My review of Tony Joseph’s new book, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, is now up at India Today.
In general, I liked the book, and have only minor quibbles with Joseph’s reportage of the genetic results. He has very particular interpretations of results on some questions, but his core audience of Indians will be focused on this, not the minutiae of D-statistics. For example, it seems to me that he gave a great deal of emphasis to the aboriginal heritage of South Asians in quantity and impact. This is a defensible stance, but it’s not a necessary one dictated by the results from the data.
The non-genetic assertions I had less background on, and so did some literature review by following Joseph’s copious citations. In these “fuzzier” fields it is harder to establish a consensus from what I can see (the number of opinions of linguists on any topic seems to equal the number of linguists!). The downside is certain conclusions are not there yet. The upside is there is still scholarship that will be done.
Overall, get Early Indians. But read with some caution and use it as a sourcebook for follow-up queries.