1) First R1a stream came to today’s India btw 5-7000 years ago (including the error maybe even 8.000) from South Siberia/China
2) Second R1a came to today’s India about 3600-3850 years ago. This is a different stream of R1a which left for Europe about 12000 years ago. First bearers of the R1a1 haplogroup in Europe lived in the Balkans (Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia).
3) They left Europe btw 4700-4500 years ago and travelled to India for about 800 years.
4) This R1a stream (so-called Indo-European) brought so-called INDO-EUROPEAN language to India.
5) The only possible conclusion from the previous is that INDO-EUROPEAN language was the Serbian language. At that time, this language already had this name. According to the timeline which I proposed (for the record) – the period of so-called PIE is 30000-8000 BC. The period of the so-called IE language started btw 8000-6000 BC.
6) Arbitrarily (my proposition), the beginning of the IE (i.e. Serbian) language is the time when the consonant group SRB was formed.
7) Another implication is that ‘Indo-European’ R1a stream brought not only the language than some mythology and, at least, the first draft of Rg Veda on this language.
8) ‘IE’ R1a also came with Vinca’s phenotype while first wave of R1a to India were probably East/Central Asian phenotype.

I will write in more details, but we also briefly presented what Anthony called ‘population replacement’ what is actually his euphemism for a genocide performed by Yamnaya R1b against Vinca’s people. That was his ’explanation’ how so-called ‘Indo-European’ language, brought by Yamnaya, was spread across the Europe. What a joke, still a bit less funny then his previous version about (Yamnaya) elites’ language diffusion across the Europe.

One of consequences of Anthony’s ‘population replacement’ was a destiny of Caucasus G2a people who came as welcome ‘guest-workers’ to Vinca. They left few Balkan toponyms (e.g. river Ibar in Kosovo, name of Bosnia and probably later Roman province Moesia=central Serbia). One part of them escaped after this genocide back to Caucasus carrying Serbian language (the name of Tbilisi has the Serbian origin) and white phenotype (!). Most likely, their descendants are modern Ossetins.

OIT failed to provide any significant contribution to this discussion. If we ignore outbursts of primitivity from their directions other, more sensible wing struggled to make a case with at least one solid point. It looks like a semi-parasite mistletoe plant which only can live on the A*T back. For the beginning, just to find out from which language came the word ‘veda’ (i.e. vid=sight, vision).

girmit

The origin myths of even the SL Tamils (at least the kings) are pretty much the same as the Sinhalese. Descent from Sinhabahu of Kalinga. The Sinhalese claim from Vijaya son of Sinhabahu.

http://noolaham.net/project/47/4684/4684.pdf

I have close sinhalese friends, they are quite keen on believing themselves to be more linked to bengal/bihar than to tamil nadu.
The more educated with nuanced discussions with Indians.

Tamil Nadu or Bihar, no Sri Lankan will support immigration from India.
Most rural Lankans are aware of Indian states, specially those linked to Buddhism and Bihar is one of those.

That said all Indians are Tamils to most rural Sri Lankans.

Sbarkum, that’s an interesting case study. While on one hand most people say they don’t care about origins, isn’t sri lanka a great example of two linguistic groups who are broadly similar racially, but invested in different origin myths. I have close sinhalese friends, they are quite keen on believing themselves to be more linked to bengal/bihar than to tamil nadu.

Most people dont really care where they came from. (even second gen and more immigrants).

Most in Sri Lanka obviously originated from India, as recently as a few generations and many millennia back.
Does that mean Lankans feel any affiliation to India. I would say very little, if at all.

Since Independence, successive govts wanted to repatriate the Estate Indian Tamils brought by the Brits to work the tea plantations. By then many had been in SL for three generations.

In 1964 many were repatriated back to India. From 15% of the population they dropped the 4% at present. India didnt want them, Ceylon did not want them.
——-
By 1936, Indian Tamils numbered 1,123,000, 15.3 percent of the total population in 1936,[4] and many of them were non-citizens of Ceylon.

Nevertheless, the issue remained unsolved.[7] In 1962, there were nearly 975,000 people, classified by Ceylon as “Indian nationals” and by India as “stateless”. Although India denied any legal responsibility for these people, it acknowledged a “sentimental interest” in them.[8]

The central part of the pact was the granting of Ceylonese citizenship to 300,000 of the Indian population in Sri Lanka, while 525,000 would be repatriated to India. It was agreed that the citizenship of the remaining 150,000 Indian residents of Ceylon would be negotiated at a later point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirima%E2%80%93Shastri_Pact

@Numinous,

I was/am genuinely interested in prehistory for the whole world (so, I make my family watch 2-hour documentaries on gobekli tepe during covid lock downs…lol). The critique by Witzel of Talageri was so bad and published in open journal with little consequence to Witzel for such poor behaviour. The same story continues to this day where any OIT proponent is dismissed off-hand as hindu-nat without a fair hearing. This hardens the opposition more and more. (similar to how a society ends up with QAnon)

Notice how PIE-homeland researchers always acknowledge “Anatolian hypothesis” even if they feel strongly about steppe homeland hypothesis, but somehow “Saraswati question” doesn’t deserve same mention about Indo-Aryan homeland. (and not even an attempt with two waves of steppe peoples or such, e.g. by Asko Prapola)

As I mentioned before, I am waiting on settling of PIE homeland in the first place. It seems to move between north of caucus mountains to south in recent times. And David Anthony seems to have another revision to his thoughts as recently as the last year. So, it is too early to get at how and why of AIT vs. OIT.

Violet, that’s my whole point really. My sense of time and another person’s are quite different, and I can’t claim superior reasoning. I don’t think this needs to be reductio ad absurdum though, the general sense is that when all cultural links are attenuated with the origin, then a group belongs to a place. Indian muslims (the small exogenous strata) don’t speak turkish, farsi or even pashto anymore. Southern brahmins speak the language of their respective regions and have the faintest idea of migrating 1500ya.
Wrt the middle east, that zionists think that all jews have a right of return after 1000s of years has to be quite an edge case (not to mention how genetically european Ashkenazi are).

“(leninist?? this one made me laugh).”

that is because you have not even understood the meaning of numinous’ comment. i just finished reading the lengthy exchange between you and him, and i must say he characterized your position quite accurately and succinctly. you are looking at all issues with a leninist lens – who..whom? meaning who will screw whom.

not all scientific debates have a hidden political agenda. think beyond the who-whom straightjacket. and dont let yourself become a tool in the hands of those who actually have a political agenda in these debates, for lenin had another term for such gullible persons – useful idiot.

@Violet:

(Bit of history, since you brought it up)

This wasn’t a topic that occupied my interest when I was in grad school. I was only tangentially aware of the whole issue. In fact, I was wholly ignorant of linguistics at that point and didn’t even know about language families and such. Of course, I had never heard of Talageri or Witzel either.

The only thing I had read on this topic up to that point was vague references to Aryas conquering India and defeating the Dasyus (from my school history books). Didn’t care much about it either way. Then, at the turn of the century, I encountered the writing of Francois Gautier, who seemed like a breath of fresh air to me, and who argued against the above narrative. His arguments were all about why this was a colonial narrative and thereby didn’t hold water. I found this somewhat convincing, and I suppose I became an implicit OIT supporter. It still wasn’t a topic that interested me, and I never bothered to do any more research.

Only when I read David Anthony’s book (Horse, Wheel…) in the early 2010s did I understand that there was a linguistics question at the heart of this issue that had completely evaded me. Only at that point did I know what William Jones’ contribution was (the guy was just a name to me until then.) Reading a bit more about language families and the evolution of languages, I got convinced that the explanation of PIE and its descendant languages was a global (ok, Eurasian) problem and required “global” thinking. The arguments of Gautier et al (and to some extent, Elst, who I then read extensively) seemed to me to exhibit a frog-in-the-well mentality, focusing solely on Indian history, Indian languages, and Indian texts. Which, taken in exclusion, can be used to marshal evidence in support of OIT. But then, if you step out of South Asia, and look at the histories and the languages and the texts (to the extent they exist) of other IE speaking regions, OIT just starts to feel more and more weird (at least to me).

That’s where I’ve landed and that’s where I’ve roughly been since. I’m open to new facts and arguments. JR produces good ones but not enough to sway my mind. If others are convinced by them, then good for them!

PS: I agree, based on what I’ve read since, that the AIT advocates have been condescending towards OIT proponents (and in earlier times racist too), but even if we consider the “Saraswati question”, as you put it, the place we land in is to doubt the AIT as it is presently formulated. OIT feels yet more weird.

You evaded it adroitly

I did not, check out that thread. More dishonesty on your part.

(The Leninist comment was thrown by me to refer to your wholly political attitude towards argumentation, and nothing else.)