Michel Danino summarizes the past several years of genetics research
Quote:
Conclusions
It is, of course, still possible to find
genetic studies trying to interpret differences between North and South
Indians or higher and lower castes within the invasionist framework,
but that is simply because they take it for granted in the first place.
None of the nine major studies quoted above lends any support to it, and
none proposes to define a demarcation line between tribe and caste. The
overall picture emerging from these studies is, first, an unequivocal
rejection of a 3500-BP arrival of a “Caucasoid” or Central Asian gene
pool. Just as the imaginary Aryan invasion / migration left no trace in
Indian literature, in the archaeological and the anthropological record,
it is invisible at the genetic level. {Arun's note: The only evidence for an Aryan invasion/migration is linguistic; the problem is that linguistic evidence is interpreted in the framework of an invasionist scenario, and thus props it up. } The agreement between these
different fields is remarkable by any standard, and offers hope for a
grand synthesis in the near future, which will also integrate
agriculture and linguistics.
Secondly, they account for India’s considerable genetic
diversity by using a time- scale not of a few millennia, but of 40,000
or 50,000 years. In fact, several experts, such as Lluís
Quintana-Murci,20 Vincent Macaulay,21 Stephen Oppenheimer,22 Michael
Petraglia,23 and their associates, have in the last few years proposed
that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, he first reached
South-West Asia around 75,000 BP, and from here, went on to other parts
of the world. In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have
ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one
migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western
Europe:
“indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many
Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which
appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South
Asia.” 24
Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words:
“For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South
Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and
sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17
line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the
Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central
Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups
in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male
Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this
line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17
could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through
Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into
Europe.”25
We will not call it, of course, an
“Indian invasion” of Europe; in simple terms, India acted “as an
incubator of early genetic differentiation of modern humans moving out
of Africa.”26
Genetics is a fast-evolving discipline, and the studies
quoted above are certainly not the last word; but they have laid the
basis for a wholly different perspective of Indian populations, and it
is most unlikely that we will have to abandon it to return to the crude
racial nineteenth-century fallacies of Aryan invaders and Dravidian
autochthons. Neither have any reality in genetic terms, just as they
have no reality in archaeological or cultural terms. In this sense,
genetics is joining other disciplines in helping to clean the cobwebs of
colonial historiography. If some have a vested interest in patching
together the said cobwebs so they may keep cluttering our history
textbooks, they are only delaying the inevitable. .
