Secret History
Long before the Nazis dreamed of an exalted master race, imperialists seized on what some dubbed the "Aryan invasion" theory to paint Britain's rule of India as the extension of a "natural" order. Indians, too, found a use for it. Caste-bound Hindu conservatives declared that the paler-skinned intruders must be ancestors of higher-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Such talk stirred a backlash in southern India, where generally darker-skinned speakers of Dravidian languages were urged to see themselves as a separate nation.
Hindu nationalists took a different tack. The West, some said, had made up the theory to set Hindus against each other. Christian missionaries and communists were using it to stoke caste hatred and so to recruit followers, they claimed. Worse, the theory challenged an emerging vision of Mother India as a sacred Hindu homeland. If the first speakers of Sanskrit and the creators of the Vedas had themselves been intruders, it was harder to portray later Muslim and Christian invaders as violators of a purity that good Hindus should seek to restore. So it was that some proposed an alternative "Out of India" theory. This held that the original Aryans were in fact Indians, who carried their Indo-European language and superior civilisation to the West.
Yet, even as Hindu nationalism has gained politically, culminating in the current rule of the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), evidence has mounted against the out-of-India hypothesis. Philologists have determined with a fair degree of certainty that the Vedas were probably composed between 1500BC and 500BC. Archaeology, meanwhile, indicates that a sophisticated urban civilisation had flourished in the Indus Valley around a thousand years earlier, but had collapsed before the Vedic Age.
The culture depicted in Sanskrit texts has different traits. It was largely rural and pastoral, relied on iron instead of bronze and appears to have used horses, chariots and bows and arrows-all of which are absent from the original Indus settlements. Proponents of the Aryan invasion conclude that a large influx of outsiders would neatly explain all this. Another clue: the proportion of Indians who can tolerate cows' milk decreases markedly towards the east, suggesting that cattle-herders migrated into the country from the west.
Even so, fierce exchanges in Indian social media have greeted every new study. Academic researchers have found themselves branded Christian missionaries, "sickularists" or even Chinese agents. Lately, however, such controversy has shifted from linguistics and archaeology to genetics. As techniques of extracting, analysing and tracking DNA through time and place improve, a clearer picture is emerging.
An accumulating pile of research using DNA from both ancient human remains and modern people indicates strongly that, beginning around 2000BC, north-west India was indeed infused with new blood. The newcomers appear to have shared the same roots in what is now southern Russia as did the invaders of a similar-sized peninsula to the west called Europe. Strikingly, too, the genetic markers identifying this group seem to be far more prevalent among modern north Indian Brahmins than among other Indians.
Because of the difficulty in collecting ancient DNA, such research has until recently relied on relatively few samples. But an international team of 92 scholars, including David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University who has pioneered techniques to analyse DNA more quickly and precisely, is set to publish data recovered from 362 "ancient individuals" from across South and Central Asia. Among their conclusions: there was probably an early migration of agriculturalists into India from what is now Iran, around 4000BC, and this was followed two millennia later-just before the Vedic Age-by a large influx from what is now southern Russia (see map).
The wider study not only confirms that "Aryans" (geneticists avoid the term) probably migrated from the steppes around the Volga and Don rivers to both India and Europe at around the same time. It also shows that their genetic markers later spread southwards across India, and are indeed particularly prevalent in "groups of priestly status".
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Steppe sons"
Comment: One wonders whether there were any particular driving forces behind the migrations:
- Genetic study confirms 4000 years ago Indians landed in Australia
- Arrival of Beaker culture 4,500 years ago changed Britain's DNA for ever
- 5,000 year old rock art discovered on cliff face in Siberia intrigues archaeologists
- The origins of the cannabis trade: Eurasian Steppe nomads were world's first 'pot dealers'
- Siberia: 50,000 year old bones may be the oldest Homo sapiens outside Africa and Middle East
Reader Comments
The story’s right there in the name. I always found strange the theory that people who came up the Indus were Indian when their very name says differently.
We are one race. We didn't migrate across the world and "spread" We were already there.
The modern 'Human race' is a result of homo sapiens mixing with a wide range of other humanoid species like Neanderthals and Denisovans.
"most people speak languages descended from "Proto-Indo-European" That is not truth either. Most of europeans speak with artificial language rooted in VULGAR LATIN. Their original languages are lost. Nothing exist about language spoken on British Isles before Roman conquer. Vulgar latin was created in Rome by people who spoke latin as second language = traders, slaves, mercenaries, etc etc. So? Current languages in most Europe are not languages that folx brought with them from root.
On other hand. Lithuanian, balto-slavic, language is sanskrit, and all slavic languages originate directly in sanskrit
Most of europeans speak with artificial language rooted in VULGAR LATIN. Their original languages are lost.I'd take exception on the term "Latin". It is ascribed to the Romans, which are likely a fiction, too. It might even have been an artifically created "administrative language".
Some constelations of stars mentioned in Vedas can be seen once in more than ten thousands years.As a side note, the biblical revelations of St. John start with the description of a star constellation as well. You know, the throne, the persons to his left and right, the animals etc. - typical medieval circumscription. And that constellation points to about 1480..1485 as most probable date of creation ...
The author of this sentence is stupid and prove he misunderstands history.
Never a German dignitary pretended to raise a master race. This is pure propaganda coming form the "winners" who were israeli's puppets.
The greatest achievement for men and for a country is when the population is homogeneous. Then the spirit and the body are connected and are relied to other members of the population. And that create harmony for the individual and for the society.
Such a homogenious population can reach the greatest achievements in culture and in spirituality.
That's all the NS men wanted to. Love you race !
A few weeks a go, I visited a prehistorical museum in north eastern Germany. And there I learned about the excavation place of a battle at about 1300 BC, here [Link] The numbers are already outdated (or falsified by Wikipedia), current estimates assume more than 6.000 dead, and more than 10.000 combattants on each side. How got that many people to fight in an area of (supposedly) endless forests and swamps, and more important, what were they fight about, in the middle of nowhere ? Compare this to "epic battles" in the same period described in biblical history, with all the archeological evidence missing.
So, it should come as no surprise that excavations are currently at halt, because of lack of funding. That couldn't be politically motivated ...