Indus Valley Civilisation is largest source of ancestry for South Asians

[Joe Shearer]

Looking into neolithic Europe is also quite interesting as to its original native languages before the Yamnaya arc (the Yamnaya being related to the Andronovo and Sintashta that would come after them further east in steppe, being the indo-european bridge we see today from Europe, Iran and Indian subcontinent).

If you have time the Minoans are very interesting to read about (they were likely one of the last "Pelasgian" languages i.e pre-Greek in the Greek region pre-bronze age collapse due to Crete holding some degree of insularity relative to the mainland).

Along with the Etruscan (and other italic + central european tribes too) that seem to have been remote/insular enough within the Italian appenines to hold sufficient pre-indo european language retention till Roman (Latin) domination much later in iron age.

The only remnant of pre-indo european in Europe is very likely just Basque now. There are substrate that persist in various languages (i.e their peculiar absorption from pre-existing languages) that can be linguistically studied by modelling deducing from our construction of proto-Indo European relative to the languages vocabulary downstream that doesn't jive. A very interesting field of work.

Here is a reply I posted in a whatsapp group some time back:


@Joe Shearer

The Indian situation has two points of interest.

First, the language isolate Burashaski from Kashmir and Gilgit. This, and Toda, are language isolates that have no known links to any language family; for that matter to any other language.

Second is the layering of languages . While the current, and uppermost, layer is Indo-Aryan descended, the immediately visible sub-stratum is a form of Dravidian, whose traces are possible to identify in contemporary languages as they exist, and even in north India. Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam (counting it as a separate language in spite of it having divided itself from neighbouring Tamil within historical memory), Tulu, are still in very popular use, even flourishing vigorously.

The shocking thing is that Parpola proposes even a third sub-stratum, from a language that has not been fully reconstructed itself, lying around and below the Austra-Asiatic sub-strate.

 

[FuturePAF]

A side note on calling the IVC “ancient Pakistan”. Pakistan today constituted the bulk of the lands of the IVC, so calling ancient Pakistan can be focused on that time.

When people think of the ancient Egyptians, it’s focus on that region that is modern day Egypt today. The ancient Egyptians didn’t refer to their region as Egypt. They called it “Kemet”.

So while trying to popularize the concept of ancient Pakistan will take time, a focus on the IVC and this genetic research, and not the post-IVC aryan civilization that followed, will allow Pakistani authorities to tell the story from geographical centric point of view. The people that populate modern day Pakistan are the descendants of those IVC peoples and they have gone through a journey or cultural change, just like the Egyptians and Iraqis but are the natives of the land and this is who they are, and so on.

 

[Joe Shearer]

A side note on calling the IVC “ancient Pakistan”. Pakistan today constituted the bulk of the lands of the IVC, so calling ancient Pakistan can be focused on that time.

When people think of the ancient Egyptians, it’s focus on that region that is modern day Egypt today. The ancient Egyptians didn’t refer to their region as Egypt. They called it “Kemet”.

So while trying to popularize the concept of ancient Pakistan will take time, a focus on the IVC and this genetic research, and not the post-IVC aryan civilization that followed, will allow Pakistani authorities to tell the story from geographical centric point of view. The people that populate modern day Pakistan are the descendants of those IVC peoples and they have gone through a journey or cultural change, just like the Egyptians and Iraqis but are the natives of the land and this is who they are, and so on.

Umm, OK.

 

[Vikramaditya1]

Languages can indeed die out; when speakers adopt other languages, especially when one civilization supplants another, and imposes its language upon the other.

Foreigners, like say the English, can come to South Asia, with a language not at all related to any of the local languages. Adopting English words is not an evolutionary of native languages, per se, but a gradual process of supplanting it, if done for long enough and with sufficient preferential treatment to the words of the foreign language, those new words just become the words for a certain thing. When the memory of those old words fade with the last living speakers lives, those words get lost.

But English don't integrate with any languages neither new languages developed as a result. English remained English. The country where English originated still speak English.

If Sanskrit came from outside why you can't find it's usage outside this region? Of all the Sanskrit literature available none of them expresses "their love for the homeland they came from". All Sanskrit mention are rivers, lands, mountains and people in this region. So it's safe to assume the language developed here integrating with whatever language was spoken in this region. The only sister language to Sanskrit though very closely related, is Avestan but they are not mutually intelligible.

So the IVC language was almost certainly its own language with the Aryans imposing their language upon the conquered peoples, most likely in a gradual process, as we haven’t found evidence of destroyed cities or mass graves or other markers of mass population replacement.

Yeah, which is why I said maybe whoever came here integrated with the local customs. As you mentioned before the death of IVC maybe due to the drying up of rivers and desertification. The skeletal remains found didn't show any wounds or show any war casualties. Besides the climate the of the region makes it very hard to find fossils.

Ancient Egyptian is probably the language we can all imagine was widely spoken, but now probably has no daily speakers. With Egyptian, though, the dialect, or way they speaker Arabic is still held over from their ancient languages, but not the worlds. That is the one thing I will give as be an aspect of language that stays constant while people transition from language to language.

Ancient Egyptian language died out through conquest not just Arabs which was the last invasion but Greek and Romans way before that. The later stages of Egyptian can be found among Coptics. They are probably the last of Egyptian speakers who are closely related to ancient Egyptian/demotic languages. In fact Coptic language was extensively used to figure out ancient Egyptian.

 

[FuturePAF]

But English don't integrate with any languages neither new languages developed as a result. English remained English. The country where English originated still speak English.

If Sanskrit came from outside why you can't find it's usage outside this region? Of all the Sanskrit literature available none of them expresses "their love for the homeland they came from". All Sanskrit mention are rivers, lands, mountains and people in this region. So it's safe to assume the language developed here integrating with whatever language was spoken in this region. The only sister language to Sanskrit though very closely related, is Avestan but they are not mutually intelligible.

Yeah, which is why I said maybe whoever came here integrated with the local customs. As you mentioned before the death of IVC maybe due to the drying up of rivers and desertification. The skeletal remains found didn't show any wounds or show any war casualties. Besides the climate the of the region makes it very hard to find fossils.

Ancient Egyptian language died out through conquest not just Arabs which was the last invasion but Greek and Romans way before that. The later stages of Egyptian can be found among Coptics. They are probably the last of Egyptian speakers who are closely related to ancient Egyptian/demotic languages. In fact Coptic language was extensively used to figure out ancient Egyptian.

It’s a matter of time, not just in the diaspora, but probably increasingly in South Asia, with the rise of the internet and WhatsApp, Urdish and Hinglish are becoming more common, not just in words but using Latin-alphabet script.

Central Asia has since seen many mass migrations, the Huns, Turks, Mongols, and the Russians. The Sintashta people, that didn’t migrate, if they are still around, were probably assimilated/absorbed into the various peoples that have come through in the intervening 3000 years.

Sure the people adapted when they got to South Asia, first being a group of people above the natives, and eventually through intermarriage and thousands of years, a part of the fabric of the population. The conquest was probably gradual, and not one mass wave as with major empires. I suspect it was a people leaving from Central Asia similar to the Huns that lived north of the Roman and then Byzantine empire, for a long time, and then when the empire weakened these people moved in. With how much force, we can’t be too sure.

We don’t know if the Aryans, had an Attila like figure to speed up the conquest. To be honest, I haven’t looked into this period of history to know how violent it was. It could have been less violent then other times central Asian nomads have moved into n area, or just about as violent. Also the climate change theory is one way it could have happened, or it could have been city destruction, which is why we need archeologists to study it further.

Not mass graves but definitely with some conflict, if the rest of human history is anything to go by.

The Turkish language group has taken over Central Asia, so there is a cutoff, but many believe Vedic influence remains amongst the various peoples of Russia.

 

[Developereo]

Perviously didn’t happen because our rulers didn’t want to think of pre-Islamic times, but I think our public is more reasonable to understand we are natives here, not mostly descendants of foreign Arabs or Turks, and we mostly accepted Islam, but genetically are the same people, just like the Egyptians and Iraqis.

Pakistani schoolbooks before Zia went into detail about Gandhara, Ashoka, Buddha, IVC, and the non-Islamic history of the region.

This blind spot was only imposed during his regime.

 

[FuturePAF]

Pakistani schoolbooks before Zia went into detail about Gandhara, Ashoka, Buddha, IVC, and the non-Islamic history of the region.

This blind spot was only imposed during his regime.

I’d always assumed it was something like that. Good to know there are at least old text books that are around that can help get us back on track.

Also to remember we are the descendants of the land and regardless of what leaders were in charge.

It’s high time we end the national myopic memory problem, and know our history, so we can plan for the long term.

 

[Nilgiri]

The Indian situation has two points of interest.

First, the language isolate Burashaski from Kashmir and Gilgit. This, and Toda, are language isolates that have no known links to any language family; for that matter to any other language.

Second is the layering of languages . While the current, and uppermost, layer is Indo-Aryan descended, the immediately visible sub-stratum is a form of Dravidian, whose traces are possible to identify in contemporary languages as they exist, and even in north India. Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam (counting it as a separate language in spite of it having divided itself from neighbouring Tamil within historical memory), Tulu, are still in very popular use, even flourishing vigorously.

The shocking thing is that Parpola proposes even a third sub-stratum, from a language that has not been fully reconstructed itself, lying around and below the Austra-Asiatic sub-strate.

Toda is in Dravidian family, it is just highly atypical due to the substrate feature you mention (that either being pre-Dravidian and/or proto-Dravidian that was retained only in Toda due to geographic insularity etc). There are similar things that happen with the sinitic family in interior/hilly China (and arcs into south east Asia)

Kind of like how Sinhala is very atypical compared to rest of Indo-European languages due to heavy Vedda and other substrate (Dravidian, polynesian and other).....because again Sinhala has very interesting arc of history, as to its separation from rest of Indo-european geographically.

Brahui has this marked geographic separation as well and there are competing theories as to how that came about and when.

This is different to Basque complete difference to surrounding Indo-European languages (and any other known language family). Agglutination (high in Basque, low in Indo-European) is one marked identifier of hard barriers between language families. We see agglutination from the surviving evidence on hand regd Etruscan, Minoan (from suffix symbol study, as its undeciphered) as well....suggesting neolithic European languages (pre yamnaya domination) had agglutination as the default.....similar feature to Dravidian, Turkic, Korean, Japanese etc.

But a high level of agglutination does not automatically mean the families are related though of course....just like non-agglutination does not confer that either (w.r.t indo-european, semitic and sinitic, the last which is highly analytical due to chinese character writing system once it was developed).

But yes, subcontinent wise, Burushaski also seems to fall in this (its own unique isolated family). There is also the native langauges of the Andaman islands, completely their own thing.

 

[Nilgiri]

@Nilgiri
@FuturePAF

Since you tagged me, a word of caution.

David Reich is a sober, serious researcher who avoids controversy. He is not willing to say or write anything that contradicts the rampage on which his erstwhile partners on the Rakhigarhi genetic study have gone.

The essential facts, including what they found at Rakhigarhi, are these:

1. The Rakhigarhi skeleton, found in distinctly Indus Valley Civilisation remains belonging to the long period of decline, was genetically free of any external or steppe traces.
2. It reinforces the canonical reconstruction that the Indus Valley Civilisation, while it had trade connections with the Central Asian steppes, was not populated by people with genetic ties to the steppe.
3. It also reinforces the canonical reconstruction that the ANI, Ancestral North Indian, profile is a mixture of this IVC profile, of the matrix hunter-gatherer profile that mixed with Iranian farmers descending from the Afghan plateau to form the IVC culture, and of traces of steppe genetic profiles.
4. That leaves us with the proposition that ASI, Ancestral South Indian, was the same, without the steppe genetic profiles.
5. That proposition #5 is largely right, but not a universal, is revealed by the numerous studies that have shown that a steppe profile is prominent among certain very restricted endogamous groups, amounting typically to 2% of the general population. This is an exception.
6. It is safe to say, therefore, as the headline proclaims, that the vast bulk of the profile of Indians, is composed of a mix of the IVC and the original hunter-gatherer profiles.
7. It is also safe to say that special constructions that have been proposed are politico-cultural deviations from academically rigorous conclusions, and should be treated sceptically.

Given the wonderful Roman holiday that this thread seems to have afforded a particular type of membership, this is all that may be said on the matter without inviting annoying interjections. Anything further off this thread.

I just let boneheads do their thing. Fora collect its assortment of them for whichever reason. Boneheads breaking the rules is where I intervene.

With non-boneheads, to get to points of agreement, I like to expand logic to maybe another neighbouring context (i. say another part of world with same archetype to study to compare and contrast)... from time to time, and see what is worth pursuing past points of disagreement. Then folks can make what they want of it, and over time you see the worthies that are worth engaging on whichever subject, because you might actually learn something.

It's not like I haven't done this all with say Greeks and Turks in their domain of fanciful extrapolations vs hard reality (i.e projecting nationstate or another tribal identity of today's sociopolitics, clashing over reasons known to the current time..... to assert over something historically in reductive inherit/disinherit zero sum way in the far distant time). DNA tests, mother tongues, oral accounts, recorded history, physical evidence you name it.

Sometimes things are just mentally fixed in unmovable way for these subjects. The more that is unmovable (in some negative fashion), well its just that less to discuss in a proper way. Then you trust in open well reasoned minds to account for that as it expresses itself here or elsewhere.... and put in their work/time if they are interested to know more.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Toda is in Dravidian family, it is just highly atypical due to the substrate feature you mention (that either being pre-Dravidian and/or proto-Dravidian that was retained only in Toda due to geographic insularity etc). There are similar things that happen with the sinitic family in interior/hilly China (and arcs into south east Asia)

Kind of like how Sinhala is very atypical compared to rest of Indo-European languages due to heavy Vedda and other substrate (Dravidian, polynesian and other).....because again Sinhala has very interesting arc of history, as to its separation from rest of Indo-european geographically.

Brahui has this marked geographic separation as well and there are competing theories as to how that came about and when.

This is different to Basque complete difference to surrounding Indo-European languages (and any other known language family). Agglutination (high in Basque, low in Indo-European) is one marked identifier of hard barriers between language families. We see agglutination from the surviving evidence on hand regd Etruscan, Minoan (from suffix symbol study, as its undeciphered) as well....suggesting neolithic European languages (pre yamnaya domination) had agglutination as the default.....similar feature to Dravidian, Turkic, Korean, Japanese etc.

But a high level of agglutination does not automatically mean the families are related though of course....just like non-agglutination does not confer that either (w.r.t indo-european, semitic and sinitic, the last which is highly analytical due to chinese character writing system once it was developed).

But yes, subcontinent wise, Burushaski also seems to fall in this (its own unique isolated family). There is also the native langauges of the Andaman islands, completely their own thing.

Never knew that Toda was a Dravidian language.
One lives and learns.

 

[Nilgiri]

We don’t know if the Aryans, had an Attila like figure to speed up the conquest. To be honest, I haven’t looked into this period of history to know how violent it was. It could have been less violent then other times central Asian nomads have moved into n area, or just about as violent. Also the climate change theory is one way it could have happened, or it could have been city destruction, which is why we need archeologists to study it further.

The problem is record keeping, attestations and evidence. The time periods in question during the bronze age and iron age are hit and miss regarding what was the state of the existing population during a migration. Was a weakened state from infighting or natural calamities etc what prompted ingress from another population and so on. These remain speculative without evidence.

Even when you keep the language family the same (but have the linguistic science to make out different branches to mark out population groups relative resident vs migrant during a transition from one to other as the cultural dominant one), the scant nature to establish what the contours of this shows up time and again during bronze and iron.

Take for example, the Armenians and the Caucusus + Eastern Anatolia region in general and substrate analysis:

Introduction to Classical Armenian

lrc.la.utexas.edu

Especially this part:

Modern scholarly views are just as wide-ranging. A common view is that the Armenians were of Indo-European stock and entered the region either along with the Phrygians from the Balkan region or with the Mitanni from the area of the Aral Sea. They encountered the Urartuan culture in a period of decline and eventually came to rule over them and other Caucasian groups in the region.

Another theory draws on linguistic similarities between the Armenian language and the Caucasian languages of the area to say that the Armenians had originally been themselves a Caucasian tribe which adopted an Indo-European tongue, and this Caucasian substrate is responsible for the fact that Armenian is rather genetically isolated among the Indo-European languages.

Yet another theory is that the Armenians are the most sedentary members of the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European; that the Indo-European languages originated in the transcaucasian region, but the Armenians, who chose not to migrate out of the area, were marginalized during periods of Hittite and Urartuan dominance.

Suffice it to say, the true origin of the Armenian peoples will remain shrouded in obscurity for some time to come.

Like Basque, there is another isolated language in this region w.r.t Georgian and the Kartvelian family.

In fact the caucus region has lot of isolated languages, with no relation to the other families or even each other (there seem to be 5 main families):

Languages of the Caucasus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Nilgiri]

Never knew that Toda was a Dravidian language.
One lives and learns.

Yes its classified fairly well too apparently (from what I last remember anyway)

It is marked contrast to sinitic "hilly" languages that have proven difficult to classify (i.e put on a branch w.r.t the proto trunk/roots)

i.e relative isolation (within a family): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tujia_language

There are disputes w.r.t Hmong (miao et al) among linguists, chinese linguists vs western....the latter tend to posit that it is its own family from different proto seed to sinitic one.

Basically Basque has larger fundamental spacing from indo european (than the non-sinitic languages and ongoing candidate study do with sinitic), as hmong, kra dai (that includes thai etc) et al are analytic along with austroasiatic (that includes Vietnamese) which led to historical classifications within sinitic (or sino tibetan more broadly)...because of that feature and likely also from the neolithic to iron age great influence of large neighbouring Han populations (and/or vice versa in chicken or the egg largely lost to sands of time). i.e we cannot do proto vs proto analysis easily here.

With greater linguistic study since, they have been put in their own families generally.
But it can be noticed that the agglutination factor is a key one to easier earlier fundamental separation (say indo european or sinitic or semitic..... with say turkic, uralic, dravidian too....though there has ofc been cross pollination for the mutual substrates depending on the time periods of relevance and proximity)

 

[Joe Shearer]

Was a weakened state from infighting or natural calamities etc what prompted ingress from another population and so on.

It is a legitimate area for speculation, taking 'state' as a place-holder for whatever the social and political formation governed the Indus Valley Civilisation - one of the extraordinary features of that culture was its apparent cohesion and homogeneity across a vast area - truly vast - with uniformity down to the size of the bricks used in different settlements and conurbations that were hundreds of miles apart.

On the other hand, there is archaeological evidence - architectural evidence - that the culture reached a high point between 2600 BC and 1900 BC, and that it was in decline from 1900 BC until the last credible settlements degenerated into villages and hamlets that had only a trail of pottery to link to the greater culture from which they had separated themselves; the links lead us back to decaying remains of much greater settlements, those in turn to the cities of the peak.

So it is fair to ask what happened during the period (taking the temporal points loosely as book-ends) 1900 BC and 1500 BC (a speculative time point based on linguistic analysis of the development of Indo-Aryan in its separation from Indo-Iranian). The citation above refers to this point of time; the points of entry of the steppe dwellers has been more or less narrowed down to the Khaibar, although there are references in the Rg Veda that raise the possibility that there was a distinct and separate point of entry through the Bolan as well, leading to a clash between the two sets of migrant tribes at the semi-mythical clash, the Battle of the Ten Kings).

Speculation rules over all these possibilities.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Even when you keep the language family the same (but have the linguistic science to make out different branches to mark out population groups relative resident vs migrant during a transition from one to other as the cultural dominant one), the scant nature to establish what the contours of this shows up time and again during bronze and iron.

In brutal terms, the speculation of the linguists is not matched by archaeological evidence. South Asian archaeology has always by academic tradition almost been hostile to ideas of steppe migration and settlement of speakers of Indo-Aryan within a pre-existing population constituted of descendants of the IVC (in the north) mingled with the primaeval hunter-gatherers who continued to exist outside the boundaries of the IVC, and with only traces of a much later date of any steppe genetic profiles in the south.

 

[ST1976]

Indus Valley Civilisation is largest source of ancestry for South Asians: David Reich​

Synopsis

For the first time, we have a genetic model that fits statistically for most present-day South Asians: mixture of IVC-like people, and other (smaller contributions) from other populations.​

David Reich, a professor of Harvard Medical School, partnered with Indian archaeologist Vasant Shinde and other experts to study skeletal DNA from Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) site. Their study, published last week in the journal ‘Cell’, has generated a debate with its new assessments on the IVC period and the extent of its imprint on modern day South Asia. Excerpts from an email interview with David Reich by ET:
Our study finds that the single largest genetic contributor to people living in South Asia today, is people from a population of which the Indus Valley Civilisation individual we analysed was a part. Some people in South Asia have a modest, but meaningful proportion of their ancestry from people from the Steppe, north of the Black and Caspian Seas; the number ranges from 0-30%. People with this ancestry almost certainly spread into South Asia from the north 4,000-3,500 years ago.

Many people question how the genetic evidence from the IVC, which predates the Aryan phase, can establish that there was no mass migration or invasion.
I think the identification of the ancestry of people living at the time of the IVC phase in South Asia does meaningfully contribute to our understanding of what happened later. For the first time, we have a genetic model that fits statistically for most present-day South Asians: mixture of IVC-like people, and other (smaller
contributions) from other populations for which we have genetic data. This allows us to be specific about what other populations contributed to present-day South Asians, and when the mix occurred.

Shinde has stated that the Vedic era followed naturally from the Harappan /Indus Valley civilisations and was not introduced by outsiders/Aryans. Would you agree?

This is an archaeological question and not one that I can comment on authoritatively as a geneticist. It is true that people, with ancestry like that of the IVC individual(s) we sequenced, were the primary source of ancestry of people in South Asia. So, it is natural to expect that they made important cultural contributions as well. Archaeologically, the material cultures of the early Vedic period have little obvious connections to those from the Steppe. So, even though there was a substantial
(if quantitatively modest) genetic contribution from the north, the material cultural contribution may be hard to detect. We see something similar in some instances in the archaeological and ancient DNA record of Europe, as discussed in the final paragraphs of our ‘Science’ paper.




Full report:

Indus Valley Civilisation is largest source of ancestry for South Asians: David Reich

For the first time, we have a genetic model that fits statistically for most present-day South Asians: mixture of IVC-like people, and other (smaller contributions) from other populations.

economictimes.indiatimes.com

I heard name India was derived from Indus civilization, is it true?