Massive migrations from Steppes to Bronze Age India is a myth

[Shahmiri]

Dr. Niraj Rai on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NirajRai3/status/1344333524745166850

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.

I think it will be the greatest ancient DNA study in this year, I am waiting eagerly for it.

 

[Angela]

I know. I saw his tweet. I also saw Lazaridis' tweet. What was a myth? That it was massive? That it took place in the Bronze Age?

South Asians got their steppe at some point, even if the percentages for the vast majority are nowhere near what Davidski said.

I get there's no R1a where they expected it at the time they expected it. Maybe it came later, or maybe to a different area, or maybe via later groups.

I'm interested too, but let's make sure the data is correct. I'm learning even scientists bow to the pressure of political ideology if it's strong enough. Look at what's happening in our universities.

 

[Shahmiri]

The main point seems to be clearly about the spread of Indo-European culture in India, massive migrations after the Bronze Age couldn't be related to it because we know this culture certainly existed in India in the Vedic period (late Bronze Age) and small migrations from the Steppe to India couldn't cause a huge cultural change in India.

 

[Angela]

Well, maybe it wasn't massive. It doesn't look massive if you look at the amount of steppe in the majority of Indians, for example.

To the best of my recollection even Brahmins can get around 15%.

 

[Shahmiri]

They certainly know the amount of steppe ancestry, it seems they have gathered Ancient DNA evidences which show it couldn't be related to Bronze Age India. When it says a massive migration is a myth, it actually means there isn't even any evidence for a small migration in this period.

 

[Zdreanțo]

I agree. India has always had a population at least 10 times larger than all the steppes in Asia. But even a small migration from India to the steppes would be visible and logical.

 

[Alyan]

Just Hinduvta yapping. David Reich and other credible experts accept the Aryans and by extension Indo-European language, gods, organization (see varnas) did not come from South Asia. And since there is no South Asian admixture in significant amounts in more western lands like Iran that means OIT didn't happen.

Deniers of AIT/AMT are more or less on the level of Creationists.

 

[Shahmiri]

It is really funny to read what Lazaridis says about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1345065698482122752?s=20

Some kind of Indo-Aryans were already in the Middle East in the Late Bronze Age in the Kingdom of Mitanni.

Were they also in India in force at the time or did they arrive much later, at the beginning of the Iron Age or even during the 1st millennium BC?

The new theory seems to be that Indo-Aryan culture didn't originate in the Indian subcontinent!! In fact they were not Indo-Iranians who migrated to India but they were the Sanskrit speaking people who migrated there, so India had no role in the creation of Vedic Culture!

 

[Ygorcs]

It is really funny to read what Lazaridis says about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1345065698482122752?s=20



The new theory seems to be that Indo-Aryan culture didn't originate in the Indian subcontinent!! In fact they were not Indo-Iranians who migrated to India but they were the Sanskrit speaking people who migrated there, so India had no role in the creation of creation of Vedic Culture!

You're over-interpreting and misinterpreting (as usual). So if Portuguese came from Portugal, and Brazilians speak Portuguese, then Brazilian culture was created in Portugal, and people living in Brazil had no role in the creation of it? That's obvious nonsense. The early origin of a language does not have necessarily anything to do with the formation and consolidation of a culture that happened to use that language, especially if we consider that Lazaridis is not even mentioning Sanskrit there, but Indo-Aryan,which is assumed to be a language very close to, but not identical to Vedic Sanskrit, since Mitanni Aryan is clearly distinct, though very similar to, Vedic Sanskrit.

Don't make up stuff to get outraged at.

 

[Ygorcs]

Well, maybe it wasn't massive. It doesn't look massive if you look at the amount of steppe in the majority of Indians, for example.

To the best of my recollection even Brahmins can get around 15%.

That's true for most of India, but in some parts of Pakistan and northwesternmost India (basically on the border with Pakistan) there are ethnic groups and castes that can have more than 20% or even 30% MLBA Steppe ancestry (now that's of course considering Sintashta and Andronovo samples, which were mainly CWC-derived, so already diluted in their EBA Yamnaya-like ancestry, only something like ~70-75% Yamnaya).

 

[Ygorcs]

The main point seems to be clearly about the spread of Indo-European culture in India, massive migrations after the Bronze Age couldn't be related to it because we know this culture certainly existed in India in the Vedic period (late Bronze Age) and small migrations from the Steppe to India couldn't cause a huge cultural change in India.

Why not? A pretty small Arab migration to the Maghreb in the Middle Ages changed the language of much of the people, their religion, their ethnic identity and many parts of their culture - and that's just citing one historically known example.

 

[Ygorcs]

Well, it seems nothing earth-shattering will come according to Niraj Rai's own words, so basically, except for nationalists and ethnocentrists with ideological biases, not pure and simple scientific interests on the matter, nothing is bound to change, and the steppe theory will remain as the likeliest explanation for the linguistic and cultural parallels between Europe and South Asia:

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).
- Source: Niraj Rai no Twitter: "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)." / Twitter

In that case, what's the big deal? Narasimhan clearly showed steppe ancestry present in northern Pakistan at least by the Early Iron Age, and a very clear path of expansion of steppe ancestry from the EBA to the LBA from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the forest and forest-steppe zone north of it to North-Central Asia and thence to South-Central Asia, just north of South Asia. Exactly as predicted by the steppe theory, only a bit later (maybe they simply didn't find the earlier than EIA samples, particularly if Aryans really cremated virtually all of their dead).

Indians seem adamant to refuse believing that a minority of the population may impart their language and some parts of their culture to the locals they conquer and/or coexist with (obviously some of their culture only, but it's too much to ask "Aryan pride" nationalists of India to consider the very high likelihood that Vedic culture was not a "purely" Aryan, but a conflation of two or more cultures, including IVC-derived ones, or that it is quite obvious that Hinduism as it is now is very different in lots of ways from the religion of the Vedas, much more syncretic, including even lots of different gods and goddesses not mentioned in those)... even though that kind of linguistic and partial cultural shift without massive genetic replacement happened even multiple times in the much more well known and documented last 2,000 years (e.g. Persian-speaking Tajiks, Anatolian Turks, Azeris, Algerian and Moroccan Arabs, Hispanic Bolivians and Guatemalans, English-speaking Irish, French-speaking Occitanie, and so on).

 

[Shahmiri]

You're over-interpreting and misinterpreting (as usual). So if Portuguese came from Portugal, and Brazilians speak Portuguese, then Brazilian culture was created in Portugal, and people living in Brazil had no role in the creation of it? That's obvious nonsense. The early origin of a language does not have necessarily anything to do with the formation and consolidation of a culture that happened to use that language, especially if we consider that Lazaridis is not even mentioning Sanskrit there, but Indo-Aryan,which is assumed to be a language very close to, but not identical to Vedic Sanskrit, since Mitanni Aryan is clearly distinct, though very similar to, Vedic Sanskrit.

Don't make up stuff to get outraged at.

That is a good example but the problem is that Lazaridis and other ones who believe the steppe theory, said before that Portuguese came from Canada to Portugal and then from Portugal to Brazil, and now when they see that there were no migration from Canada to Portugal, they say it came from Brazil to Portugal, so they probably want to focus on the migration from Canada to Brazil! Persian poet Sa'di says:

I fear, oh Bedouin, you will never reach the Ka'ba
Because the road you are taking leads to China

 

[Shahmiri]

Why not? A pretty small Arab migration to the Maghreb in the Middle Ages changed the language of much of the people, their religion, their ethnic identity and many parts of their culture - and that's just citing one historically known example.

As you read here, "The migration of Arab tribes to North Africa in the 11th century was a major factor in the linguistic and cultural Arabization of the Maghreb region, mainly Beni Hassan, Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym." Just about Banu Hilal we know they were about 300,000 Arabs accompanied by their wives and their children.

We are not here to talk about miracles.

 

[Angela]

Would you like the Hungarian example better?

How about the Romanization of a lot of Europe? How much "Roman" ancestry, as in from actual people from the area of modern Italy, is there in Spaniards and the French and the Portuguese. Yet they changed to a Romance language, changed their religion, their legal system, their housing and on and on.

Who said the Portuguese originally came from Canada, and where did they say it? Please be specific, because I have no idea what you're talking about...

 

[Shahmiri]

Would you like the Hungarian example better?

How about the Romanization of a lot of Europe? How much "Roman" ancestry, as in from actual people from the area of modern Italy, is there in Spaniards and the French and the Portuguese. Yet they changed to a Romance language, changed their religion, their legal system, their housing and on and on.

Who said the Portuguese originally came from Canada, and where did they say it? Please be specific, because I have no idea what you're talking about...

In my example Canada=Steppe, Portugal=India and Brazil=Mitanni, by Canada I meant an irrelevant land, some people just want make a relation between the Steppe and India, first they believed that there were migrations from the steppe to India and then from India to the Middle East (Mitanni kingdom), and now they say it was from the Middle East to India.

 

[Angela]

In my example Canada=Steppe, Portugal=India and Brazil=Mitanni, by Canada I meant an irrelevant land, some people just want make a relation between the Steppe and India, first they believed that there were migrations from the steppe to India and then from India to the Middle East (Mitanni kingdom), and now they say it was from the Middle East to India.

In other words you wrote nonsense.

No one ever said any such thing.

Please be careful with your postings. We don't want newbies to become confused.

 

[Ygorcs]

As you read here, "The migration of Arab tribes to North Africa in the 11th century was a major factor in the linguistic and cultural Arabization of the Maghreb region, mainly Beni Hassan, Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym." Just about Banu Hilal we know they were about 300,000 Arabs accompanied by their wives and their children.

We are not here to talk about miracles.

Well, I really doubt 300,000 Arabs with their entire families went to the Maghreb (if that's a number from some old, medieval source, you should know most of those authors are extremely unreliable as far as number goes, especially if they were trying to stress how important the thing they were talking about had been). Firstly because the entirety of Saudi Arabia had only 3 million inhabitants in the early 20th century, the neighboring countries wouldn't have nearly as many. That's in the 1900s. Sorry, but I doubt that in the 7th century A.D. there were enough people in Arabia for 300,000 people to leave it for North Africa, many thousands of others migrate to Egypt and the Near East, and still not leave Arabia completely depopulated.

Secondly, and more importantly, because modern genetic studies show NO MAJOR Arabian-like genetic ancestry (especially in Algeria and Morocco) in the various Maghrebi population samples, Berbers and non-Berbers are in fact very similar genetically, and, for Arabians to have been conquerors nad . Did those people partially refuse to mix with the locals and largely die out after the Middle Ages? Unlikely, but that's the only explanation to how 21st century Moroccans and Algerians are incredibly similar to North African genetic outliers found in COPPER AGE, BRONZE AGE AND IRON AGE Spain, Sardinia and Italy many centuries or even millennia before the Arabian conquest, and so unlike Saudis, Yemenis and other Arabians.

 

[Shahmiri]

In that case, what's the big deal? Narasimhan clearly showed steppe ancestry present in northern Pakistan at least by the Early Iron Age, and a very clear path of expansion of steppe ancestry from the EBA to the LBA from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the forest and forest-steppe zone north of it to North-Central Asia and thence to South-Central Asia, just north of South Asia. Exactly as predicted by the steppe theory, only a bit later (maybe they simply didn't find the earlier than EIA samples, particularly if Aryans really cremated virtually all of their dead).

We know Indo-Aryans were in the Middle East in 1700 BC and Narasimhan says steppe-related people were in north of Pakistan in 1000 BC and in north of Kazakhstan in 1700 BC, it seems to be clear that those who came from Kazakhstan to Pakistan were not Indo-Aryans.

 

[hrvat22]

It is really funny to read what Lazaridis says about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1345065698482122752?s=20



The new theory seems to be that Indo-Aryan culture didn't originate in the Indian subcontinent!! In fact they were not Indo-Iranians who migrated to India but they were the Sanskrit speaking people who migrated there, so India had no role in the creation of Vedic Culture!

I think I talked about it earlier (Indo-European migrations). Croats have a lot of similar words with Sanskrit words. This mean that the common ancestors of the Croats (and other Slavs) and Sanskrit speaking peoples lived in one house.

This house is Russian steppe and carriers are R1a speaking peoples (posible and R1b)

Map

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.shtml

Consequently, this means that the Slavic language is older than Sanskrit, for now at least 2,000 BC.

Wikipedia:

"Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE"

Possible expansion of Indo-European languages according to the Kurgan hypothesis​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#/media/File:IE5500BP.png

This would probably be the real time and formation of the Slavic language(3,500 BC). Interestingly, many words which existed then(if we base it on Sanskrit) are similar with today's words.