Waves of migration into South Asia

[bmoney]

Yes those swat samples were such an eye opener for me. It's the one ancient site that is so clearly linked to horses and it had a shockingly low amount of steppe compared to what I would have expected. It's the first time I realized that Aryan probably doesn't mean racially steppe homogenous at all.

Another interesting tidbit I read on another site was a guy who was speculating that the historical karna is actually someone from historical anga where iron was first used in South Asia. And karna being born with special armour is actually an allusion to the iron armour he is wearing as opposed to the bronze armour that everyone else has. The idea is that this is capturing the transition to the iron age in South Asia.

Again all very speculative but interesting an interesting thought I felt.

There is a lot of steppe adna in most of the Swat samples even if their y-haps are mostly Caucasus + Iran N R2 + H

[thorin]

There is a lot of steppe adna in most of the Swat samples even if their y-haps are mostly Caucasus + Iran N R2 + H

If you would indulge me - how much is a lot? Or is that available in the plot graph you posted earlier? I will go through that in more detail when I get to a desktop.

[Vaishvamitra]

I would say that for the later Vedas and Upanishads but the Rig is most definitely anchored in the Gandhara area, the others transitioning deeper into the Punjab. Though based what I am seeing off ancients and oracles , early Brahmin groups seem to be emanating from the Potohar, which likely means this population moved SE as kingdoms sprung up.

That's very doubtful, the swat river and the panjkora are mentioned once and the kabul river only twice even including the late 10th mandala. On the other hand the parushni (ravi) alone is mentioned five times. The Rig Vedic people certainly knew Gandhara but they mainly lived to its South East.

[Vaishvamitra]

Yes those swat samples were such an eye opener for me. It's the one ancient site that is so clearly linked to horses and it had a shockingly low amount of steppe compared to what I would have expected. It's the first time I realized that Aryan probably doesn't mean racially steppe homogenous at all.

Another interesting tidbit I read on another site was a guy who was speculating that the historical karna is actually someone from historical anga where iron was first used in South Asia. And karna being born with special armour is actually an allusion to the iron armour he is wearing as opposed to the bronze armour that everyone else has. The idea is that this is capturing the transition to the iron age in South Asia.

Again all very speculative but interesting an interesting thought I felt.

Actually read quite an old book speculating on Indo-Aryan migrations into India. While a lot of its seemed rather doubtful one particular idea seemed pretty interesting. He suggests that the clans that later occupied eastern india the ikshwakus, occupied the land south west of the Indus around the Gomal (gomati) and sarayu (an unknown western tributary of the Indus) with the Yadus to their south east along the Indus river bed itself. He suggests that puranic legends regarding wars between the kings of these two clans indicates they were neighbours at some early point in time after which they migrated to occupy the eastern gangetic basin and central India respectively. They also seem to have left behind a trail of river names. There are multiple rivers named sindhu in central India. Like wise besides the above mentioned pair, a sarayu and gomati exist together in what is now uttarakhand and the sarayu and gomati flow through the kosala region as well.

[parasar]

1. IVC is not Indo Aryan

It would be a major find indeed if IVC were proven to not Indo Aryan, and it would not bother me in the least if it were para Munda or Dravidian or Burusho.

2. Bihar only comes into prominence under Mauryas ...

The person I quoted about a new center in the east in the late Brahman period is Witzel - not a colonial times writer.
Archaeology confirms that - see NBPW. Politically, Magadh came into prominence with Ajatsattu well before the Moriyas.
The archeological changes we see in late Swat - that is what genetics is showing too - an increase in AASI, steppe, and perhaps not coincidentally, the first R1a1 (with mt R5a2) in ~400BC.
"by that time in the middle Swat Valley, completely different funerary practices had appeared that had nothing in common with the protohistoric traditions observed at Udegram and in other sites of the Swat Valley"

[parasar]

...

In your opinion, did the composers of the rig veda have any AASI heritage in them? Also would they have had any IranFarmer/baloch ancestry as well? Or in your estimation were these people 100% steppe?

...

Yes likely IMO.
Pretty much like Shahr_I_Sokhta_BA2 [mt U2c1, Y-J2a1h] who is from the earliest level at Shahr i Sokhta - from the timeframe of IVC.

Per Hemphill there are two discontinuities on the Indus - "The first occurs between 6000 and 4500 BCE and is reflected by the strong separation in dental non-metric characters between neolithic and chalcolithic burials at Mehrgarh. The second occurs at some point after 800 BCE but before 200 BCE. In the intervening period, while there is dental non-metric, craniometric, and cranial non-metric evidence for a degree of internal biological continuity, statistical evaluation of cranial data reveals clear indications of interaction with the West and specifically with the Iranian Plateau." https://www.harappa.com/content/biol...-age-harappans
"Harappan phase individuals possess the pattern of affinities expected under conditions of prolonged biological continuity within the Indus Valley from early chalcolithic times (4500 BC) until the early post-Harappan period (800 BC)" https://www.harappa.com/sites/defaul...haeology_2.pdf

The first is a transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. The latter seems to be post Vedic. So the 4500 BC to 800 BC period could very well be the Vedic period.

[parasar]

Yes likely IMO.
Pretty much like Shahr_I_Sokhta_BA2 [mt U2c1, Y-J2a1h] who is from the earliest level at Shahr i Sokhta - from the timeframe of IVC.

Per Hemphill there are two discontinuities on the Indus - "The first occurs between 6000 and 4500 BCE and is reflected by the strong separation in dental non-metric characters between neolithic and chalcolithic burials at Mehrgarh. The second occurs at some point after 800 BCE but before 200 BCE. In the intervening period, while there is dental non-metric, craniometric, and cranial non-metric evidence for a degree of internal biological continuity, statistical evaluation of cranial data reveals clear indications of interaction with the West and specifically with the Iranian Plateau." https://www.harappa.com/content/biol...-age-harappans
"Harappan phase individuals possess the pattern of affinities expected under conditions of prolonged biological continuity within the Indus Valley from early chalcolithic times (4500 BC) until the early post-Harappan period (800 BC)" https://www.harappa.com/sites/defaul...haeology_2.pdf

The first is a transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. The latter seems to be post Vedic. So the 4500 BC to 800 BC period could very well be the Vedic period.

And we also know that Indo-Aryan was present at the latest by 1761 BC in Syria.
"A recently discovered reference to mariannu in a letter from Tell Leilān in Northern Syria dating shortly before the end of Zimri-Lim’s reign in 1761 BCE (Eidem 2014: 142) extends the Indo-Aryan linguistic presence in Syria back two centuries prior to the formation of the Mitanni state. The word is generally seen as a Hurrianized form of the Indo-Aryan word *marya- (man/youth) (von Dassow 2008: 96–97 with literature) and taken to refer to a type of military personnel associated with chariot warfare across the Near East (eadem pp. 268–314)." Linguistic supplement to Damgaard et al. 2018: Early Indo-European languages, Anatolian, Tocharian and Indo-Iranian
https://books.google.com/books?id=NuEsDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT546

[Kale]

If you would indulge me - how much is a lot? Or is that available in the plot graph you posted earlier? I will go through that in more detail when I get to a desktop.

10-11% Sintashta-like stuff.

[bmoney]

10-11% Sintashta-like stuff.

There was variance among the individuals, and the authors stated 22%:

Finally, we examined our Swat Valley time transect from 1200 BCE to 1 CE. While the earliest group of samples (SPGT) is genetically very similar to the Indus_Periphery samples from the sites of Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta, they also differ significantly in harboring Steppe_MLBA ancestry (~22%). Therefore, we examined all possible Steppe pastoralist related
4630 populations as sources along with the Indus_Periphery samples as sources for the SPGT. We
observe that only the steppe populations from the 2 4631 nd millenium BCE work as sources along
4632 with the Indus Periphery samples as a fit for the SPGT.

Digging into the supplementary materials:

provides another line of
4645 evidence that the arrival of steppe ancestry into the subcontient occurred between the dates of
4646 when the Indus periphary and the SPGT samples lived- between 1000-2000 BCE.

In the distal models (Table S3.78 and Table S3.80), we observe that we require 4 ancestral
4583 components to obtain a good fit to our data for both the early and the late Swat Valley sites.
4584 Consistent with the PCA and ADMIXTURE analyses, the later sites have about 10% more
4585 southern South Asian (present-day Irula.DG) related ancestry compared with earlier Iron Age
4586 sites, suggesting that there was additional admixture from the Subcontinent (where we expect
4587 to find populations with higher proportions of such ancestry). Strikingly, the proximal models
4588 (Table S3.79 and Table S3.81) all involve Steppe_MLBA_East or a genetically similar
4589 group, suggesting (a) that there was considerable Steppe related admixture into the
4590 Subcontinent, and (b) that the Steppe_MLBA ancestry that suffused into southern Central
Asia in the 2 4591 nd millennium affected Swat at least by the beginning of the first millennium.

[bmoney]

It would be a major find indeed if IVC were proven to not Indo Aryan, and it would not bother me in the least if it were para Munda or Dravidian or Burusho.



The person I quoted about a new center in the east in the late Brahman period is Witzel - not a colonial times writer.
Archaeology confirms that - see NBPW. Politically, Magadh came into prominence with Ajatsattu well before the Moriyas.
The archeological changes we see in late Swat - that is what genetics is showing too - an increase in AASI, steppe, and perhaps not coincidentally, the first R1a1 (with mt R5a2) in ~400BC.
"by that time in the middle Swat Valley, completely different funerary practices had appeared that had nothing in common with the protohistoric traditions observed at Udegram and in other sites of the Swat Valley"

I'm still leaning to Swat being culturally Indus or a fusion, and later being fully R1aized/Vedicized by an Eastern source bringing the additional steppe and AASI ancestry like you proposed.

However there are insane levels of continuity in a lot of those Swat Samples and where current NW Indians, Sindhis/Lohanas etc plot