August 08, 2013

Major admixture in India took place ~4.2-1.9 thousand years ago (Moorjani et al. 2013)

A new paper on the topic of Indian population history has just appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics. In previous work it was determined that Indians trace their ancestry to two major groups, Ancestral North Indians (ANI) (= West Eurasians of some kind), and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) (= distant relatives of Andaman Islanders, existing today only in admixed form). The new paper demonstrates that admixture between these two groups took place ~4.2-1.9 thousand years ago.

The authors caution about this evidence of admixture:
It is also important to emphasize what our study has not shown. Although we have documented evidence for mixture in India between about 1,900 and 4,200 years BP, this does not imply migration from West Eurasia into India during this time. On the contrary, a recent study that searched for West Eurasian groups most closely related to the ANI ancestors of Indians failed to find any evidence for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West Eurasia within the past 12,500 years3 (although it is possible that with further sampling and new methods such relatedness might be detected). An alternative possibility that is also consistent with our data is that the ANI and ASI were both living in or near South Asia for a substantial period prior to their mixture. Such a pattern has been documented elsewhere; for example, ancient DNA studies of northern Europeans have shown that Neolithic farmers originating in Western Asia migrated to Europe about 7,500 years BP but did not mix with local hunter gatherers until thousands of years later to form the present-day populations of northern Europe.15, 16, 44 and 45
This is of course true, because admixture postdates migration and it is conceivable that the West Eurasian groups might not have admixed with ASI populations immediately after their arrival into South Asia. On the other hand, a long period of co-existence without admixture would be against much of human history (e.g., the reverse movement of the Roma into Europe, who picked up European admixture despite strong social pressure against it by both European and Roma communities, or the absorption of most Native Americans by incoming European, and later African, populations in post-Columbian times). It is difficult to imagine really long reproductive isolation between neighboring peoples.

Such reproductive isolation would require a cultural shift from a long period of endogamy (ANI migration, followed by ANI/ASI co-existence without admixture) to exogamy ~4.2-1.9kya (to explain the thoroughness of blending that left no group untouched), and then back to fairly strict exogamy (within the modern caste system). It might be simpler to postulate only one cultural shift (migration with admixture soon thereafter, with later introduction of endogamy which greatly diminished the admixture.

The authors cite the evidence from neolithic Sweden which does, indeed, suggest that the neolithic farmers this far north were "southern European" genetically and had not (yet) mixed with contemporary hunter-gatherers, as they must have done eventually. But, perhaps farmers and hunters could avoid each other during first contact, when Europe was sparsely populated. It is not clear whether the same could be said for India ~4 thousand years ago with the Indus Valley Civilization providing evidence for a large indigenous population that any intrusive group would have encountered. In any case, the problem of when the West Eurasian element arrived in India will probably be solved by relating it to events elsewhere in Eurasia, and, in particular, to the ultimate source of the "Ancestral North Indians".

It is also possible that some of the ANI-ASI admixture might actually pre-date migration. At present it's anyone's guess where the original limes between the west Eurasian and ASI worlds were. There is some mtDNA haplogroup M in Iran and Central Asia, which is otherwise rare in west Eurasia, so it is not inconceivable that ASI may have once extended outside the Indian subcontinent: the fact that it is concentrated today in southern India (hence its name) may indicate only the area of this element's maximum survival, rather than the extent of its original distribution. In any case, all mixture must have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of India.

A second interesting finding of the paper is that admixture dates in Indo-European groups are later than in Dravidian groups. This is demonstrated quite clearly in the rolloff figure on the left. Moreover, it does not seem that the admixture times for Indo-Europeans coincide with the appearance of the Indo-Aryans, presumably during the 2nd millennium BC: they are much later. I believe that this is fairly convincing evidence that north India has been affected by subsequent population movements from central Asia of "Indo-Scythian"-related populations, for which there is ample historical evidence. So, the difference in dates might be explained by secondary (later) admixture with other West Eurasians after the arrival of Indo-Aryans. Interestingly, the paper does not reject simple ANI-ASI admixture "often from tribal and traditionally lower-caste groups," while finding evidence for multiple layers of ANI ancestry  in several other populations.

My own analysis of Dodecad Project South Indian Brahmins arrived at a date of 4.1ky, and of North Indian Brahmins, a date of 2.3ky, which seems to be in good agreement with these results.

The authors also report that "we find that Georgians along with other Caucasus groups are consistent with sharing the most genetic drift with ANI". I had made a post on the differential relationship of ANI to Caucasus populations which seems to agree with this, and, of course, in various ADMIXTURE analyses, the component which I've labeled "West Asian" tends to be the major west Eurasian element in south Asia.

Here are the estimated admixture proportions/times from the paper:


Sadly, the warm and moist climate of India, and the adoption of cremation have probably destroyed any hope of studying much of its recent history with ancient DNA. On the other hand, the caste system has probably "fossilized" old socio-linguistic groups, allowing us to tell much by studying their differences and correlating them with groups outside India.

Coverage elsewhere: Gene Expression, HarappaDNA
Related podcast on BBC.

AJHG doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.07.006

Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India

Priya Moorjani et al.

Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent. The date of mixture is unknown but has implications for understanding Indian history. We report genome-wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI-ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago. In a subset of groups, 100% of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period. These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy.

Link

168 comments:

  1. " It is not clear whether the same could be said for India ~4 thousand years ago with the Indus Valley Civilization providing evidence for a large indigenous population that any intrusive group would have encountered."

    A caste system that harshly stigmatized out-marriage would do it.

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  2. For continuity, from your post on Roll off analysis of North Indian Brahmins:
    --------------------------------
    Dienekes said...

    Why would Brahmins intermarrying with Sound Indians in the last ~1,000 years cause south Indian Brahmins to show an earlier signal of admixture than north Indian Brahmins?
    Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:15:00 pm
    SB said...
    Could it be because the south Indians they intermarried with, themselves had earlier signal of admixture? I don't know... I was only alluding to the historic aspects on the topic. But then historical records may not reflect reality...
    Tuesday, October 09, 2012 4:49:00 pm
    ----------------------------------

    Clearly as per your analysis if the South Indian Brahmins show a 4.1 KY arrival date, the Indo-Aryans arrived 4.1 ky ago. The 2.3 KY arrival in North Indian Brahmins may signal Indo-Scythians? I am surprised that many Scythians moved into N. India??
    I still wonder if the signal responsible for the older date for South Indian Brahmins is due to the older, already admixed Dravidian populations they inter-married with. I do not completely understand the rolloff analysis algorithm so I may be wrong.

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  3. Well, if those figures are hard to accept, about the delay in arriving vs. the beginning of admixture, then how about the big one- the ancestors of the San were supposed to have bounced around the continent for 60,0000 years with the ancestors of L1, L2, and L3 with virtually no admixture until the last few thousand years? I was just a lowly middle school science teacher, but I have to say that does not pass my smell test.

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  4. The overall complete sample estimate of the inferred admixture date is a meaningless number when different sub-sample populations differ by more than a factor of two from 64 +/- 11 to 144 +/- 27 generations. Historical, archaeology, geographical realities and the patterns seen in the data itself, all strongly support the notion that admixture in South Asia was not a single event happening at a single time every place in the subcontinent.

    The method used mostly reflects the most recent admixture date, so it largely ignores the impact of waves that contributed a lot to ANI-ASI layers. For example, if a first wave of ANI migration reaches the entire South Asian subcontinent, and the Indo-European regions also experience a second wave of ANI migration that is limited to areas where the Indo-European language family took hold because Dravidian language areas are hostile to these migrants, then you would get an older date for ANI admixture in South India than in North India. To play out this scenario in more detail, imagine that a first wave of Indo-Aryan conquest reaches all of South Asia ca. 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE and gives rise to similar levels of ANI admixture everywhere at roughly the percentages seen in modern Southern India (i.e. about 30-40%). In much of Dravidian South Asia, there is ca. 1000 BCE to 500 BCE, a series of post-ANI admixture counter-revolutions against the Indo-Aryan invaders that restored the Dravidian culture and language to dominance without significance mass population movement. Then ca. 400 BCE to 100 CE, there is a second wave of Indo-Aryan migration to those parts of South Asia where the Dravidian counterrevolution failed, resulting in an infusion of 10% to 30% (of the total) of additional ANI admixture in places where Indo-Aryans had successfully defeated counter-revolutions, while these second wave migrants were unwelcome and kept out of places where the Dravidian counter-revolution succeeded.

    A familiar analogy (in terms of political see-saws, not necessarily population genetics) would be the rapid Moorish conquest of Spain ca. 700 CE, followed by eight centuries of reconquest of Iberia by Europeans, with some holdout areas as late as 1492, during which more significantly more North African Muslims might migrate Grenada which remained Moorish until almost the end centuries after the original Moorish invasion, but did not migrate to territories that Europeans had retaken.

    The surprisingly young time depth of the Dravidian language family fits this scenario. This could have arisen from almost all of the indigeneous South Asian language families being almost wiped out by the first wave Indo-Aryans. Then, the king or chief of one of the last holdout regions (probably midway down the East Coast of the Deccan Peninsula) whose country speaks the proto-Dravidian language leads a counterrevolution against the Indo-Aryans that unites the people of South India under a dynasty that lasts long enough for the people who live in it to start speaking proto-Dravidian. A few generations later, however, when counterrevolution's ouster of a linguistically Indo-European ruling class is secure, the practical need to be united politically to defeat the Indo-Aryan conquerors dissipated, and his great-great grandchild is a lousy king at a time when a climate bump makes the kingdom weak, this kingdom could break up into fiefdoms whose languages start to differentiate to give us the modern Dravidian language family.

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  5. archeology has show large population movement from the indus region eastward after 2000 BC. This is the most obvious correlation with the data. Yet the paper remains silent on this.

    Is ANI proximity to western eurasian groups more than what is simply expected due to geographical proximity. If not then ASI and ANI are groupings are not of much value.

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  6. I wonder if there were two migrations: an early first farmer one on foot with herds of sheep and a later one with horses and cattle.

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  7. Kashmiri Upper caste "ANI" autosomal, age 2987 years old, the oldest among Indo-Arian Upper caste
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZcOdLS5QwK0/UgO3Wi8rQzI/AAAAAAAAJAw/BoI8TtIPMV0/s1600/india.jpg

    Kashmiri language the oldest branch among Indo-Arian languages, age of separation 2900 years ago
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UK6uv6RZBlw/TZr4U1kHkKI/AAAAAAAADbY/jvqITDejMG0/s1600/nature.jpg

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  8. I have said it before, the population of pre-historical India was mostly composed of Tribals who were related (distantly) to the Andaman Islanders...they spoke neither Dravidian or Munda (Austro-asiatic), but likely languages that are or are related to Nahali (Language Y substrate), Colin Masica's Language "X", Kusunda, the Vedda language substrate, the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, possibly the indigenous Australian languages, the substrate(s) that are a part of some Tibeto-Burman languages in northeast India, and various other substrates found in other languages such as Tharu (all non-IE, non-Burushaski, non-Dravidian, non-Austro-asitic, non-Sino-Tibetan substrates).

    The mostly unstudied substrate(s) in Dravidian attest to it being intrusive in southern India. Some of it's core vocabulary also attests to that. After the Tribals came the Mongloids (Austro-asiatic and Tibeto-Burman), then Dravidians, and then Aryans.

    India has a very complex ethnic history.

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  9. @Dienekes
    ''Sadly, the warm and moist climate of India, and the adoption of cremation have probably destroyed any hope of studying much of its recent history with ancient DNA. On the other hand, the caste system has probably "fossilized" old socio-linguistic groups, allowing us to tell much by studying their differences and correlating them with groups outside India.''
    Does Farmana aDNA ring any bells?
    @andrew
    I strongly suggest you to take expert advise if you ever want to have a scientific answer on the Indo-European and other issues...
    http://new-indology.blogspot.in/
    A good day to you both...

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  10. The American Journal of Human Genetics (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.11.010

    Aryan Migration Theory--On the contrary, South Indians migrated to north and South Asians migrated into Eurasia

    The study is comprehensive, unlike previous studies of human genome and is unique, because it focuses on large number of populations in South Asia, and India, a region which harbours one of the highest levels of genetic diversity in Eurasia and currently accounts for one sixth of human population in the world.

    _____________


    South Indians migrate to North India, over time isolated by natural barriers like the Vindhya Mountain range. North Indians migrate out of India, establishing a genetic link between North Indian groups with west asia and central asia, and South Indian groups having no similarity with anyone in the world, OTHER than North Indians.

    Makes complete SENSE!

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  11. postneo:

    "archeology has show large population movement from the indus region eastward after 2000 BC."

    If I recall correctly, Indus influence expanded somewhat southward before 2000 BCE as well.

    "This is the most obvious correlation with the data."

    Certainly deserves attention. There is also substantial evidence of cultural elements from Afghanistan entering the subcontinent during the second millennium BCE. It seems possible, if not in fact probable, that Y-DNA R-Z93 entered northern India via that same vector.

    Grey:

    "I wonder if there were two migrations: an early first farmer one on foot with herds of sheep and a later one with horses and cattle."

    Cattle, though at first infrequent, appeared along with sheep and goats at Mehrgarh during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The first securely dated horse remains on the subcontinent are from Pirak, in Balochistan, and date from ca 1700 BCE.

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  12. It is worth remarking the the more recent rolloff date estimates are in the historic era. We know from written records who was ruling where at the time and in general what was going on and there is a series of historic events in the time frame of the secondary wave of ANI expansion that can account for population genetic shifts in Indo-European regions at about that time, culminating in the brief rule of King Ashoka who was much more peaceful than his blood thirsty ruthless territory conquering predecessors.

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  13. "An alternative possibility that is also consistent with our data is that the ANI and ASI were both living in or near South Asia for a substantial period prior to their mixture. "
    So basically these r1a caucasoids have been there a long time and have spread west, not the other way around like was once imagined.

    It's also striking how much the andaman islanders look like black africans. Of course I have seen this on some out there blogs as evidence that the black africans in extreme west africa somehow colonized india but I am thinking that's the other way around now, too. At some point as the everything from east anatolia to indus dried up and got displaced I think a lot of big changes and migrations took place (and as someone put it the "running around the planes on horses thing" is relatively new so it's probably too recent to look at the iron age for culprits).

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  14. To me Indian mtDNA landscape looks very autochthonous. There is not really much room for West Asian migrations. If we insist that there have been migrations, as we can do on the basis of linguistic evidence, these migrations must have been mainly male-mediated. The percentages of haplogroup M in India seem to vary from c. 50% to 80%. The lowest percentage is in Nicobar Islands (less than 10%), where there is a lot of F and B. Even in Uttar Pradesh, the percentage of M is 58%. By comparison, the percentage of M in Pakistan seems to be still 45%. The second biggest group consists of mtDNA R lineages, and they look also highly autochthonous. The haplogroup U is also widely distributed in India, but the oldest clade U2a is probably Mesolithic/Palaeolithic. Iranian lineage U7 has a frequency of 2.0% in India. Northern lineages, such as U4, U5 and K, have frequencies of 0.6%, 0.4%. and 0.1%. The share of H seems to be 1.4% in India and 11% in Pakistan and 17% in Iran. The frequency of I is 0.3% in India and 0.7% in Pakistan. The most important East Asian lineages such as A and D have frequencies of 1.3% and 1.8%, respectively. N1a is probably brought from the Near East and its frequency is 0.2%. Haplogroup T could be connected to cultures North of India, and its share seems to be bigger in India, 1.1% than in Pakistan, 0.7%. On the basis of this, one could think that the admixtures have happened mostly among ancient Indian and Pakistani groups and not that much between newcomers from the Near East or Central Asia.
    (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.biomedcentral.com%2Fcontent%2Fsupplementary%2F1471-2156-5-26-s4.xls&ei=Nz8FUtfVIKPG4gTO1IGIBQ&usg=AFQjCNGGefS2TL100HLccvBdKbtaqHilJw&sig2=wiBf6drNmTSMDTyUqeQfdA&bvm=bv.50500085,d.bGE)

    As usual, it is easier to see migrations to India on the basis of yDNA. On the one hand, Y-DNA L could be a signal of the ancient movements from Pakistan to India (Indus Valley culture?), and on the other hand, I would connect yDNA J to migrations of agriculturalists from the Near East and to all later contacts between India and Muslim countries. As for the very frequent haplogroup R1a, there are justified grounds to connect it to Indo-European languages in India as in other areas. I think that in this respect the Oleg Balonovsky’s R1a1a-M198 map published on this site (http://dienekes.blogspot.fi/2013/03/thesis-of-oleg-balonovsky.html) is interesting. There you can see how many haplotypes migrate between India, Northern and Southern Altaians, Mongols and Shors. There must have been contacts between India and Central Asia, and this is in fact something that we already know.

    By the way, how do they do these admixture analyses? Is it on the basis of yDNA and MtDNA haplogroup frequencies or on the basis of autosomal data or something else?

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  15. Some Ydna haplogroups fit with that theory? Some R and some Q?
    For exemple, Q1b is found among the higher casts including Kashmiri Pandits.

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  16. This a great paper but it fails to take into account Dravidian history and research. Much of what is written is from the perspective of the ANI.

    Non-Dravidian scholars presume that Indo-Aryan speakers appeared in India during the 2nd millennium BC. Although researchers have assumed this date for the migration of I-E speakers into India the archaeological data has never supported such an early date for the entrance of I-E speakers into India.

    The Indo-European speakers are associated archaeologically with the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) people. Prior to the introduction of PGW, the Indians at Harappa used black-and-red ware (BRW). The archaeological records indicate that I-E speakers entered India on two occasions. Raman and Joshi date the introduction of PGW between 1300-1000 BC. We see a second migration of I-E speakers using PGW between 800-600BC. Two migrations of I-E speakers into India would explain Moorjani et al finding of late dates for the entry of I-E speakers into India.

    Most researchers following the lead of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalist) claim that the ASI or Dravidian speakers are not related to any other group. This is false.

    Dravidian scholars claim that they are related to Africans, especially the C-Group people of Nubia and claim a recent migration into India of Dravidian agro-pastoralist.

    Bernard Sergent has discussed the Dravidian researchers who claim they originated in Africa. These researchers use archaeological, and linguistic evidence to support this view.B.B. Lal found archaeological evidence that South Indian megalithic people (Dravidians)at lower levels of Madurai and Tirukkampullyur were related to the C-Group of Nubia based on the fact that both groups used a common BRW (which was also used at Harappa), a common burial complex incorporating megaliths and circular rock enclosures a common type rock cut sepulcher.

    There is linguistic evidence by Dravidian, European and African scholars like Homburger, Sergent, Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya that show a genetic relationship between Niger-Congo and Dravidian languages. Due to a common origin in Middle Africa Dravidian languages like Tamil an African languages like Mandekan and Wolof share the names for domesticated animals including cattle, goat/sheep and horses. They share the same name for grain, cotton, land of cultivation and millet; arrow, city, house, writing, boat, mountain and deluge.

    The Tamil scholar Dr. Aravaanan has noted that Dravidians and Africans share many physical characteristics including dolichocephalic indexes, platyrrhine nasal index, stature and blood groups.

    Africans and Dravidians share several Y-chromosomes, HLA and mtDNA. Shared Y-chromosomes include M-173, H1, K2 and T-M70. This is interesting because the highest frequentcy of T-M70 is found among the Niger-Congo Fulani speakers.In relation to Y-chromosome H1, 22% of Dravidians carry this haplogroup.

    Sickle cell anemia is frequent among Africans and Dravidian tribal populations. It is interesting to not that both Arab-Indian and Senegal SC, are associated with a CIT mutation at position-158.

    Africans and Dravidians belong to the M haplogroup. Both groups ahsre haplogroups M1,M30 and M33. The M1 haplogroup was especially evident among high caste people in Kerela according to Kivisild et al 1999.

    In summary, I-E speakers entered India and settled in Baluchitan and Gujarat between 1300-1000BC. Between 800-600 BC a second group of PGW I-E population enter the Gangetic plains.This may explain Marjani et al's discovery of two I-E movements into India.

    Dravidian scholars believe that they are linguistically, cultural and physically related to Africans and that they do not enter India until after 3000BC. They support this view using linguistic and archaeological evidence. The genomic evidence also supports a Dravidian-African connection as maintained by Dravidian scholars.

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  17. 1) ANI shows a divergence of several thousand years from the Caucasian profile. It is therefore unlikely to have been close to it at the time of the first admixture.

    2) Geographical isolation, at the time of the first admixture, between ANI and ASI is quite probable. The Indo-Gangetic plain was heavily forested to the east, and the pre-Thar desert would have formed a southern boundary to the IVC-Mehrgarh-BMAC zone.

    3) The Dravidian admixture occurs at the time that the IVC is beginning to transition into the Cemetary H culture. Settlements begin to move eastward and southward into the rest of India, as environmental change forces the Indus population to find new places to live.

    4) The second admixture occurs at a time when the caste system was at its weakest. Between 300 BC & 300 AD Buddhism was dominant and India was subject to a number of invasions by groups from, or passing through, the Gandhara-Bactria area.


    It makes sense, then, that ANI was the genetic profile of the IVC-Mehrgarh-BMAC populations. This would also be why the Harappa project seems to find a 'Baloch' correlation to ANI.

    The first admixture occurred when the IVC collapsed, sending a fairly large population east and south. In addition, newly the newly 'Indo-Europeanised' BMAC, Swat & Cemetery H peoples are moving along the same track into the rest of India.

    Admixture ceases as castes begin to form and endogamy take hold.

    However, when Buddhism was on the rise, a number of groups from the Bactria-Gandhara region invade India. Being Buddhist themselves, they intermarry creating the second admixture point between 200 BC & 200 AD.

    When Hinduism gains dominance, again, and the Guptas begin their rise, caste endogamy becomes more important, freezing admixture in the north.

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  18. ''Most researchers following the lead of Hindutva (Hindu Nationalist) claim that the ASI or Dravidian speakers are not related to any other group. This is false.''

    So Hinduvta are now setting up genetic studies making them state that ASI have no relation outside of India? Or maybe you adhere to a Biblical belief that Dravidians come from Elam a lost tribe of Canaan?

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  19. there is large scale movement from the indus eastwards around 2000 bc attested by archeology. This and not some putative central asian migration is the like source of admixture.

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  20. to aniasi

    You are aware that most Buddhists came from Brahmin families? and that Buddha himself continued caste vaarna society.

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  21. I just wanted to add that, at the moment, I prefer to think that R1a arrived from Pakistan to India during the Mesolithic period or, at the latest, during the Neolithic, and was present in all great Neolithic civilizations of the area. Of course, the languages of these cultures need not be Indo-European or Dravidian.

    As for this Oleg Balonovsky’s map, it is interesting to note that there are several Indian clusters (at least 3). It would be illuminating to see if some of them are more frequent among the tribals of India, or, in particular, shared between the Pakistanis and Indians, or Iranians and Indians, or more typical of Indians and Central Asians. Anyone knows?

    Of course, part of R1a might have entered India from the North with IE languages. This is the question we all would like to find the answer to.

    That haplogroup T is very particular. It seems to be very frequent in Somalis and Fulbe. In India, it seems to be frequent only around Orissa on the East Coast.

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  22. postneo:

    "This and not some putative central asian migration is the like source of admixture."

    That "putative central asian" intrusion is also "attested by archeology" and Y-DNA R did not originate in northern India. Whether that intrusion played a part in the admixture under discussion may be a different question, though.

    aniasi:

    "Geographical isolation, at the time of the first admixture, between ANI and ASI is quite probable. The Indo-Gangetic plain was heavily forested to the east, and the pre-Thar desert would have formed a southern boundary to the IVC-Mehrgarh-BMAC zone."

    IVC sites are found as far south as Gujarat, so the Thar desert did not form the southern boundary.

    "In addition, newly the newly 'Indo-Europeanised' BMAC..."

    If indeed the BMAC spoke only one language, it seems likely that they spoke Indo-Iranian. I see no compelling reason why this would necessarily be a new development, though.

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  23. bmdriver, if they have the same Y-DNA or mtDNA they have at least some of the same ancestry. Just looking at the andamese it's obvious they are similar to current day west africans.

    I am guessing neither of them were where they are now 10k years ago. There's zero record of any negroid skull in africa until about 6k years ago, and the dravidians refer to themselves as "the immigrants".

    I am guessing they moved into india from the west and so did the vedics, from further west. And the black africans west instead of east.

    I don't know about the labguage similarities but aside from the dravidians everyone has some to something else. Maybe the distance is so great the idea has not been explored.

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  24. @ aniasi
    You must be joking? There is no such thing as a Mehrgarh-IVC-BMAC complex. Mehrgarh and the Indus Valley civilization are separated by 1000's of years. The art and cultures are different, and while the people of Mehrgarh cultivated Wheat,the Dravidians in the Indus Valley cultivated millet.

    The civilization in Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) was founded by Harappans or IVC people and Elamites. The archaeology makes it clear that that the BMAC originated after the decline of the IVC site of Shortughai (c.2400-2200BC) on the Oxus river. Most researchers have noted that the BMAC have strong Elamite affinities. Artifacts from the BMAC site at Altyn depe ruins have terracotta statuettes with Proto Elaimite and linear Sumerian script.

    Some researchers have attempted to base an Indo-Aryan origin on the BMAC based on artifacts from Gilund. This is a fantasy because the pottery from Gilund, Rajasthan, and the banks of the Bana river is BRW. The Indo-Aryans used PGW as discussed above.

    The exotic goods found at Gilund suggest that the site was a warehouse were goods imported from Central Asia were housed.

    In summary Mehrgarh and the IVC are separated in time by 1000's of years. The BMAC is associated with Elamites and Harappans--not Indo-Aryan people who did not enter India until 1300 BC. The discovery of BRW at Gilund suggest that the people spoke Dravidian languages--not Indo-Aryan. The BRW ceramic style is found at Harappan sites and the lower levels of Madurai and Tirukkampuliyur at South Indian megalithic sites. This pottery tradition supports the widespread nature of Dravidian populations in North India prior to the Aryan Invasion of India 1300BC.

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  25. @Grognard

    The whole dravidian movement has been exposed fully as a christian motivated agenda. Your simply not aware of the huge colonial literature that still exists that exposes the roots of the Afro-Elam-Dravidian movement, and it does unfortunately
    has its roots in religious ideology.

    Let me explain in simple terms, during the 19th century the south Indians where labelled as dravidians, having never laballed themselves as such. Indian scholars understand their own literature very well.

    Mountstuart Grant-Duff, the British Governer of Madras in his address to the students of the madras university in 1886 told the students "You are of pure Dravidian race"

    ''We are to teach false history, because we find in them a false religion.'' Thomas Macauley, one of the founders of Indian English Education.

    In Tamil Sangam literature it makes no references what so ever to any enslavement or oppression from invading white tribes from anywhere. In the Rig Veda it never once mentions them migrating from anywhere especially not west asia, central asia or europe. But this movement had its origin in the formation of the colonial english education, within that such ideologies are filtered. No-one knows history before them, unless its taught. Now the question is who is teaching that history and is there an agenda?

    In my opinion yes.

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  27. @Grognard

    It is clear that you have not kept up with the scientific literature. Scientists no longer refer to Africans as "negroes, negroid" and etc. This population is now called 'Sub-Saharans".

    Skeletons of Sub-Saharan or negro people are much older than 6-10ky old.Trenton W. Holliday, in 'Evolution at the Crossroads: Modern Human Emergence in Western Asia, American Anthropologist 102(1)[2000], tested the hypotrhesis that if modern Africans had dispersed into the Levant from Africa, "tropically adapted hominids" would be represented in the archaeological history of the Levant, especially in relation to the Qafzeh-Skhul hominids.

    Holliday found that the Qafzeh-Skhul hominids 20-10kya were assigned to the Sub-Saharan population, along with Natufian samples. This researcher also found African fauna in the area.

    Holliday confirmed his hypothesis that the hominid replacement of the Neanderthal people in the Levant were Sub-Saharan Africans. This discovery would make the appearence of 'negro' skeletons much earlier than 6-10kya as you claim.

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  29. 1. ASI folks entered India first.
    2. ANI folks were the neolithic farmers. These would be the dravidians. The ANI folks mixed with the ASI folks to create the "Baloch" component modal in places where IVC folks florished. The Baloch component is predominantly West Eurasian. These people were the dasyus mentioned in the Rigveda. This is consistent with Metspalu's finding that ANI is older than 12000 years old in the subcontinent.
    3. Due to climactic changes and the indo-Aryan invasion, the Dasyu folks were forced to move down South, resulting in even more admixture. We actually see >10% North European component in Brahmins. It comes from the Indo-Europeans from BMAC. People from BMAC were hybrid north europeans/caucasian. A typical admixture I notice is 5% Caucasian and 10% North European in ADMIXTURE.

    It is true that Buddhism nearly destroyed the caste system and wiped out Hinduism until some Brahmins repopularized Hinduism in India.

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  30. Kristiina,

    The main, and quite possibly only, R1a found in South Asia is R1a-Z93. There's no way this marker was anywhere near India during the Mesolithic or even Neolithic. It's too closely related to the European-specific R1a-Z283. In fact, R1a-Z283 is more closely related to R1a-Z93 than to R1a-L664, which is another European-specific subclade.

    Europe has all three subclades, and more, with instances of R1a-Z93* all over Europe. On the other hand, South Asia just has R1a-Z93, with R1a-Z93* occurring only sporadically closer to Afghanistan.

    So to cut a long story short, the vast majority of modern Asian R1a is very likely of European origin, and it arrived in South Asia via Central Asia no earlier than the Bronze Age.

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  31. Va_Highlander:

    Fair enough about Lothal. However, the Thar still formed a formidable South-East border for much of the IVC zone.

    The BMAC shows a transition during this same period, similar to that of the IVC. Witzel & Lubotsky point out that the substratum in Indo-Aryan may well have come from the BMAC. During the period in question Indo-Iranian would have been a fairly new language. Even the Sintashta culture only appears from about 2200 BC.

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  32. NOT one single tamil sangam literature talk about them being immigrants or being invaded and oppressed, quite a bit hole in a colonial story that they where invaded. Also no where in any of the vedas does it talk about coming from outside of India but it does state migrations out of India. Almost every genetic study concludes ASI have no relations outside of africa. Clive winters is pushing a religious ideological belief that Dravidians are Caananites from Elam, a bibiical miration hes trying to prove. African zebu cows have a genetic trait that comes from India, Zebu cows where domesticatd in India, thus proving a migration to africa from india. ASI have no relation outside of India, but ANI do, so any proto indo-europeam-sanskrit-munda-Dravidian dialect would have been spoken by ANI migrants moving to west asia not ASI. Sanskrit developed it spread quick along the flat planes of north india, but struggled to make impact in the mountainous regions of the south, dravidian languages have 40% Sanskrit vocabulary

    Humans settle india approx 60,000years ago, around Gujarat , they moved down south to hills and mountains early humans would have settled in caves/forrests for safety, which is where you get the highest concentration of tribals in the south, rather the flat northern planes. Overtime tribals settling south india move back north and east,40,000years approx (im only talking about Indian and west migration). As south Indians migrate back to north india, they become isolated because of the vindhya mountain range for along as 20,000years, creating the ANI and ASI.

    ''Outside Africa, the earliest and fastest growth is inferred in Southern Asia ∼52 kya. Comparisons of relative regional population sizes through time suggest that between approximately 45 and 20 kya most of humanity lived in Southern Asia.
    -mtDNA Variation Predicts Population Size in Humans and Reveals a Major Southern Asian Chapter in Human Prehistory.

    genetics would show a difference between the temperate flat plains of northern India, with the mountainous hot humid regions of south india.

    In north India the flat plains make it an ideal setting for agriculture development, it takes place from India through to Afghanistan and West ASIA from ANI migrations that come from north india going into west asia, central asia, technology gets betters allowing for greater distances traveled. As civilization increases, 15,000-5000years ago, more people are living in farming societies, population increases grater than tribal people who remain in the hunter gather society. Hence no west migration into India, as this study also suggests, and many others.

    The American Journal of Human Genetics (2011), doi:10.1016
    Aryan Migration Theory--On the contrary, South Indians migrated to north and South Asians migrated into Eurasia

    As development increases, farming to discovering iron metal in soil, to building towns, carts, domesticating animals takes hold especially in northern india on flatter plaines, to west asia, the onset of techonology, indians where able to migrate back in mountainous south India quicker and easier, Indian tribes start admixture back from 4.2-1.9 thousand years quickly, backs up Vedic literature that doesn't mention caste, but occurred later on, the Saraswati dried up, people with skills and trade moved into less developed areas with less developed cultures (hunter gather -less developed culture)to the ganges plain, this migration reclassified the vaarna system into a more rigid administration. West Asian genome comes from ANI migrants before ANI mixed back with ASI. Then from the 3-2nd century bc onwards those ANI that had migrated out to west asia and central asia, now civilized start to attack the boundaries of india, Huns, Alexander the great and others, which resulted in a more rigid vaarna system, a stricter code of conduct, administration and soceity in general, especially in north India which bore the brunt of such invasions, finally caste became completely rigid during onset of the islamic invasion, 10th-18th century.

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  33. Davidski
    Yes, I agree that Mesolithic may be too early. But in this study

    (http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/pdf/ejhg2009194a.pdf)

    the say that ”Analysis of associated STR diversity profiles revealed that among the R1a1a*(xM458) chromosomes the highest diversity is observed among populations of the Indus Valley yielding coalescent times above 14 KYA (thousands of years ago), whereas the R1a1a* diversity declines toward Europe where its maximum diversity and coalescent times of 11.2 KYA are observed in Poland, Slovakia and Crete.”

    It looks like L664 is the oldest R1a1 in Europe, and Z283 arrived later. However, Z645 may have its origin in the Middle East or North of Caucasus, and then Z283 spread in Europe and Z93 in the Middle East and Central Asia.

    In the end, you may be right or not, but the frequency of R1a1 is quite high in India (16%), Pakistan (24%) and Iran (14%). So, you think that the vast majority of it comes from Central Asia and is ultimately of recent (=Bronze Age) Eastern European origin.

    I am not saying that the Indians migrated to Europe or Europeans to India. I just thought that the ancestral clades arose somewhere in between and part of this Indian R1a1 arrived early through Iran and Pakistan and part of it at a later stage with the IE languages.

    This puzzle could be resolved by analyzing the Indian clusters closer and comparing them with the haplotypes of other ethnicities.

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  34. @clive sorry, I didn't mean to use terms you find offensive.

    I am not sure shkul counts as a modern human either let alone black african in genotype. It's got a jutting unibrow and receding forhead and jutting progothicated teeth. It does have a tiny chin but I think this is some kind of neanderthal hybrid.

    bmdriver, I think the y-dna speaks for itself though it doesn't say exactly what clive does.

    First off we have r. forget r1a1 and go to its parent group and see it covers basically everything from india to iberia very thickly. This is basically caucasoids or whatever you want to call them. This didn't happen in the iron age this is the repopulation of europe after the last ice age or even further back for sure. Hitler didn't find similar skulls in indus because of some invasion, they were basically the same all along.

    So we go futher up the tree and what do we get? We get the middle easterners and some other folk scattered through europe.

    Then the next step is the interesting one. We get D and E hanging off of C. Now C is almost certainly an asian centric clade. It HAS to be because this is where the east asians come from! It also has the most diversity in India so it makes sense it got founded there. But this makes no sense in regard to the more derived middle eastern genotypes.

    First off, E is further into africa than D! It's also further into africa than J, I and G. Now theoretically weird migration patters can occur but this is the opposite of what we expect.

    E is in between A (in africa) and D and A and D are a LONG ways away. This is where everything falls apart. We know what order things occured but the where makes no sense for that pattern.

    You have to believe in totally crazy "coastal migration" patterns. Just look at the austronesians.

    http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/5186466/1/

    So we have austronesians in australia and also arabia.

    And look at D crushed to the bottom of India. And L crushed along the west coast of india. What kind of "coastal migration" leads to that?

    It doesn't.

    But if everything is radiating out of india then it does. There's one way genetic and language migration into the south indians. That means they have been being pushed outward by the vedics for some time, there's not much other explanation for that.

    Suddenly everything clicks into place. The west africans are the first ones to migrate out of india and their haplogroups have become pretty rare elsewhere. The pygmy "B" types came next. Then the san. Then the austronesians and by this time humans had invented boats so they radiated out over much of the pacific.

    Anyway, that's what I think after endless time trying to rectify all the parts of human origins that don't seem to add up.


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  35. @bmdriver

    You claim that the Sangam literature does not mention any migrations into India. This is false the Silappadikaram, Manimekalai, and Kalittokai mention three migrations of Tamil into South India. They were the Yakshas, Koshan/Kosalas and Thirayar (Sea Kings).

    Yakshas are suppose to have entered South India from Southeast Asia. The Koshan or Kushana are suppose to be Dravidians from Central Asia.

    According to the Silappadikaram and Kalittokai some Dravidians entered India from Kumarinadu, a landmass that is suppose to have connected South India and East Africa.

    Pandyan Dravidians ruled Kumarinadu before they emigrated to South India.The Dravidians on Kumarinadu worshipped Amma(n), a god worshipped by many Niger-Congo tribes and Egyptians belonging to the New Kingdom.

    The migrations of the Dravidians is not a religion dogma. There is no such thing as a Dravidian view that they originated from Elamites. Researchers found a relationship between Elamite and Dravidian languages.

    Menges was the first archaeologist to argue that some Dravidians landed in Iran and migrated into India and the Indus Valley. The movement of this group is supported by the spread of BRW from Nubia to the Indus Valley and the South Indian megalithic.; and the Dravidian substratum in the prakrit, puranas and other languages in Eurasia.

    40% of the Dravidian lexicon is not of Sanskrit origin, it is the other way around.

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  36. @bmdriver

    You claim that the term Dravidian is of Christian origin is false.The word Dravidian is found in the Bhagavata Puranas which mentions the 'Dravida Desa'. There is also reference to Dravida in the Manusmrti 'fallen tribes, demoted to the rank of Sudras in the varnic scale encoded in the Rig Veda (purusa sukta).

    This is very interesting because South Indians are not mentioned in the Rig veda. The fact that Dravida desa is mentioned in Rig Veda, indicates that Dravidians were already living in North India when the Aryans invaded the country.

    bmdriver you have never read the Rig Veda, if had you would know that the text is about Aryan nomads invading North India to steal the wealth of the Dravidians who lived in pura or tripuras (walled cities and forts). Indra the Aryan god is referred to as PURAMDAR 'fort destroyer'. In brief Indra was "he [who] rends forts as age consumes a garment".

    The South Indians were also called Dravida. Adi Sankara in the 75th version on Saundarya-lahari referred to a Tamil Saiva Tirujnana Sambandar, who lived in the 7th century: 'Dravidsisu', nearly a thousand years before Caldwell used the term for the Dravidian family of languages.

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  37. @Davidski
    ''So to cut a long story short, the vast majority of modern Asian R1a is very likely of European origin, and it arrived in South Asia via Central Asia no earlier than the Bronze Age.''
    Just let the Farmana DNA decide that mate, i hope you are not a psychic are you? but a follower of science.....
    Oh yes i forgot Australia is improving yeah saw that last test match:).
    Good Day.
    About the Paper Parasar in Zack Ajmals blog has made some scientific conclusions-
    ”Do we know why the lower limit was raised from the 1200 of their initial proposal to 1900? Additional 13 groups – that should broaden the range not reduce? Or perhaps they removed the non-cline populations such as the Santhals that were lowering the age?
    It ranges from ~4200 for Andhra Pradesh Vysya to ~1900 for the Uttar Pradesh Dharkar, Brahmin, Sindhi, and Pathan. If ANI-ASI admixture first occurred in the south it seems to me quite plausible that until a very recent period there was either no ASI in a places like Uttar Pradesh, Sindh, the Punjab, Gandhara etc, or there was ASI present, but no admixture.
    They also can’t date entry, and just limit themselves to the time of admixture:
    “It is also important to emphasize what our study has not shown. Although we have documented evidence for mixture in India between about 1,900 and 4,200 years BP, this does not imply migration from West Eurasia into India during this time. On the contrary, a recent study that searched for West Eurasian groups most closely related to the ANI ancestors of Indians failed to find any evidence for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West Eurasia within the past 12,500 years3 (although it is possible that with further sampling and new methods such relatedness might be detected). An alternative possibility that is also consistent with our data is that the ANI and ASI were both living in or near South Asia for a substantial period prior to their mixture.”
    Reich proposes this scenario based on the paper: “Only a few thousand years ago, the Indian population structure was vastly different from today,” said co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. “The caste system has been around for a long time, but not forever.”
    Another take is that “India transformed from a country where mixture between different populations was rampant to one where endogamy — that is, marrying within the local community and a key attribute of the caste system — became the norm.”
    To me, it appears then that there were two major transformations, first a period of absolutely no admixture except some intrusions form the north to the south, then a period of a admixture in the north – perhaps coinciding with a rise of Buddhism in the eastern Ganga basin when even the lowest and upper most castes get admixed, and then followed by a revival of caste distinctions in the post-Buddhist period.”
    ”I subscribe to this thinking too, but likely only as far as the number “two” is concerned! The first ANI wave is about 1900BC when the Indus Valley is devastated and the ANI move west, east and south. The second ANI wave is much more recent ~700AD – after the Arab invasion of Makran, Sindh, Multan, Malwa, Gurjara.
    I think the 29 years per generation is a little higher than the norm of 25, especially for an ancient period.”
    I mostly agree with them....

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  38. Kristiina,

    The Nature study you're quoting is outdated and should never have been published in the first place.

    It basically assumes that R1a-M458 is the only subclade within M417, and that the STR "diversity" of Indian R1a-Z93 can actually tell us something about the origins of European R1a-Z283 and R1a-L664.

    Obviously it can't, and in fact it doesn't even say anything about the origins of R1a-Z93, because one of the reasons it's so high in India is because of multiple migrations into that country from Central Asia, and the bifurcation between R1a-L657 and R1a-Z2123 (both located under R1a-Z93).

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  39. aniasi:

    "The BMAC shows a transition during this same period, similar to that of the IVC."

    Somewhat. The BMAC seems to have expanded as the IVC declined. Later, the core BMAC sites were abandoned. The pattern is indeed similar but one seems to follow the other.

    "Witzel & Lubotsky point out that the substratum in Indo-Aryan may well have come from the BMAC."

    Witzel is rather a joke. His grasp of the region's history is so poor that it is tempting to think he is deliberately misrepresenting the archaeological record.

    "During the period in question Indo-Iranian would have been a fairly new language."

    The BMAC arose late in the third millennium BCE and I can accept that Indo-Iranian may have diverged around the same time.

    Probably going to hate myself, but...

    Dr. Clyde Winters:

    "Mehrgarh and the Indus Valley civilization are separated by 1000's of years."

    Not really. Mehrgarh was abandoned during the Mature Harappan phase.

    "The art and cultures are different, and while the people of Mehrgarh cultivated Wheat,the Dravidians in the Indus Valley cultivated millet."

    The agriculture of the IVC was based principally on wheat, barley, and pulses, though millet and rice were grown in some areas, such as Gujarat, and especially after 2000 BCE.

    "The civilization in Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) was founded by Harappans or IVC people and Elamites. The archaeology makes it clear that that the BMAC originated after the decline of the IVC site of Shortughai (c.2400-2200BC) on the Oxus river."

    Masson dates Namazga V, the beginning of the BMAC, to 2300 BCE and his chronology is widely accepted. Even if you could establish an earlier date for Shortugai, something I think most unlikely, you are at best committing a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. The Bactrian-Margiana complex is its own thing, materially distinct from both Elamites and the IVC. It would not be too surprising to learn that the BMAC developed under Indus influence, or as a result of cultural contact, but that is not what you seem to claim.

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  40. I think some people get confused about what Dravidian is. Dravidian is not an ethnicity per se. It is a linguistic group. The darker-skinned Indians are descended from the aboriginal tribals of India and are admixed to various degrees with the "later-comers" to India. The aboriginal tribals had been in India for millenia before any contact with any Mediterranean peoples who were likely carriers of the "ANI" component. Most of the aboriginal tribals of India likely looked similar to the much less ANI-admixed people of southern India who have very dark skin. Some could have been more Mongoloid like the Shompen, Kusunda, Siangic speakers, etc... These aboriginal tribal Indians WERE NOT DRAVIDIAN SPEAKERS.

    DRAVIDIAN IS INTRUSIVE, NOT NATIVE. The Indo-Iranians evidently had contact with Dravidian speakers before the break up of that language into Iranian and Old Aryan. There are clearly Dravidian words in the substrate supposed by Lubotsky and Witzel. There are also Uralic, NW and NE Caucasian words, and words belonging to a few other languages including a scant few Burushaski and Elamite words. Mr. Lamberg-Karlovsky suggested the BMAC was Dravidian, at least, according to Witzel and Kuz'mina. Stanislov Georgiev believe(s)/(d) this also. Many point to typological similarities between Uralic and Dravidian as evidence of contact. Meaning the Dravidian speakers were much further north of their present place. I am neutral on this. I kept calling him Mr. Lambert-Karlovsky in another thread...oops.

    @bmdriver

    "The whole dravidian movement has been exposed fully as a christian motivated agenda."

    What the heck!? Christians have nothing to do with what is going on in India as far as political and ethnic division. I think the religious hatreds in India fueled by Hindu extremists who are scared of the power of Christianity to change lives and give dignity to the "the least of these" and destruct the caste system, much like it was a part of the collapse Rome, is at issue. People in countries like India use minority religious groups, like Christians, as scapegoats for their corruption and failures as human beings much like the Europeans used the Jews. Much the same as in the modern Middle East sadly. Everything is the Jews fault. Not the obvious fact that your leaders are corrupt, failures as human beings, and don't give a damn about you, but we know...it's the Jews. This is tragically the same attitude of many people in India towards Christians.

    @Kristiina

    Great posts!

    @Dr. Clyde Winters

    The Dravidians were likely much more Eastern Mediterranean in appearance not the dark-skinned admixed aboriginal tribals of southern India that speak the language today. So the Afro-Dravidian theory holds no water on those grounds and many other grounds. It is an easily falsifiable theory.

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  41. @AdygheChabadi

    You mean like the slave trade and the massacre of Native American genetic groups, south American genetic groups, African genetic, Australian and now Indian genetic groups.

    If only European Christianity was around the stone age! :)

    Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope Nicholas in 1452, declared war against all non-Christians throughout the world, and specifically sanctioned and promoted the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of
    non-Christian nations and their territories."

    The largest owners of non agricultural land in India are the Roman Catholic Church aka Vatican.


    @clive winters:

    ''No African components in Dravidian speakers, even in Andhra Pradesh where Y-DNA haplogroup T frequencies are highest.
    West Eurasian diversity is derived from the more diverse South Asian gene pool."(Metspalu, Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al, AJHG, Dec. 2011)

    (ASIs DO NOT SHARE ANY similarity with any other population across the world.David Reich, 2009)

    Dravidian authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization rejected, since it noted, Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus. They found, in conclusion, Coverwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers..Sanghamitra Sengupta, L. Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majuder, and P.
    A.Underhill.

    Ibeagha-Awemu (2005) found that the genetic variability of Indian cows in Africa is fargreater than that of African local or
    taurine cows, especially in Nigeria and Cameroon. High variability within
    Indicine cow genes in Africa indicates a very old migration from India to Africa,


    Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.11.010

    Haplotype diversity associated with dark green ancestry is greatest in the south of the Indian subcontinent, indicating that the alleles underlying it most likely arose there and spread northwards. The component which spread beyond India has significantly higher haplotype diversity in India than in any other part of world. This is clear proof that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and Caucasus

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  42. @ Davidski

    ''The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from
    regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.'' - Sanghamitra Sahoo, headed eleven colleagues, including T. Kivisild and V.K. Kashyap, for a study of the Y-DNA of 936 samples covering 77 Indian populations, 32 of them tribes

    Sahoo et al:“The perennial concept of people, language, and agriculture arriving to India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny. Recent claims for a linkage of haplogroups J2, L, R1a,and R2 with a contemporaneous origin for the majority of the Indian castes’ paternal lineages from outside the subcontinent are REJECTED, although our findings do support a local origin of haplogroups F* and H.”

    West Eurasian diversity is derived from the more diverse South Asian gene pool - Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia, 2011.

    R (especially R1a1 and R2) diversity in India is indigenous in origin and does not support hypothesis of immigration from Central Asia or anywhere outside. R1a prevalence is not only high in Indo-European speaking Punjab, south Pakistan and Ganga Valley, but also in Chenchu and Koya tribes of south India (Kivisildet al.2009)

    Haplotype diversity associated with these South Asian ancestry components is significantly higher than that of the components dominating the West Eurasian ancestry palette. Haplotype diversity associated with dark green ancestry is greatest in the south of the Indian subcontinent, indicating that the alleles underlying it most likely arose there and spread northwards. The component which spread beyond India has significantly higher haplotype diversity in India than in any other part of world. This is clear proof that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and Caucasus. Modeling of the observed haplotype diversities suggests that both Indian ancestry components are older than the purported Indo-Aryan invasion 3,500 YBP. Consistent with the results of pairwise genetic distances among world regions, Indians share more ancestry signals with West than with East Eurasians. However, compared to Pakistani populations, a higher proportion of their genes show regionally specific signals of high haplotype homozygosity.
    -Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.11.010

    Underhill and colleagues (2009):

    Theyfound that R1a is oldest in India. This lineage started expanding from Gujarat about 16,000years back. By 14,000 years back or earlier, it reached the Ganga Valley and Indus Valley.Then people carrying R1a genes migrated out of India, through Afghanistan and Tajikistan,reaching Central Asia. From Central Asia they entered East Europe. They inhabited the Pontic-Caspian area. Then they populated those areas which are inhabited today by Slavic and Baltic speaking people

    In the RIG VEDA it states the Dhruhys or the Druids left India migrated out to the North, if you follow that migration it takes you to northern europe, to the Baltic speaking people.




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  43. New Delhi, International Conference on Harappan Archaeology Nov. 4 -- The beginning of India's history has been pushed back by more than 2,000 years, making it older than that of Egypt and Babylon. Latest research has put the date of the origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation at 6,000 years before Christ, which contests the current theory that the settlements around the Indus began around 3750 BC.

    Ever since the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the early 1920s, the civilisation was considered almost as old as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

    The finding was announced at the "International Conference on Harappan Archaeology", recently organised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Chandigarh.

    Based on their research, BR Mani, ASI joint director general, and KN Dikshit, former ASI joint director general, said in a presentation: "The preliminary results of the data from early sites of the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggest that the Indian civilisation emerged in the 8th millennium BC in the Ghaggar-Hakra and Baluchistan area."

    "On the basis of radio-metric dates from Bhirrana (Haryana), the cultural remains of the pre-early Harappan horizon go back to 7380 BC to 6201 BC."

    Excavations had been carried out at two sites in Pakistan and Bhirrana, Kunal, Rakhigarhi and Baror in India.

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  44. ''The migrations of the Dravidians is not a religion dogma. There is no such thing as a Dravidian view that they originated from Elamites. Researchers found a relationship between Elamite and Dravidian languages.''

    ''japeth (Aryan 1) shall dwell in the tents of Shem (aryan 2)and Canaan (Dravidians) shall be his servant''- Bible.

    Veda (18.48)

    “O Lord! Please fill the brahmanas with light, kshatriyas with light, vaishyas with light and the shudras with light; and in me fill the same light.”

    Ramayana created by a Tribal, the vedas compiled by Ved Vyas from a Brahmin-Sudra Lineage.

    I suggest people to google 'Dravidian caanite Elam', and you will understand what i mean. Noahs lineage or casta of three sons, shem, japeth and ham. Ham being a black slave to the first two light skinned sons. This belief in the last 500year was rampant in the Christian/Islamic elites, in their world view. So when they came to India they labelled dark people as Savages, Aborogines, Darkies, Blacks from African lineage. They then promoted that these ''blacks'' where oppressed by White tribes from ...Europe! This is a biblical belief.

    Clive winters is saying ASI came form Elam, when ASI have no relation out side of india, but if i where to suggest that it was ANI that have a link to ELAM, this would be sternly rejected because according to Clive Winters, they are not BLACK ENOUGH.

    Tribal Indians split into two groups, tribals and tribal farmers. Majority of the Indian population come from Tribal farmers, in the south the more mountainous regions harder to penetrate, remained more tribal.

    Genetic history proves that the majority of mankind lives in South Asia from 40-20years ago. Why is it so hard for people to accept that ANI have links to Elam not ASI. But if you where to do that in one swoop, the Conversion rackets in south India would stop right awaY, because then they wont be able to say you black dravidians where enslaved by white aryans, convert to christ a blue eyed, blonde haired, white skinned aryabs. :)

    The Indian tribals who developed farming, became the Aryas. End of.

    ReplyDelete
  45. AdygheChabadi:

    "Mr. Lamberg-Karlovsky suggested the BMAC was Dravidian, at least, according to Witzel and Kuz'mina."

    Unless he has changed his mind since 2002, either they are grossly misrepresenting Dr Lamberg-Karlovski's views or you are grossly misrepresenting theirs -- "Archaeology and Language: The Indo-Iranians":

    "...[The] bearers of any of the variants of the Andronovo culture and the Bactrian Margiana complex may have spoken Indo-Iranian but may just as readily have spoken a Dravidian and/or an Altaic language. Contemporary methodologies, linguistic or archaeological, for determining the spoken language of a remote archaeological culture are virtually nonexistent. Simplified notions of the congruence between an archaeological culture, an ethnic group, and a linguistic affiliation millennia before the existence of texts is mere speculation, often with a political agenda. Archaeology has a long way to go before its methodology allows one to establish which cultural markers, pottery, architecture, burials, etc., are the most reliable for designating ethnic identity."

    "... The Bactrian Margiana complex could have been Indo-Iranian, Dravidian, Altaic, or any combination of the three. If, say, it was Dravidian, then which archaeological culture represents the others? Central Asia has either too many languages and too few archaeological cultures or too few languages and too many archaeological cultures to permit an easy fit between archaeology and language."

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  46. @Davidski,

    Are you making this up: "multiple migrations into that country from Central Asia, and the bifurcation between R1a-L657 and R1a-Z2123 (both located under R1a-Z93)."
    Or, if not, can you identify which place in Central Asia L657 come from?

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  47. Davidski
    In order to check the subclades you referred to, I went to see this map on Familytree (the last one):

    http://www.familytreedna.com/public/r1a/default.aspx?section=results

    First, I admit that that there are probably not enough samples behind the map to permit us to be conclusive, but the map is worth a look. It seems that number 2 (Kirgiz, Arabic and Bashkir lines) is R1a-Z2123 and and 2 (Central and South West Asia) is R1a-L657 which you mentioned in your mail. By merely looking at the map above, you would say that R1a-Z2123 traces the movements of steppe IE or Turkic tribes and R1a-L657 spread from Pakistan/India to Central Asia.

    There are more maps here: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/r1a/default.aspx?section=ymap
    On the basis of those subclade maps, I would say that R1a-Z2123 originated North of Caucasus and R1a-L657 in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

    ReplyDelete
  48. From Wiki, (Brief account)

    Druhyus (Sanskrit: द्रुह्यु) were a tribe of Vedic Indians in Ancient India. They are mentioned in the Rigveda, often together with the Anu tribe. Some early scholars have placed them in the northwestern region.

    The Indian epics and Puranas locate Druhyus in the North western part of the Indian subcontinent.

    Puranic lore contain accounts of a large scale migration of Drhyus from Punjab into central asia. Druhyu king Angara is said to have been driven out of Punjab by King Mandhatri of the Ikshvaku dynasty.

    F.E. Pargiter theorises that the next Druhyu king Gandhara named the north-western state Gandhāra after himself. Puranas do not refer to Druhyus after the King Pracetas whose 100 sons settled in the region north of Afghanistan (udīcya) and became Mlecchas.[4](Bhagavata 9.23.15–16; Visnu 4.17.5; Vayu 99.11–12; Brahmanda 3.74.11–12 and Matsya 48.9.). Vishnu Purana also lists Aratta and Setu as areas where Druhyus settled.(Vishnu Purana IV.17)

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  49. Correction: STANISLAV GRIGORIEV not Stanislov Georgiev, hahaha, sorry.

    @ Va_Highlander

    I wrote you on your blog some time ago.

    "Some want to make the BMAC a Dravidian speaking area (cf. Lamberg-Karlovsky 2002: 73), however, the close loan relationships between Drav. and Sumerian and Elamite
    point to a more western trail..."
    ~ M. Witzel - Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia

    This what Kuz'mina actually said, "Lamberg-Karlovsky suggests (67, 73) that the Andronovans might have spoken Ugrian, Dravidian or Altaic languages. Linguists have argued, however, that the farmers of Turkmenistan may have spoken Elamite or a cognate Dravidian language (McAlpin 1981; Witzel 1999b), speakers of the Altaic languages reached the west from the depths of Asia only in historical times (Poppe 1965; Baskakov 1969); the homeland of the Ugrian peoples was in the forest zone around the Urals (Napol’skikh 1997; ECUIE 2001)."

    Sorry, the source I gleaned my previous statement from said something slightly different. I will not use that source again. I always vet my sources as best I can. I will have to be even more vigilant in this.

    But she does have some legitimate critiques of Lamberg-Karlovsky's work.

    @bmdriver

    I am afraid you conflate wrong-headed political ambitions and pseudo-intellectual ignorance with the actual tenets of Christianity. The same gross un-Christian error made by those people you mentioned. Anyone who is familiar with the actual tenets of Christianity would never associate those action with actual Biblical Christianity. Those are the actions of politically motivated wrong-headed hypocrites who used Christ and Christianity to do their ungodly dirt. Which, by the way, the Bible condemns as sin outright. So that tells you how much they thought of the Word of God as they did those things.

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  50. bmdriver, first off Ham wasn't really black that is a modern interpretation. It was egypt.

    Second, archaelogy is always ridiculously politicized but if you reject everything some group somewhere wants to promote then you have to reject everything.

    Third, Nobody claimed this was biblical.

    Fourth, even if they did an expansion out of middle east makes about 50 times more sense than an expansion out of africa, given the location of all the haplogroups in relation to their age. An OoA basically means MOST of them backmigrated or crossed paths in relation to each other. And the coastal migration nonsense is just that, just look at the haplomap pictures for all the haplogroups. If people did that before coming up with their research topics we'd have some much different theories to argue over.

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  51. Kristiina,

    There are 62 South Asian R1a samples in the 1000 Genomes Project, and all of them are R1a-Z93. One is R1a-Z93*.

    On the other hand, there are only 12 European R1a samples in the 1000 Genomes, and they include R1a-Z283, R1a-L664 and R1a-Z93.

    All other relevant academic and private samples of R1a show the same pattern; Asian R1a dominated by R1a-Z93, and European R1a showing more diversity.

    In regards to your question about Z2123, it's probably a Post-Proto-Indo European Asian marker, like the upstream Z2124. Z93 might also be Asian, but if so, it comes from very close to Europe and was certainly involved in the early Indo-European dispersals.

    I'd say the early Indo-Europeans mostly carried R1a-Z283 and R1a-Z93, with the latter dominating Asia due to a founder effect near the European border somewhere, like the Caspian Sea.

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  52. ''Vishnu Purana also lists Aratta and Setu as areas where Druhyus settled.(Vishnu Purana IV.17)''

    @ Clive Winters, Aratta is Sumeria.

    ''Aratta is a land that appears in Sumerian myths surrounding Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, two early and possibly mythical kings of Uruk also mentioned on the Sumerian king list. A "possible reflex" has been suggested in Sanskrit Āraṭṭa or Arāṭṭa mentioned in the Mahabharata and other texts.''

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  53. Va_Highlander

    The Mehrgarh civilization lasted from 7000-5000BC. Other people lived in the area but they do not represent the Mehrgarh culture. The Indus Valley civilization began 2300BC.

    BMAC was an Elamite civilization as noted by Ligue & Salvatori, Bactria an ancient oasis civilization from the sands of Afghanistan, p.137. Francefort La civilisatioon de l'Indus aux de l'Oxus in , Archeologia (December,1987) made it clear that Shortughai existed from 2500-1800 BC. It was the largest Harappan site on the Amou Darya and Kokcha rivers. It is much older than Namazga V. Moreover, there is no evidence the people at Namazga were Indo-Aryan speakers they did not use PGW.

    @bmdriver

    It is a myth that Dravidians and Africans fail to share haplogroups as discussed earlier. The best example is M1. Both Gonzalez at al (2007) and Kivisld et al discuss Indians who carry M1. Kivisild et al,The Place of the Indian mtDNA variants in the Global Network of Maternal Lineages and the Peopling of the Old World, In Deka,R.P. (Ed),Genomic Diversity [1999:pp.135-152] , reported that they found 26 of their subjects carrying M1. Kivisld et al said the subjects came mainly from high caste individuals from Kerala and Karnataka. In Fig 3, of the Kivisld et al [1999], you can clearly see that Indian M1 and African M1 were the same.

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  54. AdygheChabadi:

    Thank you. I have come to find that sort of coy dishonesty typical of Witzel's work. As I have said, he is a joke and may be safely ignored, with advantage.

    Glad to see Kuz'mina displaying a higher degree of integrity. I too disagree with Lamberg-Karlovsky at times, as with Kuz'mina. Since in this case she's relying in part on Witzel, and Witzel's so often found presenting half-truths as truth, it is difficult to maintain that her critique is entirely legitimate. It certainly suggests that she does not look too critically at her sources.

    The problem with her claim is that there is no compelling evidence that the peoples of the Andronovo horizon spoke Indo-Iranian and no reason to think that they shared a single culture, let alone spoke a single language. Lamberg-Karlovsky's critique of Kuz'mina is irrefutable, whatever appeals she makes to shady linguists and their arguments.

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  55. @AdygheChabadi

    The Dravidians belong to the Niger-Congo family of languages. Like the Niger-Congo speakers the Dravidians were of Capsian origin and had "negro" features as noted by Camps (1974,p.265).You are correct the Dravidians belonged to the ancient Mediteranean population (Guha,1936-37;Gates,1961;Lahavory,1963; Sastri,1955;). Keita(1993,1996), Carlson and Gervan (1979) and MacGaffey (1970) have made it clear that ancient Mediterraneans are just Sub-Saharan Africans with so-called "caucasian features" resulting from genetic drift and microevolution.

    Camps,G (1974) Tableau chronologique de la prehistoire recente du Nord et du Sahara,BSPF,71,1.

    MacGaffey W (1970), Concepts of Race in Northeast Africa. In J.D. Fage and R.A. Oliver, Papers in African Prehistory (99-115).

    Keita,S.O.Y. & Kittles (1997), The presistence of racial thinking and the myth of racial divergence, American Anthropologist,99(3),534-544.

    Sastri,Nulakanta (1955), History of South India.

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  56. @Grognard

    Ham means 'burnt',things that are burnt are black. In the Sefer_h'Hanowk (Book of Enoch, Ham is described as shacor=dark (>black)

    @AdygheChabadi

    You seem to be stuck in the idea of a 'typical negro'. Blacks have a wide variety of phenotypes and genotypes. Sub-Saharan African people have complexions from "high yellow, brown, red and jet black". Blacks grasps this concept automatically, while Europeans will note the difference between southern and northern Europeans, many fail to see that all Blacks do not look alike.

    Researchers have shown that craniofacial features, in relation to the skull can be shaped in evolutionary terms by heritability and high biomechanical load. This is reflected in the morphological heterogeneity within the same population.

    The "extremes" in African populations may be due to diet, according to Carlson and Van Gerven (1979), Diffussion, biological determinism and biocultural adaptation in the Nubian corridor, American Anthropologist [81:561-580].

    Research shows that changes in diet lead to variation in the size and position of the muscles of mastication which inturn leads to reduction in the robustness of the craniofacial complex. This would explain why the use of mulivariate techniques show variability between modern and ancient caria and skulls of African people and the board vs fine features associated with diverse African populations.
    D.J.Laubenfels explained that Australian aborigines and Melanesians show distinct Black populations. He noted That negroids/Melanoids such as the Tasmanians (and Africans) are characterized by wooly black hair and sparse body hair. Australoids or Australians on the otherhand have curly, wavy or straight hair and abundant body hair. Other differences between these Black populations include Negroid/Melanoid brows being vertical and without eyebrow ridges, whereas Australoid brows are sloping and with prominent ridges. Laubenfels believes the Australian Blacks have the prominent brows because they were the first Blacks OoA. (See Laubenfels, Australoids,Negroids and Negroes: A suggested explanation for their distinct distributions, Annals Association of Am. Geographers, 58(1) 1968:42-50). David Bulbeck found that Australian aborigine crania agree with the archaic population of Asia and the first group of Africans to exit Africa.

    The narrow slanted eyes and straight hair of most Blacks living in the Sahel, South India and Norteast and West Africa such as the Dravidians, Nubians, Ethiopians,Somalis and Fulani, are probably adaptations of Blacks during the last Ice Age. The ancestors of these Blacks probably lived in the periglacial regions of Africa before the great glaciers melted completely. The cold and ice had little effect on the skin color of African and Dravidian people. During the previous Ice Age much of the area around Lake Chad is suppose to have been a glacial area.

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  57. @Clive winters

    Gonzalez et al. (2007), Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa, BMC Genomics 2007, 8:223 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-223

    ''No African components in Dravidian speakers, even in Andhra Pradesh where Y-DNA haplogroup T frequencies are highest." -(Metspalu, Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al, AJHG, Dec. 2011)

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1929145/figure/F1/

    ''Genetic data indicated that ranges of musculus, custaneous and domesticus likely correspond to three distinct paths of expansion from the Indian cradle''
    - Boursot et al, The Evolution of House Mice, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1993, 24: 119-152;

    African Zebu cows come from India, indicating a migration from India to Africa. Mice migration also indicates the same migration from India to Africa.











    ReplyDelete
  58. @Clive Winters.

    Gonzalez et al. (2007), Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa, BMC Genomics 2007, 8:223 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-223

    “Genetic data indicated that ranges of musculus, custaneous and domesticus likely correspond to three distinct paths of expansion from the Indian cradle.
    -Boursot et al, The Evolution of House Mice, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1993, 24: 119-152

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1929145/figure/F1/

    Cow and Mouse genome shows migration from India to Africa. Thats the connection Mr Clive Winters, and it not from ASI, but ANI proto dravidian speakers, like you said (the only thing i agree with you) Sankrit has 40% Dravidian vocabulary: Its ANI proto-dravidian speakers who developed Sanskrit and ASI where not enslaved or oppressed, please stop rehashing Colonial theories of racial ideology.


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  59. @Dr. Clyde Winters

    ooooh, I will hate myself in the morning, but...

    Dravidian IS NOT Niger-Congo. If there are any language families that Dravidian maybe related to...the closest would be Afroasiatic, possibly even closer than Afroasiatic is Elamite (which has intriguing connections to Afroasiatic also), and possibly Uralic on typological grounds.

    Also, I, being an American, am well aware that "Black" come in different flavors (due to admixture from various ethnic groups that are present in the US). The recent genetic studies have shown that Sub-Saharan Africans are not all one genetic group despite seeming similar appearances. Sub-Saharans come in different flavors whether it is by Y-DNA, mtDNA, or by ADMIXTURE results. Northeast Africans sometimes labeled, Horners, are of a different kind than than other Africans particularly West African Sub-Saharans. The "Horners" carry their own "flavor" which can be found through out eastern Africa and the Sahel in varying degrees. There is also West Asian, Southwest Asian, slight North African,and slight Mediterranean admixture in eastern Africa which, no doubt, affects their appearance to varying degrees depending on how much of what component(s) they carry.

    Also, you are conflating the Dravidian language with it's current speakers appearance. The current speakers of Dravidian are strongly descended from aboriginal tribals who lost their languages completely or near completely as Dravidian replaced the aboriginal tongues of which there are some traces still left in what is called the pre-Dravidian substrate. Dravidian didn't quite overtake Sri Lanka in the way Aryan did. Aryan came into contact with the pre-Aryan Vedda language which became a substrate in the Aryan language they now speak. It is possible Sri Lankan Tamil or Tamil itself absorbed some lexicon.

    Aboriginal Andaman Islanders, predominately aboriginal south Indians (who are possibly genetically identical or highly similar to the pre-Aryan Vedda [now, Aryan speaking] of Sri Lanka being strong carriers of the "ASI" component), Australians, and Melanesians are rather genetically distinct on all levels from all Africans.

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  60. @bmdriver

    Aratta is not Sumer...it is likely to be found in the east beyond Elam and west of the IVC. If it existed at all. Marhasi could be the same place so there you go.

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  61. @bmdriver

    The Dravidians introduced the Indus Valley civilization. This is supported by the fact that Dravidian speakers continue to live in the Indus Valley and 89% of ths South Indian signs are found in the Indus Script.

    Kramer, in the Sumerians, claimed that the Indus Valley was called Dilmun, while ancient Egypt was Magan, and Kush=Meluhha. The zebu cattle was domesticated in the Indus Valley. The Dravidians probably introduced the zebu to Africa

    You can read more about the Dravidian origin of IVC, in my article: Dravidian is the language of the Indus Valley writing, Current Science,11/25/2012,Vol.10 at http://olmec98.net/indusvalley.pdf

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  62. First of all let me state that I am not an expert on this subject and just a guy with keen interest. There are a couple of issues I think the experts seemed to have missed out.

    First Y haplogroup L's distribution in India seems to be in proportion to the monsoon rainfall along the western coast. Also we know that moonsoons were active during the neolithic over Indus area. We also know that neolithic farming in india was indigenous and probably monsoon farming. L seems to have been the bearer of this monsoon farming expansion starting somewhere at the mouth of the indus (where there was heavy rainfall during the neolithic).

    They seem to have expanded along the coast all the way to south india and maybe sri lanka. They also went up the indus river up to bactria and beyond. They also seem to have expanded westwards over the iranian plateau (were they probaly came in contact with J2) and up mesapotamia up to syria. However the westward expansion cannot be due to monsoons.

    Secondly we see early bronze age technology adoption in the IVC, which would have come from the west (maybe mesopotamia) because of the chronological order of technology adoption from west to east. It is not hard to guess the people who brought this technology were J2 bearers.

    The IVC was populated by a mix of people bearing L and J2 and as the bronze age expanded into India, carried this J2 and L back into the Gangetic plains and the Deccan, And this would cause the first ANI ASI admixture 4000 yrs ago.

    Then we know of R coming in from probably Bactria, carried more advanced (late) bronze age technology in into south asia between 2000 and 1000 BC. They would have mixed with an already mixed ANI/ASI population, and then expand into south India round about 300 BC with Buddism.

    Then we know of the Scythians/Kushans coming in with R. These people were converted to Hindusim during the Gupta period round about 300 CE and expanded into south india again with Hindu expansion. So we have another admixture of ANI with ANI/ANI/ASI.

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  63. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "The Mehrgarh civilization lasted from 7000-5000BC."

    Mehrgarh was not a civilization. It was a settlement, with its earliest occupation dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The site was not abandoned until ca 2500 BCE, around the beginning of the Mature Harappan Phase.

    "BMAC was an Elamite civilization as noted by Ligue & Salvatori..."

    First, Ligue & Salvatori noted no such thing, since they did not write that volume. The sloppiness of your 'scholarship' is simply breathtaking, I must say.

    Second, Amiet's conjecture was later disproven by Hiebert & Lamberg-Karlovsky, who demonstrated conclusively that the former's "trans-Elamite" artifacts originated in Bactria and Margiana then spread south to the Iranian plateau, and not the reverse.

    "Francefort La civilisatioon de l'Indus aux de l'Oxus in , Archeologia (December,1987) made it clear that Shortughai existed from 2500-1800 BC."

    Then I am sure you will have no trouble quoting M Francfort to that effect. In any case, you have yet to offer compelling evidence that the BMAC "was founded by Harappans". Did you look up, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", by any chance?

    "It was the largest Harappan site on the Amou Darya and Kokcha rivers."

    Shortugai is the only known Harappan site on the Oxus. Please try to be honest.

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  64. Further to my previous post here http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/08/major-admixture-in-india-took-place-42.html?showComment=1376470846248#c2414334589212024876 I would like to add a couple of things more.

    There seems to have been four clear ANI expansions into South Asia as explained above. I would like to also add the predominant Y haplogroups during each expansion

    1) Neolithic Monsoon farmer expansion. Haplogroup L.

    2) Early bronze age expansion. Haplogroups L and J2

    3) Late bronze age bactrian expansion. Haplogroup R2.

    4) Scythian expansion. Haplogroup R1a1a.

    First of all the higher admixture age for south Indian higher castes can be explained by expansion 1) and 2) above. We can see that they have a higher percentage of L and J2 than north Indian higher castes.

    The bactrians expanded into indus and north India before buddhism. However their expansion into south India was caused by buddhist expansion into south India during Ashoka's rule 300 BC.

    Next by the time Scythians expanded into indus and north india, they were buddhists, however their expansion into south india happened during the hindu expansion after 300 CE.

    While the buddhist expansion affected both south india and sri lanka, the hindu expansion only affected south india and not sri lanka. And what it interesting is that the sinhalese have an unusually higher percentage of R2 (39%) against R1a1a (13%). This is clue that the bactrian expansion was predominantly R2 while the scythian expansion was predominantly R1a1a.

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  65. @AdygbeChabadi

    Dravidian does have typological shared with Uralic--but few if any relationship with AfroAsiatic.

    Dravidian languages are genetically related to Niger-Congo languages. Below is a partial list of articles denoting this fact:
    Aravanan,KP Dravidians and Africans,1979.

    Aravanan,KP, Notable Negroid elements in Dravidian India, J. Tam Stud,1980 17:20-45.

    Sergent,B. Genese de L'Inde,1992.

    Upadhyaya & Upadhyaya, Les lien entre Kerala et Bull de L'IFAN, 100-132.

    Upadhyaya & Upadhyaya, Affinities ethnolinguistiques entre , Tamil, Dravidians et les Negro-Africain, Bull de L'IFAN, 127-157.

    Winters,C , Tamil, Sumerian, Manding and the Genetic Model, Int J. Dr Ling, 18(1):67-91

    Winters,C, Did the Dravidian Speakers Originate in Africa?, BioEssays,27(5):497-498 [2007]

    Winters,C. African millets taken to India, Ann of Bot [2008], http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/leletters/100/5/903#49

    Winters,C Origin of the Niger-ongo Speakers. WebmedCentral Genetics 2012,3(3):WMC))3149. http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/3149

    Now please cite the papers demonstrating a relationship between Dravidian and Afro-Asiatic

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  66. @Clive Winters

    Gonzalez et al. (2007), Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa, BMC Genomics 2007, 8:223 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-223

    Your own source give the direction of migration. And i was proven correct that you are pushing an Abrahamic Biblical Belief of Caananites/Hamites, like you said ANI are not ''african black enough for you'' :)

    ANI migrated into Elam and Africa. Its a shame you didnt mention anything on the mice migration, which went out in three waves from India. Or how you avoid that African Zebu cows origins are once again Indian. Anyway you carry on with your masked biblical theory, in god you trust!

    In science i trust.

    ''No African components in Dravidian speakers, even in Andhra Pradesh where Y-DNA haplogroup T frequencies are highest." -(Metspalu, Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al, AJHG, Dec. 2011)

    ANI migrated into Elam speaking Proto Dravidian. Im sorry your theory of blackness doesnt hold up, other than in blaxploitation. :)

    Its through White Christian racism that today we get Black African Christian racism.

    Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.11.010
    -South Indians migrated to North India, South Asians migrated to Eurasia. Haplotype diversity associated with dark green ancestry is greatest in the south of the Indian subcontinent, indicating that the alleles underlying it most likely arose there and spread northwards. The component which spread beyond India has significantly higher haplotype diversity in India than in any other part of world. This is clear proof that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and Caucasus

    _____

    Anyway im Done. Going round in circles.

    Both ANI and ASI are of native Origin. One Origin. Ancestoral Indians.


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  67. @Santash

    Scythian where Buddhist? lol. Never heard that one before.

    I guess you subscribe to a watered down Aryan invasion theory.

    Sahoo et al:“The perennial concept of people, language, and agriculture arriving to India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny. Recent claims for a linkage of haplogroups J2, L, R1a,and R2 with a contemporaneous origin for the majority of the Indian castes’ paternal lineages from outside the subcontinent are REJECTED, although our findings do support a local origin of haplogroups F* and H.”

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  68. @Santosh Rajan

    Your identification of IVC and other haplogroups is pure conjecture no ancient DNA has been analyzed to support your conclusions to my knowledge

    @Va_Highlanger

    you said that Ligue and Salvalori noted no such thing

    They wrote "On the other hand, the higher forms of Bactrian civilization can be found in the civilizations which make up the Outer Iran community, but they reveal more affinities with Elam, which can only be explained by hypothesis difficult to verify".(p.137)

    The Bactrian fortresses, which seem more like prestige castles which could have been used as caravanserais or warehouses, point to the existence of an aristocracy composed of nomad-artisans with strong Elamite affinities...."(p.137)

    These quotes are from the Ligue & Salvatori article in Lamberg- et 1Karlovsky (Ed), Bactria: An ancient oasis civilization from the sands of Afghanistan,1989.


    Va_Highlander wrote
    ..then I am sure you will have no trouble quoting Francefort

    La civilisation harappeens, dont Shortughai est le representant en hrsie centrale, a connu son epoque de floraison entre 2500 et 1800 environ av. J.-C.(p.47)"

    Source: Archaeologia, December 1987

    Mehrgarh site namely MR3 was a small village dated 7000-5000BC.

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  69. @Santosh


    R (especially R1a1 and R2) diversity in India is indigenous in origin and does not support hypothesis of immigration from Central Asia or anywhere outside. R1a prevalence is not only high in Indo-European speaking Punjab, south Pakistan and Ganga Valley, but also in Chenchu and Koya tribes of south India (Kivisild et al.2009)

    R1a is oldest in India. This lineage started expanding from Gujarat about 16,000years back. By 14,000 years back or earlier, it reached the Ganga Valley and Indus Valley.Then people carrying R1a genes migrated out of India, through Afghanistan and Tajikistan,reaching Central Asia. From Central Asia they entered East Europe. They inhabited the Pontic-Caspian area. Then they populated those areas which are inhabited today by Slavic and Baltic speaking people. (Underhill and colleagues (2009)

    ___

    Im really done. We shall see in five years time who was correct. :)

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  70. Thats nice summary Santosh.
    I like to add the following.

    Deep Thick forests Areas of India ( now they are mostly gone) , Dandakaranya etc provided game and agriculture opportunities for ASI to survive and grow. C, F,H

    ASI : Forest Tribes
    ANI: Plain Tribes.

    ASI has built cast structure model to distribute the work.

    Urban Economists like Manu and Kautilya consolidated the cast structure to keep the economy in order with rules. Before that profession(cast) is not a restriction for marriage.

    ReplyDelete
  71. Santosh,

    I doubt that J2 and R2 were involved in any major way in the early Indo-European dispersals around Asia. They probably mostly arrived in India before the Indo-Aryans.

    The presence of two clades of R1a-Z93 in India - R1a-L657 and R1a-Z213 - suggests that they arrived in two different waves from Central Asia. Based on the data I've seen, I'd say L657 came earlier, and probably expanded from Afghanistan, where it seems to peak in frequency today. On the other hand, Z2123 probably arrived later, perhaps from west or northwest of Afghanistan.

    But these clades are now present all over South Asia, often at fairly high frequencies in the same groups. So if there were indeed two separate waves that brought them, then the caste system probably went up after they both arrived.

    In any case, it's difficult to ascribe the presence of R1a-L657 and R1a-Z2123 in India to Scythians alone.

    ReplyDelete
  72. Well bmdriver I actually mainly agree but the ASI have to fit in there somewhere.

    It's believed that the R lineages are what repopulated eurasia after the ice age. I believe the r1b was already in iberia at the end of the ice age. This is disputed but the fact is r1b and r1a are just ALL OVER eurasia, even with a few holdouts in china and japan. It's also known that there was a refugium in iberia so that neatly explains how r1b split from r1a.

    The language itself has to be separated from culture, they just aren't the same and there's no way in heck that scythians spread their language to 2/3 the world in a short time.

    But they aren't the only ones in eurasia either, though they are still dominant and were much more so until recently. There's also the Ds (ASI), Js, Gs, and Is and they have to fit in there somewhere as well. There's ancient I dna in macedonia for example, though it was probably mostly r1b in greece. Es are so scattered it's hard to trace but they seem to come from messopotamia. J1s are arabs and jews and probably have been in middle east and north africa during ice age. J2s were probably close by but more northern. So where were the Ds?

    The dancing girl statue from the IVC does look like an ASI. So maybe that is who lived there, or maybe it was a multiculture society or at the least they lived nearby.

    I had thought they found some skeletons with r1a from IVC but I can't seem to find any source. Hopefully they will be able to do this as it's one of the bigger mysteries.

    ReplyDelete

  73. @Dr. Clyde Winters - "Your identification of IVC and other haplogroups is pure conjecture no ancient DNA has been analyzed to support your conclusions to my knowledge"

    It is indeed unfortunate there is no ancient DNA. But it is also fortunate we can make use of valid scientific methods to draw our conclusions.

    1) Cause and effect

    2) Archeology

    3) Present day DNA distribution.

    I will give you an example.

    1) SE Monsoons were active over indus during neolithic. - Archeology
    2) Neolithic Indian farming was indigenous - Archeology.
    3) Neolithic indian farmers were monsoon farmers - Archeology.
    4) Haplotype L distribution is proportional to monsoon rainfall along the western coast of India. - Present day DNA distribution
    5) Cause - Neolithic monsoon farming expansion. Effect - Expansion of L along the western coast of India and up the Indus.

    Conclusion - Neolithic expansion was caused by people bearing Haplotype L.

    @bmdriver

    Scythians expanded into India between 300 BCE and 300 CE. sakas/indo-scythians/kushans were buddhists or converted to Buddhism in India. Mahayana buddhism spread to china via Gandhara/Scythia.

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  74. @Clive winters.

    Do you cite your own work? :)

    Why do most of the studies you cite come from 1920-1960's?

    I agree with the other poster, your scholarship is so lacking its not worth my time replying.

    @ Nathan Paul

    Its pretty much what is said. Tribals split into two groups: Tribal Farmers and Tribal hunter gatherer. Tribal farmers in the flat northen planes, tribals hunter gatherer in mountainous south india. ANI and ASI native Indian origin.

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  75. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "These quotes are from the Ligue & Salvatori article in Lamberg- et 1Karlovsky (Ed), Bactria: An ancient oasis civilization from the sands of Afghanistan,1989."

    Which volume was edited by Ligue & Salvatori. Those quotes are from Pierre Amiet's article found therein, "Elam and Bactria", pp 127-140. His trans-Elamite conjecture has been discredited for decades. As I say, the sloppiness of your 'scholarship' is simply breathtaking. You don't even know who you are quoting. I doubt you even care.

    "La civilisation harappeens, dont Shortughai est le representant en hrsie centrale, a connu son epoque de floraison entre 2500 et 1800 environ av. J.-C.(p.47)"

    That seems to say, roughly, that the Harappan civilization, which Shortugai represents in Central Asia, flourished between 2500 and around 1800 BCE. Assuming Google Translate and I are somewhere near the mark, you apparently don't even understand your own evidence.

    Did you look up, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", and are you at long last prepared to support your claim with something more than a logical fallacy?

    "Mehrgarh site namely MR3 was a small village dated 7000-5000BC."

    Not surprisingly, no, it was not. Mehrgarh site MR3 is claimed to be seventh millennium BCE but may in fact date only from the sixth. Mehrgarh site MR4, spreading around the core Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of MR3, is dated to around 5000 BCE. Mehrgarh site MR2 is dated to 4000 BCE, and so on continuously until the settlement of Mehrgarh was abandoned ca 2500 BCE, during the Mature Harappan Phase.

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  76. @ Dr. Clyde Winters

    Honestly, I don't know where you got such a easily falsifiable idea. Niger-Congo has absolutely nothing to do with Dravidian. It is NOT even sufficiently demonstrated that Manding (Mande) is Niger-Congo, let alone have it be related to Sumerian and Dravidian.

    It can be tentatively accepted that there maybe Dravidian loans in Sumerian via trade contacts. It can also be tentatively accepted that Dravidian and Sumerian may share links through Nostratic (I am neutral on this). Interestingly, Sumerian itself shares non-Semitic lexemes with Afroasiatic. So does Indo-European on two levels, Proto-Afroasiatic and Semitic (a primary Afroasiatic branch). Elamite is another language that shares non-Semitic lexemes with Afroasiatic. All of the above languages have had some sort of contact with Afroasiatic outside of Semitic.

    Also, there are definitely connections between Afroasiatic and Dravidian, what they mean is moot. There are non-Semitic Afroasiatic words that have clear parallels in Dravidian. The words are shared either through possible genealogical relationship (Nostratic) or via some type of trade contact.

    Roger Blench in his 2006 book wrote: "The Elamitic language was spoken in the region of modern-day south-western Iran from the 3rd millennium BC - 8th Century BC. It has resisted classification, in part because of the fragmentary nature of much of the epigraphy. McAlpin (1981) argued in a series of publications that Elamite should be classified with the Dravidian languages, spoken in South India, and the ‘Elamo-Dravidian’ phylum has entered many reference books. However, Václav Blažek (1999) has now argued in detail that Elamitic is not an outlier of Dravidian, but is instead related to Afroasiatic, either as a ‘seventh’ branch or as a co-ordinate phylum. Blažek proposes a structure where Afroasiatic is related to Dravidian ata higher level and Elamite forms a bridge between the two. Whether the apparent cognates between Elamite and Afroasiatic are indicative of a genetic relationship or simply a case of extensive loanwords remains to be explored. Although the case is not fully accepted, the arguments of Blažek are certainly strong enough to suggest that this hypothesis has to be taken seriously."

    Goergiy Starotin considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else. If Dravidian is connected to Elamite then there you have it, a relatively close connection with Afroasiatic. Vastly closer than Niger-Congo for certain.

    BLAŽEK, Václav. The new Dravidian-Afroasiatic lexical parallels.

    Some New Dravidian - Afroasiatic Parallels - Author: BLAŽEK, Václav

    As for Nostratic you can find numerous papers on this topic.

    The only Africans in India or Pakistan are Siddis. You look them up on Wikipedia.

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  77. Santosh Rajan:

    "Neolithic Indian farming was indigenous - Archeology."

    Based on what archeology? The wheat grown at Mehrgarh, for instance, was not locally domesticated.

    "Mahayana buddhism spread to china via Gandhara/Scythia."

    Mahayana Buddhism in China was likely an indigenous development, for the most part.

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  78. @AdygheChabadi

    Vaclav Blazek does good work, but he only presents a few Dravidian loans in AfroAsiatic. This is in sharp contrast to the Niger-Congo and Dravidian cognates that number in the hundreds and they share grammatical features as well.

    Dr. Loganthan has shown how Tamil and Sumerian is related and that
    Sanskrit is really of Dravidian origin.


    If it is so easy to falsify the Dravidian-Niger-Congo connection why hasn't a linguist done so in the last 70 years.

    Confirmation of a theory depends on abundance of evidence supporting a hypothesis. There are at least 20-40 papers demonstrating a relationship between Dravidian and Niger-Congo, while you provide only one. One article in support of an AfroAsiatic and Dravidian connection can not falsify the Niger-Congo-Dravidian genetic linguistic relationship.

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  79. @bmdriver

    The R haplogroup (hg) can not be indigenous to India because the Dravidians only arrived in India 5kya. It is an accepted fact that the Dravidians founded the South Indian megalithic. B.B. Lal has made it clear that the South Indian civilizations/culture were related to the C-Group culture/people of Nubia. This means that when the Dravidians left Africa 5kya they would have already acquired hg R.


    The fact that Dravidians introduced hg M to India does not support a back migration of hg M to Africa because Dravidians carry the same hg M1 as Sub-Saharan Africans. Kivisild et al (1999) found 26 high caste Dravidian carriers of hg M1 that as illustrated in the accompanying figure of Kivisild, et al ,shared the same mutations as Sub-Saharan hg M1.

    Conclusion: Dravidians left Nubia carrying hg M and R 5kya.

    This fact can not be disputed since it is supported by

    1. Dravidian traditions that they recently entered India;

    2. Archaeological evidence linking the C-Group and South Indian megalithic cultures;

    3. Linguistic genetic relationship exist between Dravidian and Niger-Congo languages

    4. Hgs R and M had to have originated in Sub-Saharan Africa given the age associated with the MRCA for these haplogroups, and the archaeological evidence supporting the migration of Dravidians to India 5kya.

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  80. ''sakas/indo-scythians/kushans were buddhists or converted to Buddhism in India''

    They didnt come as Buddhist, but i believe they where def an Indian branch of tribes.

    The real question is when does West Asia and Central Asia become EUROPEAN centric?

    ''The dancing girl statue from the IVC does look like an ASI.'' :) And what is that look?

    Scythians and Sakas where an Indic Branch, migrating ANI's. India today, doesnt represent the historical land mass of India, classed as Akhand Bharat. And all this dilution has been done during the onset of Abrahamic religions. New Gods, New Rules, New History. The Puranas, mahabharata and Rig Veda mention Indian tribes or Indian tribes excluded from India, sakas and Scythians on the borders of Akhand Bharat, where border indian tribes.

    _____

    Anyway back to just reading the articles from now one. Just one note, i think alot of people on here take human nature out of human genetics. For example, why did animal domestication take place? What was the consciousness thought process in tribals to care and attend rather than kill it? This thought process of consciousness in those early tribals is still present in India, in the form of cow protection. Zebu Cows domesticated in India, 9-10,000yeas ago: maybe thats why Cow protection exist in India, a legacy of that early conscious thought of caring rather than killing. Importance of which might seem diluted today, but imagine a tribal slaying a cow, with another tribal, stopping to think.

    Maybe thats why Elephant domestication also took place in India. This thought process then led Indians to see the inner god in all beings, so instead of attacking the elephant they engaged with it.

    We are human today posses the ability to look and understand the past as if it where today.

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  81. ''We now know what the people of Jhusi cultivated: they had rice, barley, bread-wheat, dwarf-wheat, lentil, green-gram, grass-pea, field-pea, horse-gram, sesame, linseed, anwala among other crops. Among these rice and sesame were summer crops; the rest, winter. The important point is that rice was cultivated in India as far back as the 7-6th millenia B.C.E. What is more fascinating is that there was cultural contact between the people of North-West region of the Indian subcontinent and Jhusi: There is evidence of rice in Kunal, Haryana dating to 3000 – 2500 B.C.E and Swat in 2970 – 2920 B.C.E. and various winter crops from moving from Baluchistan into Jhusi. All this is before the migration of Harappans to the Gangetic plain. Also with this find, we see a cultural continuity in Jhusi which starts in the Mesolithic period, continues through the Neolithic and Chalcolithic age to modern times''

    J. Anil K. Pokharia, JN Pal and Alka Srivastava, Plant macro-remains from Neolithic Jhusi in Ganga Plain: evidence for grain-based agricultureCURRENT SCIENCE 97, no. 4 (2009): 564-572.

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  82. @Highlander also the previous post above.

    ''The archaeological evidence shows that the Gangetic Plain owed to the Vindhyas not only for its first colonization in the Mesolithic period but as evident by very close affinity in the ceramic industries, microlithic component, food processing equipments, bone tools, beads and settlement pattern revealed
    from the excavations at Tokwa and other sites in the Vindhyas and Jhusi and other sites in the middle Gangetic Plain it can be concluded that both the regions are intimately related to each other for the origin and development of Neolithic culture. The C-14 dates from recent excavations at Jhusi and Lahuradeva in the middle Ganga plain and Tokwa in the Vindhyas suggest that this region was one of the early centers of agriculture in the world. The evidence of barley (Hardeum vulgare), bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) and other winter crops along with summer crop like rice (Oryza sativa), etc. from early levels of Neolithic Jhusi indicates that the area was in cultural contact with the original home of winter crops right from the early phase of the Neolithic culture. It may be mentioned that in still nearer region the Himalayan tarai still has some wild barley species. The wild ancestor of the six rowed barley (Hardeum hexastichum) is found in eastern Tibet.The discovery also highlights the fact that Jhusi has been a cradle of human civilization right from the Mesolithic age down to the blossoming of urban phase of the culture of this region. It is born, bred and developed at its own epicenter, the mid-Ganga Valley as exemplified by the present excavations at Jhusi. Outside influences, if any, were of an interactive rather than originary character.

    -"First Farmers in Global Perspective', Lucknow, India, 18-20 January, 2006.
    ''The Early Farming Culture of the Middle Ganga Plain.''

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  83. @Va_Highlander

    Granted the author of the article on Elamite influence on the BMAC was wrong, but my source presented Elamite influence over BMAC can which not be denied.

    Even though the radiocarbon dates vary for Shortughai between 2200-1600BC, the site is still older than the BMAC.

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  84. @Va-Highlander

    You keep asking me do I know what post hoc ergo propter means, because you are implying that my comments are a logical fallacy.

    My comments are based on science. I am a falsificationist. This means that I believe a theory can be either confirmed or disconfirmed.

    The aim of science is scientific explanation and theory. As a result, I form a hypothesis and then I test it.

    In science control is used to test the causes of a hypothesis. Layman rarely use control they accept hypothesis because of biases. Scientist test relationships to determine their validity. as a result, science is concerned with things that can be tested and observed.

    You begin any research project with a question and/or problem. My question was: What are the cultures that influenced the BMAC?

    I next created a null hypothesis:
    There is no relationship between the BMAC and non-Indo-Aryan cultures or civilizations.

    To test the hypothesis I reviewed the research literature and found that the Harappans established the first civilizations in Afghanistan, and that the BMAC was deeply influenced by the Harappan and the Elamite civilization. After reviewing the research litertature I cited the sources that confirmed my hypothesis. The research literature led to the empirical implications that the BMAC was influenced by both the Harappan and Elamite civilizations which were not Indo-Aryan civilizations.

    Granted the date for Shortughai was 300 years too early, and eventhough I provided a source for my Elamite thesis which was not properly cited, you were still able to confirm the statements I made relating to the Elamite influence on BMAC. The citing of the material can be excused because this is an informal blog discussion not a peer reviewed publication.

    I followed the scientific method in my discourse I did not make a post hoc fallacy as you imply. My hypothesis throughout this debate concerning the Elamite and Harappan influence on BMAC ( and Niger-Congo origin of the Dravidians) was tested by observation and experimentation.
    The abundance of sources cited in my post confirm my hypothesis.

    You have failed to falsify my hypothesis with counter citations denying that the BMAC was influenced by the Elamites and Harappans. You claim that I am wrong but the artifacts associted with the Elamite-BMAC relationship exist.

    If anyone has made a post hoc ergo propter in this discourse it is you. My discussion has been situated firmly in the scientific method.

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  85. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "You keep asking me do I know what post hoc ergo propter means, because you are implying that my comments are a logical fallacy."

    Yes, exactly, and I imply that your claim is based upon a logical fallacy because it is indeed based upon a logical fallacy.

    "To test the hypothesis I reviewed the research literature and found that the Harappans established the first civilizations in Afghanistan, and that the BMAC was deeply influenced by the Harappan and the Elamite civilization."

    No, that is not what you did at all. You cherry-picked outdated literature, in the case of the Elamites, and in the case of Afghanistan rather hilariously misread a sentence in Francfort. What you found was exactly what you wanted to find, just like any other pseudohistorian.

    "...you were still able to confirm the statements I made relating to the Elamite influence on BMAC."

    That is a peculiarly bold lie, even for you. As I've said before, please try to be honest. It is going to be really hard but I know you can do it.

    "I followed the scientific method in my discourse I did not make a post hoc fallacy as you imply."

    Of course you did! I ask again, did you look up, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", and are you at long last prepared to support you claim with something more than a logical fallacy?

    "The abundance of sources cited in my post confirm my hypothesis."

    Every source you cited has either been proven wrong or was wildly misinterpreted by you in a way that supports your claim.

    "You have failed to falsify my hypothesis with counter citations denying that the BMAC was influenced by the Elamites and Harappans."

    Again, you cannot tell the truth, even when the truth is sitting just above for everyone to see -- the unfortunate Dr Winters, Sunday, 11 August 2013:

    "The civilization in Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) was founded by Harappans or IVC people and Elamites."

    You did not claim they were "influenced", something quite possibly true, in the case of the IVC, and demonstrably false, in the case of Elam. What you claimed was that the BMAC was "founded" by Harappans and Elamites, another preposterous claim altogether.

    "You claim that I am wrong but the artifacts associted with the Elamite-BMAC relationship exist."

    That too was shot down as soon as you tossed it out. Amiet was proven wrong, once the results of Soviet archaeology in the region became known in the West. The artifacts in question first appear in Bactria and Margiana and spread south to the Iranian plateau, not the reverse.

    It is typical of pseudohistorians to rely upon outdated sources and ignore later scholarship that refutes their claims.

    "If anyone has made a post hoc ergo propter in this discourse it is you."

    As I suspected: you don't even know what it is. At least that answers my question. Either you didn't look it up or you were incapable of understanding what you read.

    "Granted the author of the article on Elamite influence on the BMAC was wrong, but my source presented Elamite influence over BMAC can which not be denied."

    Since Amiet was wrong, of course it can be denied! You cannot see that because you do not understand why Amiet suspected Elamite influence. As I say, you don't even understand your own evidence.

    "Even though the radiocarbon dates vary for Shortughai between 2200-1600BC, the site is still older than the BMAC."

    You obviously have not seen the C14 sequence obtained at Shortugai. You have no compelling evidence supporting your claim and you still don't know what, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", means.

    bmdriver:

    If you agree that at least some cultivars of the Indian Neolithic were not indigenous, then that casts some doubt upon the claim of indigenous agriculture.

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  86. @bmdriver

    "The real question is when does West Asia and Central Asia become EUROPEAN centric?"

    I think it's interesting that suddenly anatolia and georgia and the caucas area are no longer part of europe. Turkey was considered the sick man of europe for the longest time, now it's not considered europe at all.

    The thing is, this is the heart of europe, or was, and where europoids all came from.

    I agree with clyde that it's just impossible to have such a quick spread of IE, it just didn't happen.

    R is all over eurasia and if anything was more prevalent before attila the hun and endless successions of mongol and other hordes that drove many west or south.

    It's believe that plain or R is the main resettling force after the ice ace. It seems pretty clear that r1b was already separate from R1a about then, in iberia, and spread out from there.

    Now maykop was clearly r and far from savages but the most advanced civilization of their time. Before then I am guessing the spread of R was mostly west, but after then (and around time indus stopped being very habitable) they probably went east, too. But we can clearly trace them back further east before then, too.

    So the r1a is not just some wild tribes that got lucky. They are and were a major ethnic megagroup that has covered a very large area for a very large time, and probably were on the edges of the glaciers as they retreated, giving them the opportunity to expand that was greater than what the people in what was at that rime more ideal locations would have.

    So it's not like india got invaded in a short time it's more like a giant group that has made a huge imprint on all of eurasia for an extremely long time.

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  87. @Va_Highlander

    Amiet did not suspect an Elamite-BMAC connection. Following the lead of many archaeologists he reminds us that Elamites influenced BMAC cultures. Some of this influence include:

    1. Proto-Elamite signs on BMAC figurines associated with Namazga III

    2.Collon's Indus-BMAC hybrid pieces

    3. Proto-Elamite tablet found at Shahr-i Sakhta

    4. identical lithic drillheads from Shahr-i Sakhta and Chanhu-daro

    The Shortughai dates are from Francefort

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  88. @highlander - "If you agree that at least some cultivars of the Indian Neolithic were not indigenous, then that casts some doubt upon the claim of indigenous agriculture."

    Not really. Trade was surely discovered long before farming was. For something to be indigenous I don't think it has to be something that originates there, either. Were the people farming integrated into the locals? If so then for all intents and purposes they are already what we think of as the locals at that point.


    "post hoc ergo propter"
    But we are talking about science here, not pure logic. Which is evidence based. If the only evidence we have is one association it doesn't prove it's true, but it starts to look more likely.

    OTOH it is compelling that some claim to have translated indus script and found it's a sanskritian language. And exciting because this would conform to a script similar to the phoenicians.

    If it turned out the phoenicians and IVC are synonymous it would be mind-blowing. There's definitely I DNA at very low levels at all of the phoenician colonies and megalithic sites. There's also local I2 and historically and to a large entent currently it's been a fairly "white" area in gedrosia, much more so than anything around it.

    I is also thoroughly mixed in to r1a slavs, so since the two culprits that could be responsible are linked together it would make a lot snap into place.

    Actual r2 aryans just don't fly, though, for a million reasons.

    And it's also the "convenient" and explosive find so it could be a case of finding what the researcher wants to see.

    Could it be dravidian instead?

    Thing is no one agrees and no one knows for sure, but there's no need to get insulting about it. Clearly we see art that looks like black africans (with cornrows!!!), and no art that looks like white people. And it's very advanced art. So yes maybe the black looking people came afterwards, or it went back and forth but you can't just completely ignore that.

    It's maddening we have no DNA here, and no DNA from places like stonehenge where there's loads of bones to try and sample. Even more than this I'd like to know if r1b has always been in iberia and west europe. Well, I am pretty sure the hunter gatherers then were r1b but if not then it would be mindblowing to see indo-european migrations/conquest had such a huge effect in so short a time.

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  89. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  90. @Grognard,

    As usual, you are making a lot of speculations about history and the role of some Y-DNA haplogroups in it without providing any evidence for your claims. Also you are conflating political-based issues such as what constitutes Europe with genetics.

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  91. Grognard,

    You don't have a clue what you're talking about.

    The major expansion and SNP branching of R1a took place during the Bronze Age somewhere in Eastern Europe.

    That's when the European R1a-Z283 and now mostly Asian R1a-Z293 parted their ways, spread across Eurasia and diversified into a wide variety of young subclades.

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  92. Correction: Georgiy Starostin

    @Dr. Clyde Winters

    I am afraid you are gravely in error. No linguist accepts that Dravidian is related to Niger-Congo. This is an idea that belongs to fringe “linguists” who are not taken seriously by anyone.

    Honestly, no one needs to falsify it. It was clear from the time Dravidian was first detailed by any linguist that it had no very close relations to any other documented language. As knowledge has progressed and more languages were documented and others discovered, that became even clearer. In more recent times, with the knowledge of so many languages now under our belts, it has been determined that the closest language families to Dravidian are Afroasiatic, Elamite, and Nostratic. Notice, no worthy linguist even looks at Niger-Congo. They have known from near the beginning that there is no actual connection between Niger-Congo and Dravidian, only ones imagined by fringe “linguists”. That construct was built on European racist ideas and should be abandoned as the false science it is. I could go into more detail, but that is not necessary.

    You are the same linguist who says Meroitic is “Tocharian”. In fact, I happen to be studying the known Meroitic lexicon and it is heavily Afroasiatic. If Meroitic is not Afrroasiatic, it certainly has very massive borrowing from, not just some of the daughter languages, but even proto-Afroasiatic itself (we know that is impossible, so those words had to be inherited). There are even Greek loans in Meroitic. Even the phonotactics (which are securely established) of the language are very similar to the rest of Afroasiatic and rather dissimilar to Northern Eastern Sudanic, Astaboran, Eastern k Sudanic (all refer to the same branch to which Nubian belongs) and the rest of Nilo-Saharan. Even the hydronym “Astaboras” has an easily Afroasiatic etymology and one that matches supremely well with the meaning of the river-name given by Pliny the Elder. The “Tocharians” of the Tarim Basin are not even “Tocharian”. The real Tocharians spoke Bactrian, an Iranian IE language which is rather distinct from the IE language(s) spoken in the Tarim Basin.

    Sumerian and Dravidian are not accepted as related except through Nostratic. As I said before, there are loans in Sumerian from Dravidian and possibly vice versa through mostly trade contact.

    As for Sanskit, it is known to be very securely Indo-European. No intelligent argument can be made against that, so please do not try. Sanskrit and subsequent Aryan languages are known to have borrowed intensely from Dravidian…that is known to every linguist.

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  93. Grognard:

    "Not really. Trade was surely discovered long before farming was."

    I don't think you can have it both ways. Indigenous development implies that agriculture arose in isolation on the Indian subcontinent. If you claim there was trade with agricultural communities -- a reasonable assumption, perhaps -- then obviously it was not an isolated development.

    If you wish to argue against agriculture arriving with a substantial population of farmers, that is a different argument entirely. If you wish to argue that traded cultivars arrived after agriculture arose, then please proceed.

    "But we are talking about science here, not pure logic. Which is evidence based."

    Which the astute commenter would realize is rather the point. Where is this evidence? Since you choose to champion his cause, let's see you make his case.

    Your suggestion that a scientific argument need not be logically valid had me laughing out loud. I hope such was your intent.

    "OTOH it is compelling that some claim to have translated indus script and found it's a sanskritian language."

    Suggesting merely that some are easily compelled. Others have noted that, given the very large symbol set and its many singletons, the very short symbol strings, and a dearth of repeated symbols, it is doubtful that the so-called Indus script encodes a language at all. In the absence of any broadly accepted translation, I find this argument persuasive.

    "Thing is no one agrees and no one knows for sure, but there's no need to get insulting about it."

    I think you lost the plot several pages ago. Contra the claims of Dr Clyde Winters, I stated with some confidence that the Bactrian Margiana Archaeological Complex was its own thing, founded neither by Elamites nor Harappans. You have not cast any reasonable doubt on that statement, so what's your point?

    Dr Clyde Winters:

    "Amiet did not suspect an Elamite-BMAC connection."

    As expected, you have little knowledge or understanding of the sources you cite. You are in the business of spinning pseudohistorical fantasies. A comprehensive grasp of the relevant literature would only get in the way.

    "1. Proto-Elamite signs on BMAC figurines associated with Namazga III"

    So, which is it? Are you now claiming that Proto-Elamites are responsible for Namazga III or do you think that, for reasons surpassing mortal understanding, this proves that Elamites founded the BMAC?

    "2.Collon's Indus-BMAC hybrid pieces"

    Which obviously has nothing to do with Elam. Those hybrid seals actually suggest BMAC influence on the IVC.

    Shahr-i Sokhta is not a BMAC site, so you are confused at best. I get the impression that you're down to just throwing stuff against the wall in the hope that something might stick. This is desperation, not argumentation.

    "The Shortughai dates are from Francefort"

    Then I am sure you will have no difficulty quoting Francfort to that effect. Are you now conceding that Shortugai was settled after the rise of the BMAC?

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  94. @ Highlander

    I am not going to recite the radiocarbon dates they are well known.

    I believe that the Elamites and Harappans were in already settled in the area before the BMAC.

    @AdygheChabadi

    Homburger, Dr. Upadhyaya and Dr. Upadhyaya; Dr. Aravaanan and Sergent are well established linguist and they recognized a relationship between Dravidian languages and Niger-Congo group.

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  95. "You don't have a clue what you're talking about.

    The major expansion and SNP branching of R1a took place during the Bronze Age somewhere in Eastern Europe."

    According to junk science of molecular clocks only.

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  96. The Proto-Dravidians have western origin.
    The oldest Dravidians in this work have the age of 4,176 years old in India.

    Mr. Igor' Rozhanskiy estimated the age of R1a1a1b2a1 L657 ->4,300 years old
    estimated the age of R1a1a1b2a2b Z2122 ->4,400 years old
    estimated the age of R1a1a1b2a2a Z2123 ->4,550 years old
    here in the bottom of the picture http://r1a.org/

    +
    Dravidian and Uralian
    http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/411899?uid=4&sid=21102549920023

    +
    Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting to some a prolonged period of contact in the past.[21] This idea is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell,[22] Thomas Burrow,[23] Kamil Zvelebil,[24] and Mikhail Andronov.[25]

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  97. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "I am not going to recite the radiocarbon dates they are well known."

    You are lying and I did not ask for the "radiocarbon dates". I facetiously stated that you would have no trouble quoting Francfort.

    "I believe that the Elamites and Harappans were in already settled in the area before the BMAC."

    Your latest claim is that Shortugai dates from 2200 BCE, yet as stated previously it is well known that the BMAC begins about a century earlier. Clearly, what you believe and what is widely accepted to be true are two very different things.

    As for your supposed Elamite settlements, how do you explain the fact that there is no material evidence of any Elamite presence in Bactria or Margiana? Why, in your expert opinion, did these supposed migrants completely abandon every aspect of their culture, including their written language, and adopt or invent the culture of the BMAC before they even arrived?

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  98. @George

    Just because the most recent common ancestor of a haplogroup
    is assigned a particular age
    does not establish that particular hapologroup in a specific region/local. Archaeology places the origin of Dravidian speakers in africa--not eurasia and definitely not India.

    The Dravidian speakers were spread throughout Eurasia from India and Central Asia into China according to Dravidian historical text.

    The Silappadikaram,Manimekalai, and Kalittokai are Dravidian text that mentiom three migration of Tamils into South India from Eurasia. This literature claims that the Kushana or Tocharians of Central Asia were Tamil who mirated into South India from Central Asia.

    According to Dravidian history text aother Tamil tribe the Yakshas lived in China. They were pushed into first Yunnan and then South East Asia by the Hua and Yi tribes . The Dai Viet tribes pushed many Dravidian speakers out of Southeast Asia into South India.

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  99. Highlander,

    I'm not championing his cause, but you have made a logical error, all there is to it.

    You can't disprove his case by saying another case is possible. Well of course. If there were one possibility everyone would agree.

    You are really just venting your opinion, nothing to support it but other people's opinions. Especially with the language. My opinion is that we have not enough info, that you have a set opinion means you have a lot less distance from the topic than me. But the not a language opion is the least likely, there's oher languages with more singletons than indus and we don't have all of them.

    And to come and say "no there's no farming!" from such speculation is pure rubbish. No one thinks farming was a one time miracle but a process of tens of thousands of years of experimentation. I won't say there's farming for sure but it's a joke to rule it out so casually.

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  100. Grognard:

    I realize that you do not think logic has any place in such discussions but this is just sad. One day you assert that science is "evidence based", then a mere three days later you insist that a theory with no supporting evidence at all is just as valid as those of informed experts. Sadder still, I suspect this too will go whizzing right over your head while you sit there complacently catching flies.

    Again, since you choose to insert yourself and champion his crackpot cause, let's see you make his case. Where is the evidence suggesting that the BMAC was founded by the Harappans and Elamites? Without compelling evidence, Winters might as well be claiming that the BMAC was founded by little green men from Alpha Centauri.

    "But the not a language opion is the least likely, there's oher languages with more singletons than indus and we don't have all of them."

    How many languages and how many more singletons per each? For that matter, do you even know what a singleton is? Based on that sentence, it seems doubtful.

    "And to come and say "no there's no farming!":

    Is English your second language? It is not possible to get from anything I wrote to what the voices in your head are telling you.

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  101. @Dr. Clyde Winters

    There are no relations between Dravidian and Niger-Congo. Please stop spreading this falsehood.

    R. Austerlitz described attempts to relate Dravidian to the Uralic, Altaic, African (Niger-Congo, Khoisan, etc...), Basque, Sumerian, etc. language families as ‘unprofessional’, ‘typological’, ‘wrong’, ‘experiments without intent to convince’, ‘unsystematic’ etc. I will have to agree fully. The Afro-Dravidian hypothesis is born out of the racist European notion that southern Indians supposedly resemble Africans and, therefore, they must be related linguistically and genetically. This is conspicuously false on every level as we know and have known for quite a few decades now. What R. Austerlitz's words say about the authors you mentioned is up to you to interpret...I know what it says to me.

    The Dravidian languages must be separated from there current speakers. Proto-Dravidian is estimated, by some, to have existed as late as 5000 years ago. The melanistic tribals (the source of the "ASI" component) likely spoke a vastly different group of languages as evidenced by the various substrates found throughout the Sub-continent's extant language families (except Burushaski which may be Macro-Caucasian).

    Also, the Yakshas are chthonic semi-divine beings, half god and half demon. They live under the earth in the Himalayas where they guard the wealth of the earth (gems, gold, silver, etc.). They are led by Kubera, the god of wealth. Like their leader, they have all fat bellies and plump legs. They have no special characteristics, are not violent, and are therefore called punyajana ("good beings"). Kubera's epithet is Punyajaneshvara. They are clearly not Dravidians.

    Furthermore, the Kushan were not Dravidian speakers, but clearly Indo-European speakers. Again, the “Tocharians” of the Tarim Basin are not even “Tocharian”. The real Tocharians spoke Bactrian, an Iranian IE language which is rather distinct from the IE language(s) spoken in the Tarim Basin. So called "Tocharian" A, B, and C (yes, they have discovered a third language/ dialect) of the Tarim Basin are not related to Dravidian period. These language(s) are very securely IE, though, there are known loans from other languages. One in particular is the so called "BMAC substrate" which is not even one language, but several languages that Indo-Iranian came in contact with (this includes Dravidian). There are some substrate words that Indo-Aryan has that Iranian lacks and these are words encountered before Old Aryan's entrance into the Sub-continent.

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  102. @AdygheChabadi



    The Dravidians did not speak Proto-Dravidian 5ky. This is supported by the Indus Valley writing. The Indus seals are written in Tamil.
    As a result, 5kya in the Indus Valley some of the Harappans were speaking Tamil.

    Most researchers accept that the harappans spoke a Dravidian language because researchers such as B.B. Lal, Parpola, I. Mahadevan and Possehl to name a few maintain that the Indus Valley writing was probably written in a Dravidian language.

    B.B. Lal, thought Harappans and Dravidians were connected because the same symbols on the Indus seals and South Indian pottery were the identical and both groups used red-and-black pottery. This idea was supported not only by epigraphic and archaeological evidence, there are Islands of Dravidian speakers in Afghanistan, Iran, Yugoslavia, Russia and Pakistan. 300,000 Brahui speaking Dravidians live in Qualat, Hairpur and Hyderabad.

    Centrla Asia was early settled by Dravidian speakers. As a result, they left many placenames and form the substratum language of Tocharian.

    Tocharian is not securely in the IE family. It is not clearly related to other IE languages. A major problem is that although Tocherians lived near Indo-Aryan speakers the languages are not alledgely united. It is a strange language there are archaisms in Tocharian and only a few common innovations with "western languages"

    This had led some researchers like Andrew and Susan Sherratt to claim that Tocharian might be a trade language use along the Silk Road. I subcribe to this view. Lets look at Tocharian. Tocharians shares phonological ,word formations and lexical correspondence with Balto-Slavic; Sanskrit and Iranian influences via Buddhism.

    The most important influence on Tocharian are the Dravidian languages which indicates a substratum influence on Tocharian culture terms. In addition to culture terms, most of the placenames in Central Asia are Dravidian.

    Tocharian English Dravidian
    ku dog ku-na
    Ko cow kode
    wast house wastu
    yuk horse iyuli
    par bring, take bar

    It would appear that the Dravidian substratum in Tocharian suggest that Dravidian speakers lived in the area before the coming of the IE speakers.

    Alexander entered Central Asia in 245 BC with 30,000 mercenaries

    183 BC Greeks conquered India

    130 BC Saka occupied Tashkend, Fergana

    160 Kushana first occupy Tranxiana and Oxus Valley

    The Kushana dynasty lasted until 3rd Century

    The Tocharians called themseves Kushana. The Chinese called them Kuishuang. In Tamil history text they were called Kosars.

    As I stated earlier the Tamil say the Kushana were Tamil speakers. Thus it would appear that when the Chinese forced the Kushana out of Xinjiang, they were returning to a region formerly controlled by the Dravidians--as supported by the presence of the Dravidian substratum in Tocharian and numerous Dravidian Central Asian placenames.

    I subcribe to the Sherratts hypothesis: Tocharian was a trade language. It was probably used as a lingua franca due the variety of ethnic groupds that formerly lived in Central Asia; this would explain the Greek and Balto-Slavic and Saka influences on Tocherian.

    There is no such thing as a "BMAC substrate " in Tocharian. To date, I don't believe if researchers have identified a BMAC language.

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  103. @Va_Highlander

    The Tocharians came from Xinjiang. They were not IE speakers. In the Chinese literature they were called Kuishuang and Yueh chih. The Kushana are related to the Qijia culture, not Afanasievo culture of the Steppes. The Qijia culture existed from the upper Weishui Valley in the east, the Huangshui Valley of Qijia in the West, MNingxia and the westernmost inner Mongolia in the north. Qijia pottery signs are analogous to those found in the Harappan writing and on Harappan pottery

    The evidence of Harappans first exploiting the metals in Central Asia, as indicated by the major IVC colony Shortughai in the area. The Dravidians from Harappa established mines along the lapis lazuli mines of Sar-i-Sang in Badakshan from Shortughai. Other lapis lazuli was mined in the Chagai massif of Northern Baluchistan, near the lapis lazuli centres on the Hilmand or the Indus. The archaeological evidence of the association of mining operations and irrigation sites in Central Asia points to the long establishment of Dravidians in Central Asia, as indicated by the discovery of Harappan artifacts at Dashly and Balkhab.

    Let's not forget that vessels from the IVBI workshop at Tepe Yahya, have a uniform shape and design. The vessels sharing this style are distributed from the Uzbekistan to the Indus Valley.The intercultural style vessels from Tepe Yahya show clear parallel between Indus Valley, Sumerian and Elamiten sites.

    Imported Indus seals have also been found at Altyn-Depe, the large ceremonial center situated in southern Turkmenia.

    The early Dravidian miners and explorers probably used the southern Zagros region of Iran, as its dispersal point into Central Asia. This would explain the presence of Dravidian placenames in Central Asia.

    Francefort outlined the archaeological data supporting a Dravidian colonization of farming and mining habitats in Central Asia. This would explain the Dravidian substratum in Tocharian.

    The Dravidian substratum supports the view that Harappan Dravidian speakers introduced innovative technological and economic culture traits. It suggest that the majority of people in Central Asia prior to the Harappan settlement of the area were hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads, since the Dravidians probably introduced many items of culture and civilization and trade to the Bactrians, Dravidian was a language served as an early lingua franca linking the urbanized Dravidian speaking people with the Dravidian and non-Dravidian speaking nomadic groups from Bactria in the West, to China and Mongolia.

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  104. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "Elamiten"? Heh.

    I find it difficult to believe that you are really this obtuse and am increasingly inclined to see you as a shamelessly mendacious fraud. The lapis trade and irrigation in Central Asia are older than the IVC. Both existed for more than a thousand years before the settlement of Shortugai. Dravidian is a language, not a people, as you have been repeatedly told. A few stray Harappan artifacts in Central Asia suggest trade, which given the regional history surprises precisely no one. The same may be said of the intercultural style.

    I ask you again. How do you explain the fact that there is no material evidence of any Elamite presence in Bactria or Margiana? Why, in your expert opinion, did these supposed migrants completely abandon every aspect of their culture, including their written language, and adopt the culture of the BMAC before they even arrived?

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  105. Va_Highlander

    Dravidian is a language family. But it is also recognized as an identity for the people who speak these languages.

    The Harappan finds in Central Asia support the presence of the group in the region when the BMAC people arrived. There are many examples of people adopting a substratum culture without explicitly illustrating that culture.

    For example, the Euro-Americans who took the U.S., from the Native Americans adopted many elements of Native American culture, placenames and etc., plus the culture and culture terms of African slaves that would not be evident in the "American Culture", because people take it for granted that the American culture was maintained and solely created by Europeans.

    The elite dominance model explains the lost of Elamite and Dravidian culture in Central Asia. In Central Asia the native cultures were abandoned when new groups took over the area. The elite dominance model implies the arrival of a small militarily effective population into a new territory, speaking a new language, that successfully subjugates and dominates the existing population. The BMAC would represent such a group.

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  106. Dr Clyde Winters:

    "The Harappan finds in Central Asia support the presence of the group in the region when the BMAC people arrived."

    No, they obviously do not, since the artifacts in question were found in a BMAC cultural context. A thing cannot already be present before it arrives. To suggest otherwise is silly.

    "The elite dominance model explains the lost of Elamite and Dravidian culture in Central Asia. In Central Asia the native cultures were abandoned when new groups took over the area."

    So, basically, you are now claiming that these Elamites and 'Dravidians' invaded and dominated southern Central Asia but contributed nothing whatsoever to the BMAC. They should have retained whatever superior cultural elements that they possessed but even you admit that they retained nothing whatsoever, not even their written language. The obvious implication is that these supposed 'elites' were more like savages, when compared to the Oxus Civilization, culturally inferior in every possible way to the people they came to dominate.

    This seems to be universally true, if I understand your 'theories' correctly. These 'elites' leave Africa and, wherever they go, they contribute nothing. Everywhere we find them adopting the culture of the people they supposedly dominate, while retaining nothing of their own. Conversely, when Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they retained a substantial amount of their native culture and contributed materially to the culture that dominated them. It is a fascinating paradox, don't you think?

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  107. Trying way too hard. Lets see all the white guys who are portrayed in IVC art. Whoops.

    http://racialreality.blogspot.com/2012/12/racial-composition-and-history-of-india.html

    I don't like this guy's blog for the most part but look at the clusters. Europe and tibet off by themselves.

    Dravidian somewhat mixed to both IE speakers and afro asiatic speakers. I trust that more than the nonexistent archaeology and nonexistent DNA tests.

    I don't have strong opinion on the exact details of what's going on with IVC, I think anyone who isn't caught up in an agenda has to see it's still up in the air. You can't really determine what direction a relationship goes very easily, the nature or direction of it matters.

    But looking at the clustering we can discard the inane theories that the dravidians have no relation to afro asiatic or come from uralic or something totally lame like that. Of course anything is possible but those never seemed to be anything but wishful thinking.

    But a bigger question is about the IVC identity and if someone can really peg that it's like saying you are going to split the atom, in archaeology terms, and hilarious to see such angry arguing about it.



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  108. @Va_Highlander

    You have it all wrong. The BMAC were the invaders.The Harappans and Elamites were agropastoralist and miners who established centers of commerce and trade. They were the original settlers in the area when the BMAC invaded the area.

    Your reasoning is unsound.The Elamites in Central Asia and the Dravidians came from Iran, and the Indus Valley which was founded by Dravidians, not Africa.

    You seem to be unfamiliar with history. Lets look at Germanic-Roman relations. Romans ruled the Germans for some time. The Germans eventually ran the Romans out of their homelands.

    When the Germans liberated their homelands and took control of Roman territories they did not practice Roman culture or employ writing, yet Roman text and artifacts show the Romans had great influence in the area; just as Harappan and Elamite writing and artifacts illustrate their presence in Central Asia.

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  109. Grognard:

    "I don't have strong opinion on the exact details of what's going on with IVC..."

    Or any detailed knowledge of the facts, apparently.

    "But a bigger question is about the IVC identity and if someone can really peg that it's like saying you are going to split the atom..."

    Which, as anyone paying attention knows, was first done in a sustainable fashion over 70 years ago.

    "...in archaeology terms, and hilarious to see such angry arguing about it."

    I warned you about listening to the voices in your head. Dismantling the claims of a crank like Winters is entertaining and I might as well get angry at a crossword puzzle. Refuting utter bullshit is often more challenging than addressing a reasonably cogent argument, hence the attraction.

    Dr Clyde Winters:

    "You have it all wrong.""

    No, I do not.

    "Your reasoning is unsound."

    No, it is not.

    "You seem to be unfamiliar with history."

    No, I am an avid student of history. You are projecting your own ignorance onto others and hoping no one will notice.

    "Harappan and Elamite writing and artifacts illustrate their presence in Central Asia."

    Another shamelessly transparent lie. Elamite writing has never been found in the oases of Central Asia. Seals found in a BMAC context suggest the presence of trade, not that Harappans founded the BMAC.

    This has gone on long enough. You are proven wrong on the facts, again and again, and you just pretend it did not happen. You blatantly lie about your sources to someone that knows better. You are a joke and, if you were not deliberately teaching lies as truth to the impressionable, it would be funny.

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  110. @Va_Highlander

    I am not teaching lies. You admit in your post August 14, that Amiets presents evidence that Elamites probably influenced the BMAC.

    Moreover, the Harappans were settled throughout Bactria before the nomadic BMAC people came on the scene. As a result, archaeologist have found Indus seals in Bactria and the Kopet Dagh foothills.

    The BMAC is usually associated with Namazga V. Here we find small seals, IVC beads and ivory sticks. also, lets not forget that Possehl, claims that Namazga V was contemporary with Shortughai (Hiebert, Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization in Central Asia, p.172). The depopulation of the urban sites in the Kopet Dagh foothills around the end of Namazga V, may indicate the rise of BMAC nomads as the dominate group in the region, since it was at this time widespread occupation of Bactria begins (Hiebert, p.172).

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  111. One last thing, remember. The afro-asiatics are related to the dravidians so when you talk about non indigenous crops you are actually talking about sharing between two highly genetically related groups.

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  112. To AdygheChabadi:
    You make the assertion that Dravidian is intrusive, not native. Yet there is no strong evidence of Dravidian having mediterranean origins or having links to any other language family outside India. Also, there is a paper by Sengupta et.al. titled "Polarity and temporality of high resolution Y-chromosome distribution....." which claims that Dravidian originated in Southern India.

    However, If your assertion is correct, then mediterranean agriculturalist brought proto-Dravidian to Afghanistan & IV at an unknown date perhaps as early as 7000 B.C. around the period of Mehrgarh culture? Proto-Dravidian, through the process of elite dominance displaced the languages spoken in the area by ANIs who had not yet intermixed with ASIs (based one Reich et.al.) at that time. Perhaps in this process the native languages had a substrate or sub-stratum influence on Dravidian?-a hypothesis that cannot be tested, since none of those languages exist today. A similar thing happened when the Central Asian pastoralists arrived around 2000 B.C. which is coincident with the fall of IV. Sanskrit displaced Dravidian from North, in the process absorbing many Dravidian loan words and being profoundly affected by Dravidian at the sub-stratum level. Of course, you are very familiar with all this. This also was the period of profound admixture between ANIs and ASIs as described in Reich et.al. paper

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  113. Hi, Dr. Clyde Winters!

    I used the date for the proto-language of Dravidian most often used by reputable linguists.

    I am not sure at all that you are right about the people of the IVC speaking Tamil. I am neutral on the issue of whether the people of the IVC spoke Dravidian. I will say it is interesting that many of the words of the so called “BMAC substrate” are actually Dravidian which means that Dravidian was likely spoken outside of what is now India proper. This the only way such words could have ended up in Indo-Iranian and shared by both Iranian and Old Aryan. There are words of Dravidian origin that Old Aryan encountered that Iranian did not before Old Aryan entered the Subcontinent.

    To some degree, we agree about Dravidian being outside what is now India. To what extent is a point of disagreement.

    Also, yes, Tarim Basin IE is definitely IE. Its inherited core lexicon definitely matches that of other IE languages of the Centum kind and is closest to Germanic of all other IE languages. There is no legitimate argument against the Tarim Basin IE languages being IE. I do not like to use the term “Tocharian” for these languages, so I use the aforementioned designation…Tarim Basin IE. Again, actual Tocharian was an Iranian IE language much distinct from Tarim Basin IE. It differs from its historical source likely due to contact with non-IE languages like Uralic, Altaic and/ or Yeniseian.

    The Tarim Basin IE speakers referred to themselves as ārśi > Tocharian A texts. Tocharian B texts use kuśiññe < kuśi or kuči, which is also a name known from Chinese and Turkic documents.

    The real Tocharians spoke Bactrian, the East Iranian IE language I mentioned earlier.

    Some of the words in that small comparison list have Afroasiatic parallels also...

    English: dog // Dravidian: ku-na // Tarim Basin IE: ku // Afroasiatic: Berber: kun-, Omotic: Kafa (Kaficho): kunano, Omotic: Mocha: kunano

    English: cow // Dravidian: kode // Tarim Basin IE: ko // Afroasiatic: Egyptian: k3 'bull' (pyramid), Central Chadic (Biu-Mandara): *kaw- 'bull', Agaw (Central Cushitic): *kiw- 'buffalo'

    English: bring, take // Dravidian: bar // Tarim Basin IE: par // Afroasiatic: Berber: (?) *HabVr- 'take (in handfuls)', East Chadic: *bar- 'touch', Beḍauye (Beja aka North Cushitic): bari 'get, collect, have', Saho-Afar: *bar- 'grasp, hold'

    The word for “dog” is a well-known ‘wanderwort’. The contact between IE and Afroasiatic is well-known. The relationship of Dravidian to Afroasiatic is known. We discussed that in this thread. Afroasiatic is closer to Dravidian and Elamite (especially close with Afroasiatic) than to any other language families.

    Also, Alexander Lubotsky and M. Witzel both identified a layer of loans in Indo-Iranian and its daughter languages that they correlated with the BMAC. This is not a layer of loans from one language however. It is actually a jumble of words from various languages Indo-Iranian came in contact with including NW and NE Caucasian, Uralic, Dravidian, Burushaski (only a few words), scant Elamite and Semitic (Akkadian), and possibly some others (Altaic, Yeniseian). The Indo-Iranian word for ‘bread’ may come from Sumerian, I am not yet sure of that. I suspect Sanskrit: gandha "smell, fragrance, aroma, scent, incense, perfume, etc..." is Dravidian, not sure yet though...investigating. The word is considered part of the BMAC substrate.

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  114. @Ramesh Mohan

    Namaste!

    Well, there is linguistic evidence of Dravidian being intrusive. We can safely say that the carriers of the 'ASI' component where not originally Dravidian speakers. Their entrance into what is now India is far older than Dravidian. Comparatively speaking, Dravidian is rather new to the Subcontinent and Indo-Aryan even newer. The Austroasiatic speakers and Sino-Tibetans were in the Subcontinent before Dravidians were according to many geneticists and linguists. Again, Georgiy Starostin says that Dravidian, Elamite, and Afroasiatic are much closer to each other than to other language families.

    There are some detected substrates in Dravidian, but no one has ever fully investigated Dravidian for substratal influences. Not all Dravidian languages have been studied for one thing, unlike say, well-studied language families like Indo-European and Afroasiatic. I believe, in the future, Afroasiatic will gain a new member, Meroitic (the language of ancient Kush).

    Dravidian has core lexicon items that are strongly indicative of geography, flora, and fauna outside of what is now India. The Dravidian numerical system may show substratal influence from a language spoken by the original ‘ASI’ component carriers. Vaclav Blazek says some of the numerals match the numerals from indigenous Australian languages quite well. Speaking anthropologically, the Veddoids (original ‘ASI’ component carriers) are considered Australoid. We also have good linguistic evidence of other now defunct languages being in what is now India. As for Dravidian and Elamite, I am not so sure of a genetic relationship between them, but there is definitely some shared vocabulary and they share some morphology. All of this points to goodly contact between the two (not sure about genealogical relationship). Also there are securely Dravidian loans in Indo-Iranian shared between Iranian and Old Aryan and they are not as few as M. Witzel has stated in the past (he has changed his mind about some things). He is a strongly respected expert in Indo-Aryan. There is also the Afroasiatic connection to Dravidian, they share non-Semitic lexicon between them. There are possible Dravidian loans in Hebrew and Greek (Indo-European). Also there are words shared with Sumerian (likely to be loans also). All this points to Dravidian being existent outside of what is now India.

    I believe the Dravidian were carriers of the ‘ANI’ component so there is no way to distinguish them from other ‘ANI’ carriers except by language. According to the ‘Globe 13’ analysis of Dienekes, the ‘ANI’ seems comprised mostly of “West Asian”, low to moderate “North European” and low to non-existent “SW Asian”, and “Mediterranean”. Also there are tiny traces of “Siberian, “Native American”, “East Asian”, “Australasian”, and “Arctic”. As far as languages 9000 years ago/ 7000BCE, that is the close to the youngest age proposed for Afroasiatic before its break up (most estimated ages for Proto-Afroasiatic are much higher, they average out at about 13000BCE or 15000 years ago if I read correctly). So I cannot say what languages were spoken. As I said to Dr. Clyde Winters, the most used estimated age for Proto-Dravidian is 5000 years ago/ 3000 BCE at the latest. If there is or was such a thing, I am not sure of what the estimated age for Elamo-Dravidian would be.

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  115. @ Grognard

    The Dravidians cultivated African millets--not wheat. The names for these crops are of Niger-Congo origin not Afro-Asiatic. See:
    African Millets taken to India by Dravidians,Ann of Bot, http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/eletters/100/5/903#49

    @Ramesh Mohan

    There were no IE speakers in India when the Dravidians entered the country. It was probably sparsely populated by Munda people.

    North Indians were useing Black and Red Ware (BRW). BRW was the signature ceramic style of the South Indian Megalithic Dravidian speaking people. So we see a continuity between BRW in the North and South of India.

    The Indo-Aryan speaking ANI group are associated with painted grey ware (PGW). PGW does not enter India until after 1200 BC. There is no evidence that Sanskrit was spoken in India before 1200 BC. The Indus Valley seal symbols and pottery signs on South India megalithic pottery is the same. This is evidence of a common/shared writing technology or ideational system among these groups.

    It was the invading PGW people who replaced the Dravidian users of BRW after 1200 BC, not the otherway around as you assume. This replacement is supported by archaeological research--not conjecture.

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  116. Dear Adyghe: Shalom! Thank you for your insightful response. I had a couple of questions. You mention there is reference to flora, fauna in Dravidian that is clearly outside South Asia. I am curious what they are? Also, if Proto_Dravidian only 5000 years old, how is it that it is classified much older (>7000 years) in the Nostratic family of super-languages where it is believed to have branched off very early from proto-Nostratic.

    Also, there is no explicit reference in Sangam literature about a sedentary urban culture in the past. Early Sangam literature Puarananooru, Agananunooru, tolkappiyam (Silappadhikaram is a few hundred years younger) was composed by bards describing nature, describing the glory of kings who gifted generously to them.

    It is difficult to imagine that descendants of people who lived in highly advanced urban centers such as Harappa would have regressed back to being pastoralists and agriculturalists and remembering nothing of it, not even in oral traditions! While there is recent evidence of Indus seals appearing in places like Porunthal in Tamil Nadu indicative of trade contacts, there is no archeological or epigraphic evidence of any advanced culture prior to 5th century BC in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere in South India implying that when the purported admixture happened there was no memory of IV that was carried to the South which defies logic!

    Are you referring to the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary by Emeneau for looking up Dravidian root words? Gandha appears to be Sanskrit to me and there is nothing in Old Tamil that sounds close to it. But I am not a linguist.

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  117. Dr Clyde Winters:
    While your statement regarding PGW and BRW is true, I do not agree with your conclusion that the appearance of a few Indus Valley seal symbols on South Indian megalith pottery implies they shared the same writing technology. South Indians at that time were most probably pastoralists perhaps phasing into agriculture, but certainly their society had not evolved to the stage where writing was necessary or known. The occurrence of these symbols simply means they traded with the citizens of IV. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, there is no archaeological evidence of civilization in the South till a century or two before the beginning of the Christian era. PS: I incorrectly mentioned 5th Century BC in my previous post.

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  118. @Ramesh Mohan

    There must have been wides pread literacy among the South Indians given the frequentcy of Indus Valley signs (e.g., Tamili writing) on the pottery.

    The dating of the Dravidian South Indian megalithic is much earlier than 2-3 centuries BCE. This would have given ample time for the Dravidian speaking IVC people to migrate into South India from the North. The distribution of BRW would support such a migration.

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  119. @Ramesh Mohan

    Adyghe_Chabadi is correct the Dravidians share many words for fauna and flora with people who live outside India.

    Dravidians recognize an African origin for many Dravidian speaking people as a result, they share many terms with other Niger-Congo speakers

    English Dravidian African
    millet sonne,connal suna (Wolof)

    rice mala-kurula malo (Mande)

    Yam ku, kui ku

    cultivated bey (Wolof)
    field bey be (Mande)

    hoe parai daba(Mande)

    hoe Kuntali Konko(Wolof)

    seed cigur si, se (Mande)

    cow naku, nika(Mande)

    The presence of these cognate terms make it clear that the Proto-Dravidians were a agro-pastoral people. It appears that when the Dravidian speakers separated from the other Niger-Congo people they already knew how to cultivate crops and manage cattle and sheep.

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  120. At least one of the words listed is clearly not cognate:
    parai and daba. Also, ari or arici is the word for Rice not mala-kurula is not an etyma for Rice. Kurula or surula means curly in Tamil and in Dravidian.
    Some putative cognates look suspicious- sigur and se?
    Some of these terms could have been brought by neolithic farmers from Africa to the middle east and then to India. I do not know any mainstream linguist who believes an African origin of Dravidian. For the longest time Dravidian as a group was considered a language isolate and I believe that is still the mainstream view. Nowadays there are a few claim Dravidian to be part of Nostratic family of languages, but this has not been accepted by the mainstream. I would like to know what paper describes Dravidian words describing flora and fauna outside India.

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  121. @Ramesh Mohan

    Namaste!

    I am sorry it has taken so long, very busy with university and career.

    I mentioned that because of what I read from M. Witzel here is the quote:

    ”As mentioned above, Zvelebil (1970, 1990) is of the opinion that the Dravida entered South
    Asia from the Iranian highlands. Their oldest vocabulary (Southworth & McAlpin) is that of a semi-nomadic, pastoral group, not of an agricultural community.”



    About the age of Dravidian, it is confusing I know, hahaha. I mean they say Proto-Indo-European is about ~6000ybp. The Dravidian languages are much closer to each other than Indo-European or Afroasiatic. This means they must not have separated from each other that long ago. So they consider Proto-Dravidian to be a bit younger. The longer languages have been split from each other the more change happens.

    About the IVC, I am neutral on what language was spoken there. I know Dravidian is not native to India and that, again, there are secure Dravidian loans in Indo-Iranian which were transmitted to Iranian and Old Aryans which suggests contact outside of what is now India. Where that contact occurred is debatable. There is vocabulary of highly civilized urban living in Tamil. Iravatham Mahadevan says, ”It is suggested that the Dravidian migration to the South at the end ofn the Indus Civilisation is the source of the city-related vocabulary preserved in the oldest layers of the Tamil Cankam poetry handed down by oral transmission at the earliest stages.”

    Also George van Driem states, “In summary, some indologists hold that the oldest layers of the Rgveda were composed in areas to the northwest of the Punjab, and compelling evidence has not yet been adduced to demonstrate that this is not the case. Lubotsky's findings indicate that the non-Dravidian loan layer in the Rgveda is too early to be traced to the Punjab and that the same source language is already reflected in Indo-Iranian. The fact that Dravidian loans are to be found in the later layers of the Rgveda is precisely what we should expect if we entertain the hypothesis of a Dravidian Indus.”

    I have no comment on the Dravidian Indus hypothesis, but he is correct about the substrate words in Indo-Iranian. They do belong to much earlier contact languages.

    Also you should read, “Pleonastic Compounding: An Ancient Dravidian Word Structure” by Periannan Chandrasekaran (Google search it). He puts forward a strong argument about that particular type of compounding in Dravidian and it’s implications for interpreting some of the words in the Indo-Iranian substrate and the Rgveda. By his evidence Dravidian was spoken outside of what is now India. The number of words in the Rgveda and the Indo-Iranian substrate increase beyond what is already securely…other words now become securely Dravidian that were once thought not to be.

    I can e-mail you a copy if you would like.

    The closest I find to both the Iranian and the Old Aryan word is below. There are other words that match the semantics, but they are in languages of Dravidian not known to have had contact with Indo-Iranian…like Kannada and Tulu and are derived from roots that do not match the Indo-Iranian substrate one. /k/ <> /g/ is a common phonological alternation in Dravidian. The word is attested in only Tamil and Telugu.

    1129 Ta. kaṭi
    1129 Ta. kaṭi scent, odour, fragrance; (-pp-, -tt-) to waft an aroma, emit fragrance. Te. (SAN) kaḍi good or bad odour. DEDS 146.

    Much like English: 'candy' could ultimately go back to Sanskrit: khanda "piece (of sugar) < ? Dravidian: Tamil: kattu (katti-) “to harden, consolidate, congeal, coagulate”. The Indo-Iranian substrate word (BMAC *gandʰ/t- → Skt. gandhá-; LAv. gaiṇti- ‘odor’) COULD go back to Dravidian: katti “to waft an aroma, emit fragrance”.
    How the phonetics would workout is difficult. I do hypothesize *uʃtr “camel”, *iʃtaka “brick”, *athr̥/ *atharavan, and *gandharva among others are Dravidian also which is highly interesting.

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  122. @Ramesh Mohan

    Are you claiming Homburger, Dr. Upadhyaya and Dr. Upadhyaya; Dr. Aravaanan and Sergent are not established linguist?

    You are seeking only Europeans to define Dravidian Linguistics
    this is sad because Dravidian linguist like Dr. Upadhyaya and Dr. Upadhyaya; and Dr. Aravaanan do see a relationship. Why do you think Europeans would know more about Dravidian linguistics than the people who speak them?

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  123. @Ramesh Mohan

    The Mande term malo "rice" corresponds to Dravidian: mulai, mula, mole

    DED 4997 Ta. muḷai (-v-, -nt-; -pp-, -tt-) : (page 450)

    Ta. muḷai (-v-,-nt-;-pp-,-tt-) to spring, grow as horns, hair, etc., sprout as shoots, germinate as seeds; n. shoot, sprout, seedling;? muḷari lotus. Ma. muḷa germ, shoot, young plant; muḷekka to germinate, shoot, grow up as rice-plants; muḷavu, muḷeppu sprouting, germinating. To. mï&lstroketod;, mïḷ shoot of plant. Ka. moḷe to germinate, grow, shoot forth, come out of the ground, sprout, bud, shoot; n. germ, bud, sprout, first shoot out of the ground;

    There is a clear cognate relationship between Mande si,se , and Dravidian sigur/cigur.

    DED 2489 Ta. imir̤ (-v-,-nt-) to sprout, shoot forth. Ka. igaru, cigur, cigaru id.; n. a sprout, shoot, young leaf; cigi to sprout, shoot. Tu. igaruni, iguruni to bud, germinate, shoot up; iguru bud, germ, tender shoot; cig&uring;r&uring; sprout, bud, germ; cig&uring;runi, ciguruni, siguruni,




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  124. @Ramesh Mohan


    Everyone else has given up on the two Afro centric colonialists. The genetics 100% go against their fringe '' semi religious'' theory of Noah.

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  125. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  126. Dr Clyde Winters: One cannot posit a theory of African origin based on a few cognate terms. The evidence has to come from multiple disciplines: archaeology, genetics, linguistics and history.

    Archaeology: Nothing that uniquely connects megalith culture of South India with Africa. There is a link with North India and IV as you correctly pointed out through the signature BRW.
    Genetics: Nothing here to link Dravidians to Africa, whether they belong to ANI (which I am beginning to believe is true- Adyghe Chabhadi makes a persuasive case) or to ASI, it doesn't matter
    Linguistics:Dravidian is a language isolate with origins in South Asia or of Meditteranean origin (Adyghe Chabhadi: Dravidian susbstrate in Indo-Iranian is very interesting). In this context I would like to point out a well researched paper by R. Balakrishnan of Indus Research Centre " Roja Muthiah Centre, Chennai, India titled "The High West- Low East Dichotomy of Indus Valley Cities- A Dravidian Paradigm" . He links many place names in Iran, Afghanistan, Sind to Dravidian place names and also finds many parallels between village names in Tamil Nadu to the layout of Indus cities.

    Aravaanan's ideas are dated and they were never considered mainstream even at the time of its publication. Citing these as evidence serves no constructive purpose. There were many Western Indologists in the 19th century who either had Christian agendas or Eurocentric bias. Most scholars today from the West including Witzel are scholars and scientists who try to be good scientists, but may inject their own perspectives/biases, when the data is not conclusive. I do not know why bmdriver labels "Witzel- the biggest con artist in the world"? I do not always agree with Witzel's for ex: the paper which he co-authored with Farmer, Sproat etc on Indus script, but that does not make him a con artist by any means! I know he is a Sanskrit scholar of the highest caliber but sometimes tends to shoot from the hip. Remember, he and Sproat were the ones who exposed Rajaram's ill-fated attempt to prove IV to be Vedic by faking a horse seal?

    Nowadays, the people with agendas are mostly Hindu nationalists who believe that Vedic civilization is the mother of all civilizations and subscribe to the OIT theory as well? Upanishads and some parts of the Vedas contain some of the most profound spiritual truths and insights in the history of world literature and those insights were gained in South Asia, but that does not make South Asia the home of IAs! There was no major IA invasion of the subcontinent as previously believed by the mainstream- ideas dating back to the 18th and 19th century- they should now be abandoned in favor of acculturation. Through elite dominance the language of the Vedic aryans was widely adopted by the inhabitants of North West India- a region that was already witnessing a sea change in demographics caused by the collapse of IV. The IAs were Central Asian pastoralists who used the horse, the chariot and the wheel to transform the world including South Asia. Then we have a few Dravidian pseudo-linguists, who in reaction to the IA supremacists (which has a long history) have taken the opposite view of Dravidian being the most ancient language and culture of South Asia. Obviously, both these groups belong to the extreme fringe.

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  127. @bmdriver

    There is only one Afro-centrist that I saw in this thread and that is Dr. Clyde Winters...As I have said over and over...the Afro-Dravidian theory is absolute bunk.

    @Ramesh Mohan

    "In this context I would like to point out a well researched paper by R. Balakrishnan of Indus Research Centre " Roja Muthiah Centre, Chennai, India titled "The High West- Low East Dichotomy of Indus Valley Cities- A Dravidian Paradigm" . He links many place names in Iran, Afghanistan, Sind to Dravidian place names and also finds many parallels between village names in Tamil Nadu to the layout of Indus cities."

    I have that paper actually.

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  128. @Ramesh Mohan

    ''The IAs were Central Asian pastoralists who used the horse''

    Where do you get the data for that? I have not seen one. You class some as Christian influenced scholars, then you go and rehash the colonial theory of white tribes from central asia riding on horses.

    You might not agree but Witzel is widely mocked for his distortions of Sankrit.

    The latest study shows Indian lineage into Central Asia, and Mesopotamia, hinting at an even older lineage. As this study also confirm no west asian migration at all in the last 12,500years and older.

    Thanks.

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  129. @Ramesh Mohan

    You are trying to posit an Afrocentric view of the connection between Dravidian speakers and Africans. This is ludicris.

    Dr. Upadhyaya and Dr. Upadhyaya and Aravaanan are Tamil speakers, not Afro-Americans. How can a Tamil speaker be considered Afrocentric, when they are Dravidian-centric.

    Your arguments are irrational. The clear cognation between Dravidian agro-pastoral culture terms and etc., are not just a few shared terms, linguist such as the Upadhyayas , Aravaanan, Sergent and others present 100's of cognate terms.

    R. Balakrishnan, in 'African Roots of the Dravidian -speaking Tribes,: A Case Study in Onomastics', International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics,(2005) 34(1):153-202, illustrates the African origin of the Dravidians using place names shared by both groups.As you can see Dravidian researchers continue to show the African origin of Dravidian speakers.

    You have not presented any evidence illustrating that IE speakers used BRW. The IE speakers never used BRW. It is only found among Dravidian speaking communities in South India, and the Indus Valley.

    There was a major IE invasion of India. This is supported by the replacement of BRW in North India, by two waves of people using PGW after 1200BC. The IE speakers introduced PGW, when they destroyed the Dravidians cities in search of booty. The Dravidians in North and Souh India used BRW.

    Why are you trying to confuse readers by claiming Tamil speakers are Afrocentric, just because they recognize an African origin that has been supported by the archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence discussed in the above posts?

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  130. bmdriver:

    I agree with you that the latest studies show no major influx of Central Asian pastoralists. But minor influx could have been there and their signature has yet to be discovered by more detailed studies as even Moorjani suggests in the Harvard, etc paper. Elite dominance is the most parsimonious explanation for the present day ubiquity of IA languages in Northern India. Attempts to show a South Asian origin for IE languages cannot be defended on a linguistic, archaeological, historical or genomic grounds. Even if R1a1 can be proven to have South Asian origin, the PIE has a later date of origin compared to the date of the purported migration of PIE out of south asia.

    Perhaps the vast majority of today's IA speakers are descendants of Dravidian, Munda etc speaking people. The substratum influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is deep-phonological, morphological and syntactic.

    Probably a similar scenario occurred when the Dravidians entered the subcontinent a few thousand years earlier from the mediterranean region. Through the process of elite dominance they replaced the native languages of ANI and ASI speakers initially in the North with Dravidian and later in the South. Exactly when they entered the subcontinent and what is their relation to IV culture is not clearly known. Are they the architects of IV or was it some other linguistic group of ANI or ASI? (At this stage the ANI and ASI had not started intermingling). It is clear that Dravidian speakers occupied a much wider swathe of geography than they do today, but did they come from the mediterranean or from some other region far beyond Afghanistan, Baluchistan etc or are they autochthonous origin is a question we are left to wrestle with. Incidentally, Baluchistan might be the place where IAs first came in contact with the Dravidian speaking population, based on what we are seeing from genomic studies.

    Can you please tell me about the latest papers you are talking about? I am familiar with the 2011 paper by Metspalu et.al?

    All: Has any detailed genetic studies done on IV human remains? Would this not help in reconstructing a cohesive picture of the demographics of those times?









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  131. @Ramesh Mohan and bmdriver

    Namaste!

    I will agree with what the latest studies show. As I said, I believe the Indo-Iranians are from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. I believe that the Indo-Iranians share with other populations, from north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, a high proportion of Dienekes’ Globe 13 admixture analysis component labelled “North European”. This “North European” component is found in moderate to low frequency in all populations who speak an Indo-Iranian language or who have had contact with an Indo-Iranian speaking population. I should say those populations in Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. This “North European” component even appears in Southeast Asia as I mentioned, but this is likely due to population contacts between India and that region…both ancient and more recent. This ”North European” component, as I said before, shows up in moderate to low traces throughout the Indo-Iranian speaking populations this is exactly the type of patterning that one should expect if there was no mass migration but instead small bands or waves of people. As Ramesh said, Elite Dominance is the most parsimonious explanation for the widespread dominance of Indo-Iranian speakers. We always forget the Turkic speakers in this discussion also. Their languages also spread much in the same way that the Indo-Iranian languages did. There were no massive Turkic migrations to the west. This is evidenced by genetics. It was small bands of Turkic peoples and through Elite Dominance passed their languages to non-Turkic populations who now speak them (Bashkirs, Anatolians, and Azeris for example). There may even be some Turkish words in Dravidian, but these were only encountered during the time when the Turkic speakers ruled a vast swath of territory much later (several thousand years later) than when Dravidian was spoken outside of what is now India.

    Also Ramesh, I am not sure the Dravdians came from the Mediterranean, but they maybe Mediterranean (“racially”), they seem to have originated a little further east than the Mediterranean.

    Also, I think it is clear Dravidian is conspicuously un-autochthonous based on linguistic grounds. So we can safely disregard any autochthonous Dravidian theory. The carriers of the “ASI” component were in what is now India well before Dravidian speakers entered the Subcontinent. They spoke languages entirely unrelated to Dravidian as evidenced by the numerous non-IE, non-Sino-Tibetan, non-Austroasiatic, non-Dravidian, and non-Burushaski substrates found in the Subcontinent.

    I said early in this thread that the Dravidian were likely “ANI” carriers and that one could distinguish between them and other “ANI” carriers except by language. I add to that…culture. Those are the only two things that would distinguish Dravidian speakers from other “ANI” carriers.

    About the genes of the IVC:

    http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2005/08/population-genetics-of-indus-valley.html

    http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/02/connections-between-indus-valley-and.html

    http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/121116/indus-civilization-2000-years-old-archaeologists

    http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-evidence-shows-harappan.html

    Also, craniometric studies have shown that there is no major statistical difference between modern and ancient skulls. There were differences but, not statistically major. I am sure you know of these studies.

    I could not find any aDNA studies, but I did find interesting articles though.

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  132. Adyghe Chabadi: Shalom! Thank you very much for your response. I am strongly leaning towards Dravidian being intrusive. Dravidians were most probably ANIs and very unlikely they were ASI, even though ASI components are found among groups outside South Asia albeit in small proportions (Harappan World Admixture).
    All:
    Also, the presence of two root words for horse in Dravidian (ivuLi and kuti rai) clearly shows Dravidian is from outside the subcontinent. It also seems to suggest that the architects of IV were not Dravidians, since it has been clearly established that was horse was unknown to the IV residents. It also raises another interesting question. Surely the Dravidians would have introduced the horse into the subcontinent when they entered around 3000BC? If so, why was it unknown to IV? Why is the first mention of horses in Rig Veda over 1000 years later? Why did not the Dravidians bring the horse along with them when they entered the subcontinent? These are vexing questions.

    When we look at the dates of admixture for Vaishyas in AP 4000 YBP (a Southern State) and KaLLars 3000 YBP in the deep south-Tamil Nadu, it is clear that the IAs were not responsible for the admixture. It appears that this process is not related to the appearance of Indo-Aryans since both the Southern states are thousands of miles away from the likely ingress points of the IAs.





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  133. @ Mohan
    You are right Dravidians already knew about the Horse before they settled in the IVC. They probably arrived in IVC by boat. The artifacts make it clear that in the IVC Dravidians used cattle to pull carts.

    The Dravidian term for horse is shared by other Niger-Congo speakers in Africa. As mentioned earlier the Dravidians belonged to the C-Group culture of Nubia. Dravidian languages are genetically related to the Niger-Congo group of languages.

    Horse:
    M. wolu, Bam. b’lu, wolo, N. unde Ta. Iyuli, Brahui hulli

    It would appear that the Proto-Afro-Dravidian namer for horse was
    *-oolu/ooli.

    Another ancient form of the word for horse in Afro-Dravidian languages was *par- / * far-.

    Below are other Dravidian-African terms for horse:

    Mande wolu Bam. B’lu, wolo
    Mande bara ‘grey horse’, Hausa baraba ‘swift horse’
    Wolof fas Somali fara-ka Egyptian nefer Serere pis; Tamil , Mal. Pari Tamil payyeru, Fulani puucu, Mande bari Ge’ez faras Galla or Oromo farda, ferda

    Ka. Karte Tamil kartai Hausa doki
    Tel. gadide Kanuri Nile koś Hausa godiya

    The Dravidians and Niger-Congo speakers formerly lived in the highlands of the Sahara. Many of these people migrated into West Africa. In West Africa according to Daniel McCall the horse was in the Sahara during the Second Millennium BC This would explain the affinity between the Dravidian and African terms for horse outlined above.

    The Saharan horse was small in size. These horses match perfectly the horses depicted with the Saharan chariot riders. These horses were stiil be used by the warriors of ancient Ghana as noted by the Arabic writer al-Bekri when he visited this area.

    The fact that the chariots found in West Africa resemble those of Crete does not mean that the riders of these chariots had to have come from Crete. In fact Greek traditions make it clear that the ancient Cretans, called Minoans came from Africa

    The Dravidian and African languages share similar names for the wheel. For example:

    Galla makurakura; Tulu gali, tagori
    Swahili guru, dumu; Mande koli, kori, muru-fe;
    Tamil kal, ari, urul , tikiri ; Ka. gali tiguri, tigari

    It would appear that the proto-African-Dravidian term for wheel was *-ori / *-uri *go/uri and *ko/uri. The proto-South Dravidian term for wheel *tigu/ori . The linguistic evidence suggest that in the proto- language the speakers of proto-African-Dravidian used either the vowels o/u or a/i after the consonants. It is also evident that the l and r, were interchangeable in the construction of the term for wheel.

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  134. @Mohan




    Dravidian speakers probably introduced the horse to Central Asia.

    These horsemen would have been Dravidian and /or Elamite speaking people., not Indo-Iranian speaking people who seem to have learned about the horse from the Dravidian speaking people.

    In the 2nd millennium BC the horse was extensively exploited throughout Central Asia (David 1986:486). For example, at the 17th 16th century BC site of Sinatasha, there are horse and chariot burials. These horsemen made fine bronzehead spears.

    The oldest alleged Indo-European language spoken in Central Asia is Tocharian. Although many researchers believe Tocharian is an Indo-European language, it was probably in reality a trade language, used by the diverse people of Central Asia to communicate.

    The Dravidian language is especially close to Tocharian A (TA). It would appear that Tocharian B (TB) has been greatly influenced by the Indo European languages. For example, there is labialization of labiovelars before voiceless consonants in TB.

    In TA on the otherhand there are few traces of an earlier distinction between labiovelars and velar plus *w, clusters. For example:

    Horse: TB yakwe, Old English eoh, Latin equus
    > *yakwe PIE *ekwos Sanskrit asvas, Old Irish ech
    TA yuk
    Dog: TB kwem< PIE *kwena < PIE acc. *kwonm (Sanskrit svanam )

    The TA terms for Central Asian domesticates agree with Dravidian terms.

    1. Tocharian A ku dog
    Dravidian kona id.
    Kannanda Kunni id.
    Tamil Kukkal id.
    " Kuran id.
    Telugu Kukka id.
    Malayam Cokkan id.

    3. Tocharian A ko bovine
    Toda kor id.
    Dravidian kode id.
    Kolami ku.te id.
    Tulugu kode id.
    Kolami konda,konde id.
    Tamil kali id.
    Kananda gonde id.
    Gadba konde id.
    Gondi Konda bullock


    As you can see from the above the Dravidians and Tocharian A group share many terms for animals, e.g., Ø ku na # 'dog'__/ Toch. Ø ku #; Ø kode # 'cow', Toch. Ø ko #; and Ø ivuli # 'horse' Toch. Ø yuk #.

    Dravidian speaking people probably introduced the horse and chariots to Central Asia. In Mongolian the term for ‘cart’ is terga, this corresponds to Ta. Teer ‘car, chariot’, Ka. teer(u) ‘chariot’ .

    The terms used for horse in Central Asia agree with Dravidian terms. This is interesting because it has affinity to Dravidian and Mongolian words for horse including:

    Buryat (Mongolian) guun, gu ‘mare’
    Tamil: kutirai, Karutai Ka. Karte ‘horse’, Proto-Nilotic *tike:ri donkey
    Hausa kutur, Kuturi ‘hindquarters of a horse or domkey’
    Telugu: gurramu, gadide ‘horse’; Hausa doki , goodiya; Kanuri koś
    Kol: gurramu

    Tocharian A yu horse ; Mande wolu
    Tamil ivuli id. Bambara b’lu, wolo
    Brahui hulli id. Nubian unde
    Telugu payyoli id.

    . Many researchers may dispute the affinity between Dravidian Ø ivuli # and Tocharian A Ø yuk # 'horse'. Yet the identification of Tocharian A yuk, to Dravidian is much more supportable than the PIE root for horse. This results from the fact that there are five different Proto Indo European (PIE) roots for horse. This multitude of PIE roots for horse makes these terms inconclusive for the PIE lexicon. They also support the view that the horse was not domesticated by the Indo Europeans before the Dravidian speakers.

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  135. @Ramesh Mohan

    Reading your last comment, made me want to laugh out loud.

    I will leave it at that.

    ''Dravidians are intrusive''...LOL.

    ReplyDelete
  136. @Ramesh Mohan

    Namaste!

    I don’t know if the Dravidian words for horse are relevant here. The Dravidians may well have known of the horse, but it may not have been integral to their culture as is evident. It is also not known if the words are related to the “true” horse (Equus ferus caballus) or rather to its relatives (Equus asinus [donkey]) and (Equus hemionus [onager]). Also it is not accepted, as far as I know, that Tamil: ivuɭi and Brahui: (h)ulli are legitimate cognates going back to Proto-Dravidian. Proto-Dravidian: *(h)ivuɭi (M. Witzel) would likely go back to a Proto-Dravidian: *civuɭi and through the normal South Dravidian I and II phonological processes word-initial *c- > s- > h- > Ø which would reflex as Tamil: ivuɭi as there is no /h/ phoneme in Proto-Dravidian (DED[R]). Tamil: ivuɭi could also possibly be connected to Semitic: *?ib(i)l- "camel" (BlaZek 1999: 64). Tamil: kutirai “horse” is much more secure and is highly likely related to DED(R) 1705 Tamil: kuti (-pp-, -tt-) “to jump, leap, bound, frolic, leap over, escape from, splash (as water), spurt out” ; noun: “jump, leap”; > Malayalam: kuti “leap, gallop” (DED[R]). Interestingly, Dravidians seem to call animals by their salient traits. Dravidian (DEDR 1711 a) Tamil: kutirai, Telugu: kudira, kudaramu, Kota: kulyr, Toda: kïθïr, Kodagu: kudïre have been compared with Elamite: kuti "to bear", kutira "bearer" (McAlpin 1981:147-8; Southworth 1979: 181). Note also Tirahi (Dardic): kuzara (Harmatta 1992: 375, d. CDIAL 32191) (M. Witzel). Further note, Dravidian (DEDR 1711a) kutirai "horse" > Koraput Munda: *kuXrtag, see Zide & Zide 1976: 1331 (M. Witzel). I know the Indo-Iranian word for camel (part of the so called, “BMAC substrate” adduced by A. Lubotsky and M. Witzel) is a Dravidian/ Indo-Iranian hybrid…such words are not uncommon. It is a Dravidian root + the Indo-Iranian agent formative/ agentive…so there you have a connection to the BMAC/ Oxus Civilization. So it is rather clear that Dravidians were well-familiar with camels and their traits as well as the horse. Dravidian also has a repertoire of animal vocabulary that very much match the animals known to the IVC. I am neutral on the language of IVC, but that is compelling.

    What you say about the admixture in the modern populations in the states of southern India is very interesting!

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  137. Dr Clyde Winters: Thank you for your elaborate response. You make a strong case for a Dravidians to be the first to domesticate the horse. I am not sure what the mainstream view is on this subject? Thanks for pointing out "pari" as another word for horse in Dravidian. The word does appear in Old Tamil literature such as "parimElazhagar". pari "to flow swiftly" is descriptive of a horse, much like "kutirai", where kuti means to jump as Adyghe correctly pointed out. It also appears there is some controversy with regards to the meaning of "ivuLi" -horse vs camel! Your derivation of ivuLi from the proto-afro-dravidian "ooLi" is highly suspect, since proto-Afro-Dravidian is not accepted by mainstream linguists!

    With regards to dog in Dravidian kona, I have an observation to make. In Tamil Onai refers to wolf. I wonder if they are related? Here is another interesting data point. In Sanskrit the word "Shvana" refers to dog. Incidentally, in the dialect that I speak (Saurashtrian) the word for dog is shuna or suna. We are a group of people who migrated from Saurashtra region of Gujarat to Tamil Nadu many hundreds of years ago (legend has it that we migrated South when the temple of Somnath was sacked by Mohammed of Ghazni). Is it possible that Shvana is a dravidian loan word?

    From your description, it appears that horse played a very important role in Dravidian life. If this is true, and even assuming they arrived on a boat to the Indus, why would they not have any memory of the horse when they settled down in the Indus Valley? My understanding is that Harappan civilization has a cultural continuity with Mehrgarh and is probably an outcome of many years of cultural evolution and is not a result of a sudden arrival of highly civilized dravidians on the scene. It also begs the question, where did they set their sales from? According to linguists the Dravidian imprint is noticeable in Elamite, BMAC, Indo-Iranian, so they were already in the neighborhood. So why resort to a sea route? Can you explain how Mande "bara" can be linguistically related to "pari" using accepted linguistic rules?

    Adyghe: Shalom! It is hard to imagine horse playing a marginal role in early Dravidian culture, if indeed horse was known to them from the earliest of times. It appears that horse has been a "game changer" for other cultures. "Elite dominance" is partly attributable to the introduction of the horse driven chariot by the IAs. Given the pivotal role that horse has played in other cultures, it is hard to imagine that horse played such a marginal role that the Dravidians completed forgot about them when they settled in IV.

    I am very interested in learning about the Dravidian repertoire of animal vocabulary that matches the animals known to the IVC. Please share with me! What about that strange mythical unicorn that appears so prominently in the Indus seals? I wonder if there is a term in Old Tamil for such a creature! Iravatham Mahadevan would definitely know.

    Just as you pointed out kuti "jump" is a salient trait of a horse, "para" means fly and "paravai" refers to bird and paranthu refers to eagle. The word for donkey in Tamil is kazhuthai, kazhu means to wash in Tamil and donkeys are often used to carry wash loads. However, I could not find kazhu in DED and so I could be on the wrong track with this one. Incidentally, kazhuku refers to a vulture in Tamil.

    bmdriver: I take it you do not subscribe to the view that Dravidian is intrusive?

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  138. @Mohan

    First of there is no continuity between Mehgarh and IVC. The art is different ,and while the former cultivated wheat, IVC farmers mainly cultivated millets.
    The Dravidians probably employed a sea-route because they had left Africa in search of metals . They chose key areas which had access to rivers flowing into the Sea so they could maintain trade with Mesopotamia, Egypt and Kush.they usually settled a place and remained their for an extended period of time.It was more effective to use cattle to pull carts carrying metals and other goods than horses.

    The Dravidians were mainly a agro-pastoral people so the horse was not a predominate animal in their early culture because cattle were stronger and could work harder. Traditionally Dravidians and Africans rode their horses bareback. The effective use by IEs of the chariot forced Dravidians and other people to see the horse in a different light.
    The IEs found the horse exciting because it provided them with an effective and efficient means of transportation and communication as they practiced their nomadic lifestyle.
    The comparative method is used by linguists to determine the relatedness of languages, and to reconstruct earlier language states. The comparative linguist has two major goals (1) trace the history of language families and reconstruct the mother language of each family, and (2) determine the forces which affect language. In general, comparative linguists are interested in determining phonetic laws, analogy/ correspondence and loan words. To determine a linguistic relationship we look at patterns of correspondence. Patterns of correspondence is the examination of terms which show uniformity across the location or placement of consonants in a word. This uniformity leads to the inference that languages are related since uniformity of form within terms leads to the inference that languages are related since conformity of terms in two or more languages indicate they came from a common ancestor.
    In comparative linguistics we look at the location of the consonants. As a result, we may often find that across related language terms sharing similar meanings can be composed of /d/ in one language and appear as a /t/ in another; or a /p/ in one language and /f, b,v/ in another. In Indo-European languages the kinship term for the male parent can have an initial /p/ , /b/ or /f/ sound. Thus we have in Spanish padre ‘male parent’, and English father. We see regular correspondence between the Span. /p/ and Eng. /f/; Span. /d/ and Eng. /th/ and both languages share the /r/. Thus we have the following pattern Span. P-d-r and Eng. F-th-r for the male parent. As a result, the Mande bari (b-r-) corresponds to Dravidian pari (p-r-) since both terms name the horse.

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  139. @Ramesh

    ''bmdriver: I take it you do not subscribe to the view that Dravidian is intrusive? ''

    Not when the genetics go against it.
    NOWHERE on earth has genetics stated Dravidians are a people or race.


    --No African components in Dravidian speakers, even in Andhra Pradesh where Y-DNA haplogroup T frequencies are highest." -(Metspalu, Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al, AJHG, Dec. 2011)

    Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome- in South Asia,
    --South Indians migrated to North India, South Asians migrated to Eurasia. Haplotype diversity associated with dark green ancestry is greatest in the south of the Indian subcontinent, indicating that the alleles underlying it most likely arose there and spread northwards. The component which spread beyond India has significantly higher haplotype diversity in India than in any other part of world. This is clear proof that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and Caucasus. We have conclusively proved that there never existed any Aryans or Dravidians in the Indian sub continent. The Aryan-Dravidian classification was nothing but a misinformation campaign carried out by people with vested interests,”

    --Sahoo et al:“The perennial concept of people, language, and agriculture arriving to India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny. Recent claims for a linkage of haplogroups J2, L, R1a,and R2 with a contemporaneous origin for the majority of the Indian castes’ paternal lineages from outside the subcontinent are REJECTED, although our findings do support a local origin of haplogroups F* and H.”

    --'The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.'' - Sanghamitra Sahoo, T. Kivisild.

    --Gonzalez et al. (2007), Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa, BMC Genomics 2007,

    --Ibeagha-Awemu (2005) found that the genetic variability of Indian cows in Africa is fargreater than that of African local or taurine cows, especially in Nigeria and Cameroon. High variability within Indicine cow genes in Africa indicates a very old migration from India to Africa,

    --Dravidian” authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization rejected indirectly, since it noted, “Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus. “overwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers.”
    Sanghamitra Sengupta, L. Cavalli-Sforza,

    FROM THIS STUDY!:
    ''It is also important to emphasize what our study has not shown. Although we have documented evidence for mixture in India this does not imply migration from West Eurasia into India during this time. On the contrary, a recent study that searched for West Eurasian groups most closely related to the ANI ancestors of Indians -failed- to find any evidence for shared ancestry between the ANI and groups in West Eurasia within the past 12,500 years3.''

    2013 PLoS ONE 8(9):
    --mtDNA from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period Suggests a Genetic Link between the Indian Subcontinent and Mesopotamian Cradle of Civilization. We anticipate that the analysed remains from Mesopotamia belonged to people with genetic affinity to the Indian subcontinent since the distribution of identified ancient haplotypes indicates solid link with populations from the region of South Asia-Tibet

    Almost all studies show a REVERSE migration out of india? ANI tribes migrate out of India taking dravidian dialects. With the onset of agriculture and developed civilisation, Sanskrit developed in North India, the flat planes of the north ideal for agriculture, not the mountainous south, where Dravidian dialect remained strong.

    (Winters is pushing Biblical Hamite ideology)

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  140. @Mohan

    The IVC animals depicted on the seals probably related to the corporation the bearer belonged too. The Dravidians were associated with several coporations whoes god was represented by a sacre animal.

    The Harappan seals were amulets. The importance of the Harappan seals as amulets is attested too by the popularity of wearing totems among the Dravidians.

    During the Sangam period (of ancient Dravidian history), the warriors and young maidens wore anklets with engraved designs and or totemic signs. Moreover at the turn of the century, in South India, it was common for children to wear an image of Hanumen around their neck; while wives wore a marriage totem around their necks as a symbol of household worship.

    It is also interesting to note that K.K. Thapliyal in, Studies in Ancient Indian Seals, found that many Indian seals from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD , portray animals, with an inscription above the animal ( just like in the case of the Harappan seals) which were indicative of the religious views of the owner of the seal. This evidence supports my finding that the Harappan seals were worn (or carried) by the Harappans to help them remember the Harappan man's goal, to obtain guidance from his deity.

    In the Harappan worldview animals were used in many cases to represent characteristics human beings should exhibit. As a result the bird was recognized as a symbol of the highest love, due to its devotion to its offspring ; and the elephant due to its strict monogamy symbolized the right attitude towards family life and social organization.

    The principal Harappan gods are all depicted on the Harappan seals. The main god of the Harappans was the unicorn. The unicorm probably represented Maal ( Vishnu or Kataval). This god was held in high esteem by the coherds and shepards.

    Other Harappan gods were represented by the water buffalo, humped bull, elephant, rhino, tiger and mythological animals. The crescent shaped horns of the oxen or castrated bull on some Harappan seals may represent the mother goddess "Kali". The lunar crescent shape of the oxen's curved horns recalled the lunar crescent which was the primordial sign for the mother goddess.

    Siva was probably represented by the the short horn bull. The elephant on the Harappan seals may have represented Ganesa/Ganesha the elephant headed god of India. In the "Laws of Manu", it is written that Ganesha is the god of the 'shudras', the aboriginal population of India. The Tamilian name for the elephant god is 'Pillaiyar, palla and veeram'. The hunter figure on Harappan seals wearing the horned headdress and armed with a bow and arrow may have been Muruga, the son of Uma.

    Pillayar, is considered the shrewdest of animals. He is associated with Harvest time, abundance and luck. The appearence of mythological animals on the Harappan seals may refer to Pillayar or Ganesha in one of his many transformations.

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  141. @bmdriver

    I don't understand what you are talking about in relation to Biblical Hamite theory.

    I have shown the archaeology and linguistics which point to African origin for the Dravidian, much of it based on the research of B.B. Lal.

    The genetic evidence tells us almost nothing about past migrations. Any genetic data we look at unless it is AmtDNA, reflects the genetic make-up of the contemporary people we test. As a result, genomic evidence must be supplimented by skeletal, archaeological and linguistic data.

    The social science data make it clear that the Dravidians did not originate in India. Nor does it indicate that Indians spread civilization into Central and Western Eurasia. This evidence indicates that Dravidians entered India from Iran and migrated into South India.It was from Iran that Dravidian speakers made their way into Central and maybe parts of Western Eurasia.

    You are correct that the Dravidians and Mesopotamians are related this has been proven by linguistic and archaeological evidence for years. The research indicates that the Sumerians and Dravidians formerly lived in Middle Africa, before they migrated into Mesopotamia.

    Moreover you talk about the origins of Agriculture in India. This is patently false. The ANI and ASI have different agricultural traditions. The ANI cultivate wheat. The ASI like the Niger-Congo people mainly cultivated millets.

    Finally, why do you keep maintaining that the ANI did not enter India, when B.B. Lal and others have proven that this group introduced the Painted Grey Ware tradition into India after 1300BC?

    Questions:

    1. How does the Bible's Hamitic story relate to Dravidian origins when B.B. Lal presents archaeological evidence supporting a close relationship between Dravidian peoples and the C-Group of Nubia?

    2. Why do B.B. Lal, and other Hindu archaeologist claim the ANI introduced PGW to India after 1300BC?

    3. Why does the research of the Upadhyayas and Aravaanan experts in Dravidian linguistic indicate a genetic relationship between African and Dravidian languages, but not a genetic relationship between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language (except the possibility of Dravidian being substratum language in IA)?

    4. Where is your evidence of Dravidians migrating out of India ?

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  142. @Ramesh refute the genetic evidence with facts, not your opinion.

    Second read the comments again. especially Clive Winters

    ''Ham means 'burnt',things that are burnt are black. In the Sefer_h'Hanowk (Book of Enoch, Ham is described as shacor=dark (>black)''

    Go and read the biblical account of human creation of which Clive Winters subscribes to, you should really understand the underlying ideology that has been present for the past 5-600years through Abrahamic conquest, of which i have no interest of going into, as this is not a history book website.

    ''Japeth shall dwell in the tents of shem and canaan shall be his servant'' -Bible

    If you want to understand religious colonial ideology present today in modern studies, then you NEED to know the historical aspects of the last 5-600years which have shaped modern society.

    The genetics show ASI share no similarity with any other population. So tell me why you think it was not ANI dravidians speakers who went out of india?

    ''Outside Africa, the earliest and fastest growth is inferred in Southern Asia ∼52 kya. Comparisons of relative regional population sizes through time suggest that between approximately 45 and 20 kya most of humanity lived in Southern Asia.
    -mtDNA Variation Predicts Population Size in Humans and Reveals a Major Southern Asian Chapter in Human Prehistory.

    I dont understand your position because you provide no evidence what so ever. Genetics underpins human movements. Maybe you can right it off as meaningless but then show me the genetics that underlines a dravidian migration into india, at least. Or maybe you should be commenting on a archeological sites, but im sure genetics holds SOME value. lol.

    ANI and ASI are from ancestral Indian tribe. First they went to south india, because it was lush, rich, wet and the hills and mountains ideal places for human to seek protection and shelter, over the next ten thousand years tribes move back up to the flatter northern planes.

    Now i will end my conversation with you, by not talking about humans but animals.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1929145/figure/F1/

    ''Genetic data indicated that ranges of musculus, custaneous and domesticus likely correspond to three distinct paths of expansion from the Indian cradle''
    - Boursot et al, The Evolution of House Mice, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1993, 24: 119-152;

    Ibeagha-Awemu (2005) found that the genetic variability of Indian cows in Africa is fargreater than that of African local or taurine cows, especially in Nigeria and Cameroon. High variability within
    Indicine cow genes in Africa indicates a very old migration from India to Africa.

    Where is this evidence of South Indian dravidian (a term forced upon south india through the christianized networks) migrating to India? Where is this evidence for Aryan invasion because then you must OBVIOUSLY be an adherent of that also, if you believe in dravidians in the context of abrahamic ham/cannite migration? Where is this evidence of this, you should source from large pools of data rather then follow one set.

    ''R (especially R1a1 and R2) diversity in India is indigenous in origin and does not support hypothesis of immigration from Central Asia or anywhere outside. R1a prevalence is not only high in Indo-European speaking Punjab, south Pakistan and Ganga Valley, but also in Chenchu and Koya tribes of south India'' (Kivisildet al.2009)

    NOW the latest study:
    PLoS ONE 8(9): e73682. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073682
    mtDNA from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period Suggests a Genetic Link between the Indian Subcontinent and Mesopotamian Cradle of Civilization

    Now they use skeletal remains and guess what, it show Indian migration into central asia/west asia, with evidence of them being the descendants of older Indian migrants.

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  143. @bmdriver

    You rely too much on the method of authority, instead of researching what you write about. just because an article is published by an authority does not mean that that published article can not be challenged.

    True genetics underpin human migrations, but unless the genome is ancient DNA, it can only tell us who lives in a region today. In addition genomic evidence can not tell the racial origin, pigmentation or language of a group. Language, phenotype and "race" can only be determined by skeletal remains respectively, but even bones can not tell us language and identity spoken by the person who possessed the skeletal material we have analyzed.

    Your reasoning relating the Dravidians to the Biblical myths is pure hogwash. Archaeological evidence links Dravidians and C-Group people in Nubia. This would not place Dravidian speaking people in India before 4-5kya.

    You claim Dravidians do not share any haplogroups with people outside India, especially Africa. This is false.

    Africans and Dravidians share several Y-chromosomes, HLA and mtDNA. Shared Y-chromosomes include M-173, H1, K2 and T-M70. This is interesting because the highest frequentcy of T-M70 is found among the Niger-Congo Fulani speakers.In relation to Y-chromosome H1, 22% of Dravidians carry this haplogroup.

    Sickle cell anemia is frequent among Africans and Dravidian tribal populations. It is interesting to not that both Arab-Indian and Senegal SC, are associated with a CIT mutation at position-158.


    Africans and Dravidians belong to the M haplogroup. Both groups also share haplogroups M1,M30 and M33. The M1 haplogroup was especially evident among high caste people in Kerela according to Kivisild et al 1999.

    The R haplogroup (hg) can not be indigenous to India because the Dravidians only arrived in India 5kya. It is an accepted fact that the Dravidians founded the South Indian megalithic. B.B. Lal has made it clear that the South Indian civilizations/culture were related to the C-Group culture/people of Nubia. This means that when the Dravidians left Africa 5kya they would have already acquired hg R.


    The fact that Dravidians introduced hg M to India does not support a back migration of hg M to Africa because Dravidians carry the same hg M1 as Sub-Saharan Africans. Kivisild et al (1999) found 26 high caste Dravidian carriers of hg M1 that as illustrated in the accompanying figure of Kivisild, et al ,shared the same mutations as Sub-Saharan hg M1.

    Conclusion: Dravidians left Nubia carrying hg M and R 5kya.




    The new study:

    PLoS ONE 8(9): e73682. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073682
    mtDNA from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman Period Suggests a Genetic Link between the Indian Subcontinent and Mesopotamian Cradle of Civilization

    is an interesting paper but it does not indicate a reationship between ASI or ANI with Sumerians. Terqa is located between Ebla and Sumer. There is no evidence that this was a Sumerian site.

    The original excavators of specimen TQ28F 112, which is now classified as hg M49, was originally said to belong to hg K (M9). This gentleman was tall and carried a bronze sword, he may have been indigenous, since the earliest skeleton from Terqa, date to 6000BC and carried hg K.

    The people at Terqa were not isolated form the rest of the world. The people at Terqa had trade relationships with the East, as illustrated by the discovery of cloves at terqa. Cloves were cultivated on the Molucca Island. No matter what the origin for specimen TQ28F 112, the people of Terqa were not Sumerians. Specimen TQ28F 112, if we accept his identification as M49, would place the indidividual in Tibet and therefore would not confirm any alledged migration of ASI or ANI into Mesopotamia, from India.

    But we do have firm evidence of Dravidians using red-and-black ware migrating from India into Mesopotamia. Moreover, the Dravidians who settled the Indus Valley, which was called Dilmun by the Sumerians according to Kramer, had intimate relations with the Sumerians, but not the people of Terqa.

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  144. @Ramesh Mohan

    Namaste!

    Again, Ramesh, the horse may not have been the “true” horse (Equus ferus caballus), but one of its relatives such as the donkey (Equus asinus) or onager (Equus hemionus). As such it may not have been such a game-changer in those respects. If it were the “true” horse then, yes, it would definitely be a great game-changer, but that does not appear to be the case as horses did not breed well in what is now India. Dravidian does not have the words associated with “horse culture”. If you notice in Indo-Iranian they had words associated with “horse culture”. This means that whatever horse the Dravidian speakers knew, it was not the one that is called the “true” horse or the “game-changer” as you call it, hahaha. They may have known of the “true” horse, but I am not sure. There is a lot to be said on this topic. Too much to try and fit here.

    As far as the Dravidian repertoire of animals matching animals known to the IVC, Franklin Southworth says, ”Among domesticable animals Proto-Dravidian has words for cattle, sheep/goat, cat, and dog (and, less securely, donkey, horse, and pig); wild animals include reptiles (crocodile, lizard, snake), primates (langur/baboon), various birds (crow, crane, dove, imperial pigeon, peacock tail), and –less certainly –deer, elephant, wild canids (wolf/fox/jackal), felids (tiger/ panther/ leopard). Unfortunately, we do not know whether the first group of reconstructed words referred to wild or domesticated species, but in general it is likely that they referred to different species or variants at different times and places. Wild forms of most of these animals (sheep, goat, cattle, chital deer, onager, pig, and probably elephant) have been found in the Indus Valley from the early levels of Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium BCE (Meadow 1986, 1987). Excavations of “late stone age” sites have produced remains of canid, pig, and buffalo (Langhnaj, Gujarat), and dog, Bos indicus, buffalo, sheep, goat, and pig, at Adamgarh on the Narbada (Allchin 1979a). Words for aquatic creatures (especially ‘prawn’ and ‘shellfish’) suggest a possible awareness of maritime products.” Franklin C. Southworth ~ Linguistic Archaeology South Asia.

    @bmdriver

    Your comments have no bearing on the Dravidian language. It speaks of the “ASI”-intensive southern populations of India. Also, if the Dravidians were already “ANI” then how, outside of language and culture, would you distinguish them from the rest of the “ANI” in the region? The Dravidian languages cannot be autochthonous. The “ASI”-intensive South Indians, East Indians, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans are descended of the “autochthonous” tribals that had been there for literal thousands, even tens of thousands, of years before Dravidian speakers. Dravidian is, relatively, new to what is now India. Indo-Aryan is, relatively, even newer. The Austro-Asiatic (Munda) speakers have an even older history than Dravidian speakers in what is now India. Even a court in India declared Dravidian to be intrusive.

    M. Witzel and A. Lubotsky point out that the word for “canal” in the “Indo-Iranian/ BMAC substrate”, Indo-Iranian/ BMAC substrate: *i̯avīi̯ā-, jawījā “canal, irrigation channel”Sanskrit: yavya- /yaviya/ = yavīyā-; Old Persian: yauwiyā-, Persian: ju(y) < Dravidian: Tamil: iyavai “way, path, by natural extension, channel, course”. There you have another connection to the BMAC/ Oxus civilization. This is just one of many words that clearly indicate Proto-Dravidian (not just merely some type of Dravidian) was spoken outside of what is now India. Language contact is the death of the autochthonous Dravidian speaker theory.

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  145. @Dr. Clyde Winters

    When you quote a study like Gonzales, claiming it proves your fringe theory

    ''Gonzalez et al. (2007), Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human backflow to Africa, BMC Genomics 2007, 8:223 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-8-223


    You should really read it carefully.

    ''Mitochondrial lineage M1 traces an early human -backflow- to Africa''


    You need to understand Dravidians are not a race. Even though you might want to hide your Afro-bibilical hamite claim because it shows your absurdity, you never the less have admitted to it, and even if you dont recognize it right now, it is the underlining of your theory.

    All evidence PROVES ANI migration into africa, central asia and europe. Let me guess they are not african black enough for you, because in essense that is your whole theory, they look AFRICAN, let me go one step further, they look HUMAN.

    :)

    Please carry on with your fringe b b b lal theory, i shall continue to accept modern science. BB Lal wasnt he a student of the Mortimer Wheeler?

    Let me just let you know for future reference, i deem all pre and post colonial theories such as yours backed up by colonially education hindus as nothing but hogwash.

    Take Care.

    'No African components in Dravidian speakers, even in Andhra Pradesh where Y-DNA haplogroup T frequencies are highest.
    West Eurasian diversity is derived from the more diverse South Asian gene pool."

    (Metspalu, Gyaneshwer Chaubey et al, AJHG, Dec. 2011)

    And if your using dubious people like WITZEL then it goes to show why you think that way. He is PROVEN to be a person who distorts Sanskrit and Indian history, many scholars have pointed this out.



    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1929145/figure/F1/

    ''Genetic data indicated that ranges of musculus, custaneous and domesticus likely correspond to three distinct paths of expansion from the Indian cradle''
    - Boursot et al, The Evolution of House Mice, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1993, 24: 119-152;


    ANI migration into Africa. Just accept the data.

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  146. @bmdriver

    Your problem is tht you don't read the supplemental files. It is there that you usually find the breakdown of all the subjects in the study. Also I also quoted Kivisild et all 1999, who also reported 26 High Caste crriers of M1.

    B.B.Lal is not a fringe archaeologist he is well respected in India. Hindutva like yourself often quote Lal, when he agrees with your theories.

    It is sad you would rather adhere to a history made up by Hindutva, rather than study the history of India for yourself.

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  147. Adyghe: Shalom! VaNakkam Thank you for illuminating me about the saga of the horse or is it the donkey? Looks like the Dravidians got a raw deal- ending up with a donkey instead of the prized horse, haha! In the Southworth list, are there animals only known to the IV area?

    I think your conclusion about the horse is based on two assumptions- 1) ancient India was not a suitable place for breeding horses and 2) Dravidian does not have the words associated with "horse-culture". What exactly is "horse-culture'? What is the basis of claim 1)? BTW, in TN horses are fed a legume called "horse gram" or "koLLu", which is very nutritious to humans too! Ok enough horsing around....

    You make a persuasive case for a foreign origin of Dravidians. Now, what about the "cognate" Dravidian terms in Mande, that Dr Clyde Winters points out to? How do the mainstream linguists interpret it?
    Dr. Kenoyer's research based on tooth enamel suggest that there were burials of foreign men alongside local women at IV indicative of matrilineal culture. Today such a practice exists among Nairs of Kerala, Bunts of Karnataka, Khasis, Jaintia and Garo of Meghalaya. I am still interested in learning if anyone has undertaken a study in the lines of Reich et.al. of IVC fossils so we can get a good picture of IVC demographics. Since the date of ANI/ASI admixture is post-IVC collapse, I would expect to find mostly ANIs and a few ASIs

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  148. bmdriver: I think your insistence on "Dravidian" being a Christian conspiracy displays insensitivity to other cultures and frankly ignorance of South Indian and Tamil history . The Dravida term appeared in 2 BCE texts in SriLanka, Damila appears in Buddhist, Jain texts referring to Southern people most likely Tamizh. Even Mahabharata refers to people in the South as Dravidas. So, why are you in denial of the rich multi-cultural heritage of India? In all probability most IA speakers were at one time Dravidian speakers and were bi-lingual. Dravidian shows extensive lexical borrowing and very little structural borrowing, whereas the opposite is true with IA languages. This asymmetry can be best explained by the above scenario. Despite different origins, all of the scientific, spiritual and religious thought arose as a result of the confluence of IA, Dravidian, and to a lesser extent Austo-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Vedda, Nehali, Brushaski and Masica's X culture etc. Having said that, I agree with you that many 18th, 19th century historians who were white Europeans had a three point agenda - to use history as a colonial and exploitative tool to promote the supremacy of the Western Hellenistic civilization over and two to establish "correctness" of Biblical events, and three to promote Christianity as the only hope for Indians by exposing the many evils that existed in society (and there were many!) but also distorting and misinterpreting many Hindu customs in the worst possible light in order to promote their agenda! However, not all European scholars were racists. There were many great scholars & archeologists. I also think a serious effort should be undertaken by scholars to study the events mentioned in the early Sanskrit texts and Sangam literature. Finally attempting to re-write Indian history as the story of one people, one culture, one language would be tantamount to misrepresenting facts and promoting a revisionist agenda which is no different from what the colonialists tried to do!
    I believe most readers of this blog accept the premise that there has been no massive influx of Central asian pastoralists which is supported by multiple genetic studies. This does not mean there was no minor inflow whose traces can still be found in upper caste brahmins and other elite groups throughout India! With time, with caste barriers breaking down, even these signals will become weak and eventually disappear. As the authors of the Moorjani paper claim "further sampling and newer methods such relatedness might be detected". In a recent publication titled "Traces of sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern lineages in Indian Muslim..." the authors state "Overall, our results support a model according to which the spread of Islam in India was predominantly cultural conversion associated with minor but still detectable levels of gene flow from outside, primarily from Iran and Central Asia". If only a "minor level" of gene inflow could be detected of muslim invaders, why is it surprising that we cannot detect any strong signal dating back 4000 years? The subcontinent was already teeming with ANIs 4000 years ago and the arrival of a few thousand IAs with a slightly different mix of ANI components is not going to alter the genomic landscape significantly. Anyways, I will let the experts chime in.

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  149. It is a mystery to me how the nomadic IA pastoralists had such a disproportionate influence on the linguistic landscape when they first encountered the more civilized and urban population of IV? What was the tipping point? Was the horse the game changer? Or did the idea of a simple agro-pastoral lifestyle of the IAs resonate with the IV folks who were already getting fed up with3 city life? The timing couldn't have been better. IVC was already unraveling. People were returning to the farms

    Perhaps the IVC elites grew a fascination for Vedic language and over time through the process of elite dominance, people chose IA as the lingua franca and eventually adopting IA as their mother tongue? ( BTW, it was Metspalu who had first made me aware of elite dominance!)

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  150. This article appeared October 1st in DNA tribes.
    http://dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2013-10-01.pdf

    Nothing new in this, but mostly a review of recent developments. Not even sure if everything is accurate!

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  151. @Ramesh Mohan:

    Namaste!

    Well, for the first example you mention. Horses don’t like densely forested areas while there are some subspecies that have lived or do live in heavily forested areas. This is not true of all horses, especially, the “true” horse. Also, “true” horses don’t like very hot and very humid tropical areas as they did not evolve in such regions. They can survive there, but not at all optimally. As to your second question. “Horse culture” involves all the details of breeding, raising, and maintaining/ caring for horses in a culture that has thoroughly integrated them and become dependent on them for their way of life. You can notice the plethora of horse-related vocabulary in the Rgveda and notice the dearth of it in Dravidian. “Horse culture” is often very strongly associated with Indo-Iranian cultures in the greater Middle East. “Horse culture”, was not present in the Near East until the Indo-Iranians introduced it. Note the Botai culture in what is now Kazakhstan…http://horsetalk.co.nz/2011/10/28/evidence-for-horse-domestication-clearer/

    The Dravidians would have been stuck mostly with the Onager (Equus hemionus). It is nearly untamable by most accounts, so it would have not been much good to them in many ways as a “true” horse would have been. “True” horses as far as is known, were extinct in the Subcontinent, so they had to be imported from Central Asia.

    I don’t think that you would find specific animals peculiar only to the area of the IVC. The IVC was a massive trade entity so animals from over a wide area were known to them. “Domesticated animals included dogs and cats, humped and shorthorn cattle, domestic fowl, and possibly pigs, camels, and buffalo. The elephant probably was also domesticated, and its ivory tusks were freely used.” ~ Encyclopedia Britannica

    Just as an example, all of these animals were known in Egypt as well, except the buffalo (though some consider that the Egyptians either had or knew of them and their African buffalo relative). The Egyptians definitely had a relative of the buffalo, called an auroch. The people of the IVC seemed to be typical agro-pastoralists. They were definitely crop-raisers, but also raised livestock.

    As for Dr. Clyde Winter’s associations of Mande to Dravidian…they are two whole distinct and unrelated languages. Mr. Winter’s is also known for saying Meroitic (the ancient language of Kush, a rival to Egypt situated immediately south of Egypt) is related to “Tocharian” an IE language known to have existed in the Tarim Basin in Northwest China. In my opinion, Meroitic is very strongly lexically Afroasiatic based on the known vocabulary and has significant Egyptian borrowing, but anyway, on both accounts he is EXTRAORDINARILY WRONG. Mande is currently classified as Niger-Congo (the family to which the Bantu languages belong), but maybe Nilo-Saharan and related to Songhay as there are some very striking parallels to Songhay a Nilo-Saharan language of the Western Saharan Branch. Mande may even be an independent isolated language family strongly areally influenced by other languages that surround it. Nilo-Saharan may, itself, be related to Niger-Congo in a Niger-Saharan family. As I said before, Dravidian’s closest relatives are Elamite and Afroasiatic. This is agreed upon by nearly all the experts who have studied the lexicons of these families. No one takes the Afro-Dravidian hypothesis seriously. It is a degraded relic of old European racialist ideas and should have died long ago. As for suspected parallels between Dravidian and Mande, they can be very securely discarded as false or chance occurrences.

    As far as aDNA is concerned, we can only speculate, but what you say is a safe conjecture.

    Also, the demise of the IVC seemed to be both climatological and geological. Geological shifts seem to be part of why the Ghaggar-Hakra dried up and the climate changed also which dealt another blow to the civilization. http://www.livescience.com/20614-collapse-mythical-river-civilization.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakra#Ancient_tributaries

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  152. Adyghe: Shalom! As always, your answers were clear, logical and detailed, backed by dispassionate analysis.Thank you.

    I went back and read the dnatribes October publication. These seem to strongly hint to a Govarari River (Andhra Pradesh) origin for Proto-Dravidian, but they do concede the possibility of an external origin for Dravidians.

    The most surprising data in the paper is the presence of large Japanese automsomal STR component among South Indians only smaller than the largest Australian component. The Japanese component is bigger than the Mesopotamian component among South Indians. Who would have guessed the Japanese connection among South Indians? Any linguistic explanation Adyghe or anyone else?

    As far as autosomal SNPs, the top three components among South Indians is Mesopotamian, Caucasus mountains, South East Asian followed by Oceanian and Tibetian!

    With regards to IAs, the authors claim a Mesopotamian origin which is contrary to a Central Asian origin view held by many. Perhaps, the genetic experts can weigh in on the dnatribe publication?

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  153. @Ramesh Mohan

    Namaste!

    Yes, I think they are following Franklin C. Southworth's suggestion.

    "If it is true, as I have suggested (Southworth in press, ch.8) on linguistic grounds, that Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the lower Godavari basin in the early-to-mid third millennium BCE (though there is as yet no independent confirmation of this), then Dravidian-speaking groups may also have travelled up the Godavari in to Maharashtra. (The rivers mentioned above with Dravidian names are upper tributaries of the Godavari system.)" ~ F. C. Southworth - Prehistoric Implications of the Dravidian element in the NIA lexicon, with special attention to Marathi

    He bases his theory on as he states, ”…the assumption that the region of greatest variability is likely to be the oldest region, it is probable that Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the lower Godavari basin…” ~ F. C. Southworth - Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia

    This is not always the case, Semitic may have originated in Africa, specifically what is now Northern Egypt, but it did not significantly diversify until it was in what is now the Levant/ Near East.

    Even Southworth admits his proposal is shaky and the archaeology does not quite fit his proposal. ”Thus the Southern Neolithic complex is a close, though hardly perfect, fit for the Proto-Dravidian speech community, in terms of specific artifacts, animals, and plant remains. This is not a surprising conclusion, given that Dravidian languages have been dominant in the peninsula since the beginnings of recorded history.” ~ F. C. Southworth - Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia

    All of the linguistic evidence he adduces matches with the IVC better than the Lower Godavari does. I am neutral on the language of the IVC, but again, that is an interesting correspondence. Southworth further admits that the Proto-Dravidian speakers could have come from much further west. The fact that Proto-Dravidian words are found at the proto level of Indo-Iranian (at least before Iranian and Indo-Aryan separated) is, again, extremely interesting.

    Also, I read the DNA Tribes paper, there are some errors and omissions. It is not thoroughly researched, but it serves their purpose.

    I doubt that Indo-Iranian is “Mesopotamian”. This may be decided based upon modern speakers of the languages. When they finally are able to do ancestry tests on ancient Indo-Iranians…I suspect that, ancestrally, they might well resemble the populations north of the Caucasus, Caspian, and Black Sea.

    As far as language is concerned, Dravidian has been compared to Ainu (an isolate language spoken in Northern Japan). No significant correspondences were attained.

    According to Dienekes’ ‘Globe 13’ admixture analysis, all the populations with ~ 70% or more of the “South Asian” component have less than 3.5% of the “Siberian” and “East Asian” each which, according to ‘Globe 13’, the Japanese are composed entirely of those 2 components. The Bhunjia, Gonds, Nihali, and Chaubey et al. – Paniya are an exception with 21%, 10.5%, 10.4%, and 7% “East Asian” component respectively. They all evidence traces of “Australasian” (less than 5% at the most), “Amerindian”, and “Arctic”.

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  154. @AdygheChabadi
    You claim that Dravidian is not related to the Niger-Congo group. But numerous linguist say the language families are related.

    Aravanan, K P , "Physical and cultural similarities between
    Dravidians and Africans", Journal of Tamil Studies
    10,(1976)pages 23-27.

    Aravanan, K P. (1979). Dravidians and Africans , Madras.

    Aravanan,K.P. Notable negroid elements in Dravidian India,
    Journal of Tamil Studies, 1980, pp.20-45.

    R. Balakrishnan, in 'African Roots of the Dravidian -speaking Tribes,: A Case Study in Onomastics', International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics,(2005) 34(1):153-202

    Lal, B , "The Only Asian expedition in threatened Nubia:Work by an Indian
    Mission at Afyeh and Tumas", The Illustrated London Times , 20 April 1963

    Lahovary, N , Dravidian Origins and the West, Madras: Longman,1963.

    N'Diaye, C.T. (1978) The relationship between Dravidian languages and Wolof. Annamalai University Ph.D. Thesis.

    Sergent , Bernard (1992). Genèse de L'Inde. Paris: Payot .

    Singh, H.N. (1982). History and archaeology of Black-and Red ware. Delhi.


    Upadhyaya,P & Upadhyaya,S.P., Les liens entre Kerala et l"Afrique tels qu'ils resosortent des survivances culturelles et linguistiques, Bulletin de L'IFAN,
    no.1, 1979, pp.100-132.

    Upadhyaya,P & Upadhyaya,S.P. Affinites ethno-linguistiques
    entre Dravidiens et les Negro-Africain, Bull.de L’IFAN,No.1, 1976,pp.127-157.

    Weber, S.A.(1998). Out of Africa: The initial impact of millets in South Asia. Current Anthropology, 39(2), 267-274.

    Wigboldus,J.S. (1996). Early presence of African millets near the Indian Ocean. In J. Reade, The Indian Ocean (pp.75-86), London: The British Museum.

    Winters, Clyde Ahmad. (1980). "The genetic unity of Dravidian and African languages",Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Asian Studies (PIISAS) 1979, Hong Kong: Asian Research Service.

    Winters,Clyde Ahmad.(1981a) "The Unity of African and Indian Agriculture", Journal of African Civilization 3, no1 ,page 103.

    Winters,Clyde Ahmad.(1981b). "Are Dravidians of African Origin", P.Second ISAS,1980,( Hong Kong:Asian Research Service)pages 789- 807.

    Winters, Clyde Ahmad. (1985). The Proto-Culture of the Dravidians, Manding and Sumerians, Tamil Civilization 3 (1), 1-9.

    Winters,Clyde Ahmad.(1986)."The Dravidian Origin of the Mountain and Water Toponyms in central Asia", Journal of Central Asia 9(2): 144-148.

    Winters, C.A. (1994). The Dravidian and African languages, International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 23 (2), 34-52.

    Winters, Clyde Ahmad.(1999a). ProtoDravidian terms for cattle. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 28, 91-98.

    Winters, C.A.(1999b). Proto-Dravidian terms for sheep and goats.PILC Journal of Dravidian Studies, 9 (2), 183-87.

    Winters, C.A.(2000). Proto-Dravidian agricultural terms. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 30 (1), 23-28.

    As you can see there is abundant evidence of a Dravidian and Niger-Congo relationship. The Dravidian languages are genetically related to Niger- Congo, in addition to Elamite.

    Your claims are just your own personal opinion.

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  155. @Ramesh Mohan

    There is an intimate relationship between the Dravidians and Japanese. The linguistic connections have been discussed over the years by Prof. Karashima, Dr. Chandra, Susumu Ohno and myself.

    Dr. Susumu Ohno has done the most research on the relationship between Dravidian speakers and the Japanese. He maintains that there is a genetic linguistic relationship between Tamil and Japanese.

    Susumu believes that Dravidian speakers arrived in Japan in late Jomon times. He believe that they played a direct role in the introdution of agriculture in late Yayoi times since most Japanese agricultural terms are Tamil.

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  156. @Dr. Clyde Winters

    Hello!

    With all due respect to you, I am not impressed by that list of outdated publications. The work it contains is practically irrelevant and full of bunk. I see a good bit of your list is your own work.

    No, linguist serious about their work gives any attention to such bunk. With your training, if you are a doctoral recipient, you should know better.

    There is NO genetic relationship between Mande and Dravidian nor any between Japanese and Dravidian.

    The Afro-Dravidian hypothesis is based in old European racialist ideas and should be rightfully discarded as such. I informed you before of the opinions of the foremost Dravidianists such Krishnamurti, Burrow and Emeneau, Parpola, Zvelebil among others have rejected most of the proposals concerning Dravidian external relationships. Why can you not understand that science does not support you? Neither linguistic science, genetic science, nor history support you. Please stop misleading people with this falsity you are perpetrating, it reflects very poorly on your scholarship.

    Again, of all languages on earth, Dravidian is closest to Afroasiatic and Elamite with Elamite being the closest to Afroasiatic. While Elamite and Dravidian do seem to have had goodly contact with each other at some point. They share some lexicon and some morphology. Not sure about a genetic relationship, but goodly areal contact is virtually undeniable.



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  157. @AdygheChabadi

    Hi

    None of the linguist you mention have ever presented any evidence disputing the research articles I cited above. You talk about science,but you don't really understand science. In science researchers test hypotheses. as a result, you confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis.

    You talk as if the Mande Dravidian relationship has been disconfirmed. This has not been done.

    Moreover, there has been only one paper published showing a relationship between Elamite and Dravidian, while tens of articles have been published confirming the relationship between Niger-Congo and Dravidian. The large number of articles supporting a Niger-Congo-Dravidian relationship confirms the genetic relation existing between these languages. Sadly, your comments lack any merit or linguistic support.

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  158. Clyde Winters: You are citing papers that are many decades old that appear to have been abandoned by linguists a long time ago. If Krishnamurti, Parpola, Burrows, Emeneau and Zvelebil who are luminaries and legends in Dravidian studies have rejected the African origin hypothesis, I can only draw one conclusion about your claims- you are more interested in spreading your own personal dogma than engaging in a serious dialog in the pursuit of truth, which is the true hallmark of a scientist.

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  159. @Ramesh Mohan

    You claim that Krishnamurti, Parpola, Burrows, Emeneau and Zvelebil who are luminaries and legends in Dravidian studies and they have rejected any connections between Dravidian and other languages. Yet these researchers have never presented linguistic data supporting this claim.
    Your contentions are ludicris. You argue that the papers I cite are decades old, when you know for a fact that Burrows and Ememeneau’s research dates back to the 1950’s, Parpola and Zvelebil the 1970’s, while my research in Dravidian linguistics , the work of Sergent and Balakrishnan were written within the present decade.
    The aim of science is theory construction (F.N. Kirlinger, Foundations of behavior research, (1986) pp.6-10; R. Braithwaite, Scientific explanation, (1955) pp.1-10). A theory is a set of interrelated constructs, propositions and definitions, that provide a systematic understanding of phenomena by outlining relations among a group of variables that explain and predict phenomena.
    Scientific inquiry involves issues of theory construction, control and experimentation. Scientific knowledge must rest on testing, rather than mere induction which can be defined as inferences of laws and generalizations, derived from observation. This falsity of logical possibility is evident in the rejection of the reality that Dravidian languages are genetically related to the Niger Congo group.
    Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, rejects this form of logical validity based solely on inference and conjecture (pp. 33-65). Popper maintains that confirmation in science, is arrived at through falsification. Mr. Mohan your contentions are based on inference and conjecture since there is no reliable and valid research falsifying the Niger-Congo-dravidian relationship.

    Therefore to confirm a theory in science one test the theory through regorous attempts at falsification. In falsification the researcher uses cultural, linguistic, anthropological and historical knowledge to invalidate a proposed theory. Beginning with Homburger, linguist have onserved the existence of a genetic linguistic relationship between Dravidian and Niger-Congo languages. This theory has been confirmed by other linguists.
    Krishnamurti and Zvelebil state that Dravidian is not related to other groups but they have never published an article falsifying the Dravidian-Niger-Congo hypothesis.
    If a theory can not be falsified through test of the variables associated with the theory it is confirmed. It can only be disconfirmed when new generalizations associated with the original theory fail to survive attempts at falsification.

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  160. @Dr. Clyde Winters

    Hello!

    Honestly, you ask a question that is similar to, "Why has no one made any serious inquiry into why English and Japanese are not related or Semitic and Nahuatl or Cushitic and Inuit?"

    You don't see massive amounts of work dedicated to those topics as there is no need to waste the time or effort. It is rather obvious that neither of the pairs are related.

    Why waste the trees, effort, and time proving what is already obvious from the study of those languages?

    Georgiy Starostin and Vaclav Blazek have further studied the Dravidian lexicon and neither found any connection to Niger-Congo or Nilo-Saharan (Mande could belong to either language family or be an isolate), but did find connections to non-Semitic Afroasiatic and Elamite.

    I saw where you claimed that all languages were derived of Mande.

    If anyone is interested, an article about "Dr. Clyde Winters":

    http://www.flavinscorner.com/8-10-01.htm

    I am not going to engage you any further on this issue as it is as futile as trying to drain an ocean a thimbleful at a time.

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  161. @AdygheChabadi

    I agree lets end this discourse.

    You have nothing to share but your personal opinions. Throughout this discussion you have failed to provide any research articles supporting your contention that Dravidian and Niger-Congo languages are not related.

    I have explained to you that science is about testing hypotheses. You have not found even one article to support your claims--this makes conversation with you on this matter a waste of time.

    I hope that in the future you will do a proper review of the literarture before you make all inclusive claims and propositions you can not support with accurate, relevant and reliable data.Granted you don't have to provide citations in a simple discussion--but when one cites literature in support of their arguments you should at least provide citations to falsify the hypothesis: Dravidian languages are related to the Niger-Congo family. Not just make bold claims lacking any scientific (linguistic) support.

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  162. @Dr. CLyde

    I find it ironic how you say science is about confirming/disproving hypotheses, yet you insist that there was some magical African civilization, and that the ancient Celts were African.

    I cannot laugh at a more ludicrous statement.

    ReplyDelete
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  165. Honestly, it does not makes sense for a population which has coexisted for almost 8000 years to start admixing all of the sudden, given the dynamic cosmopolitan civilizations which existed there. I am very sceptical of Moorjanis paper, it goes very contrary to human history, you made a good case about the Gypsies. I am positive ASI/ANI was happening far before those dates Moorjani has given.

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  166. I forgot to mention. There is a study done by Pichappan et.al about the origins of caste in Tamil Nadu (TN) and they determined the coalescent period was 4000-6000 years ago when the population was transitioning from megalithic culture to farming and then all mixing stopped. This is in sharp contrast to Moorjani study which finds the stratification to start only 1900 years ago. The Pichappan study used a much larger sample from TN and hence statistically more significant. The senior author of the paper has also expressed his healthy skepticism about Moorjani et.al. findings...
    .

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  167. Its wrong to label ASI as "Distant relatives of andamanese" the andamanese are the ORIGINAL human settlers who MIXED with migrating ASI poulation.

    ReplyDelete

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