raj iyer.
one more tam bram in a high post in usa.
https://thedailyswitch.com/culture/women-reporters-are-being-sexually-harassed-by-farmers-at-protests-alleges-india-today-anchor
So noble…