Posted on 01/12/2006 7:06:13 PM PST by dennisw
Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports.
The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages—but it absorbed few genes—from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida.
The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years.
That theory is bolstered by the presence of Indo-European languages in India, the archaeological record, and historic sources such as the Rig Veda, an early Indian religious text.
Some previous genetic studies have also supported the concept.
But Kashyap's findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, stand at odds with those results.
True Ancestors
Testing a sample of men from 32 tribal and 45 caste groups throughout India, Kashyap's team examined 936 Y chromosomes. (The chromosome determines gender; males carry it, but women do not.)
The data reveal that the large majority of modern Indians descended from South Asian ancestors who lived on the Indian subcontinent before an influx of agricultural techniques from the north and west arrived some 10,000 years ago.
Most geneticists believe that humans first reached India via a coastal migration route perhaps 50,000 years ago.
Soon after leaving Africa, these early humans are believed to have followed the coast through southern India and eventually continued on to populate distant Australia.
Peter Underhill, a research scientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine's department of genetics, says he harbors no doubts that Indo-European speakers did move into India. But he agrees with Kashyap that their genetic contribution appears small.
It doesn't look like there was a massive flow of genes that came in a few thousand years ago," he said. "Clearly people came in to India and brought their culture, language, and some genes."
"But I think that the genetic impact of those people was minor," he added. "You'd don't really see an equivalent genetic replacement the way that you do with the language replacement."
Language, Genes Tell Different Tales
Kashyap and his colleagues say their findings may explain the prevalence of Indo-European languages, such as Hindi and Bengali, in northern India and their relative absence in the south.
"The fact the Indo-European speakers are predominantly found in northern parts of the subcontinent may be because they were in direct contact with the Indo-European migrants, where they could have a stronger influence on the native populations to adopt their language and other cultural entities," Kashyap said.
He argues that even wholesale language changes can and do occur without genetic mixing of populations.
"It is generally assumed that language is more strongly correlated to genetics, as compared to social status or geography, because humans mostly do not tend to cross language boundaries while choosing marriage partners," Kashyap said.
"Although few of the earlier studies have shown that language is a good predictor of genetic affinity and that Y chromosome is more strongly correlated with linguistic boundaries, it is not always so," he added.
"Language can be acquired [and] has been in cases of 'elite dominance,' where adoption of a language can be forced but strong genetic differences remain [because of] the lack of admixture between the dominant and the weak populations."
If steppe-dwelling Central Asians did lend language and technology, but not many genes, to northern India, the region may have changed far less over the centuries than previously believed.
"I think if you could get into a time machine and visit northern India 10,000 years ago, you'd see people … similar to the people there today," Underhill said. "They wouldn't be similar to people from Bangalore [in the south]."
Very Bollywood Persian looking and the women are beyond knock down gorgeous exotic
The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture
The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate
Print ISBN 0195137779, 2001
doi:10.1093/0195137779.001.0001
Abstract: As a result of the discovery of similarities between Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe, scholars hypothesized the existence of an early "proto-Indo-European" people who spoke the language from which the other Indo-European speakers evolved. The solution to this Indo-European homeland problem has been one of the most consuming intellectual projects of the last two centuries.
At first it was assumed that India was the original home of all the Indo-Europeans. Soon, however, Western scholars were contending that the Vedic culture of ancient India must have been the by-product of an invasion or migration of "Indo-Aryans" from outside the subcontinent. Over the years, Indian scholars have raised many arguments against this European reconstruction of their nation's history, yet Western scholars have generally been unaware or dismissive of these voices from India itself.
Edwin Bryant offers a comprehensive examination of this ongoing debate, presenting all of the relevant philological, archaeological, linguistic, and historiographical data, and showing how they have been interpreted both to support the theory of Aryan migrations and to contest it. Bringing to the fore those hitherto marginalized voices that argue against the external origin of the Indo-Aryans, he shows how Indian scholars have questioned the very logic, assumptions, and methods upon which the theory is based and have used the same data to arrive at very different conclusions.
By exposing the whole endeavor to criticism from scholars who do not share the same intellectual history as their European peers, Bryant's work newly complicates the Indo-European homeland quest. At the same time it recognizes the extent to which both sides of the debate have been driven by political, racial, religious, and nationalistic agendas.
If you look at recent DNA studies of the British population most Brits (including the English) can still trace their genetic heritage to Celtic origins while the English language is mostly a potpourri of German (Anglo-Saxon), Norse, and French, with a few residual traces of Gaelic thrown in.
Just because we'll agree to speak your language doesn't mean we're going to let you diddle our sisters.
Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi accent has so much in common with Welsh.
Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.
We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels
Her interest aroused, Ms Mathur spoke to a number of other people whose first language is Hindi.
One Hindi doctor in north Wales told her that when he answered the phone, people hearing his accent would begin talking to him in Welsh.
"I thought maybe it isn't a coincidence, and if I dig deeper I might find something more," Ms Mathur said.
Particular similarities between the accents are the way that both place emphasis on the last part of word, and an elongated way of speaking that pronounces all the letters of a word.
"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels," Ms Mathur said.
"For example, if you were to pronounce 'predominantly', it would sound really similar in both because the 'r' is rolled, there is an emphasis on the 'd', and all the letters that are used to make the word can be heard.
"It's just fascinating that these things happen between people who come from such varied backgrounds."
The similarities have sometimes proved particularly tricky for actors - Pete Postlethwaite, playing an Asian criminal in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, had his accent described by Empire magazine as "Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea".
Proto-European language
But not only the two languages' accents share notable common features - their vocabularies do too.
Ms Mathur's own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - "seven", for example, is "saith" in Welsh, "saat" in Hindi.
"These kind of things really struck me," she said.
"When I reached number nine they were exactly the same - it's 'naw' - and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence."
She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University's School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
I wish our oriental eyed Welsh beauty Catherine Zeta Jones would post here more often. That *Zeta* is her secret Zoroastrian/Persian/Hindi signal. How could you be so blind!!!~
This comes from the BBC's Welsh timeline, which was refering to the Norman invasion of Wales, AFTER the 1066 invasion of England.
The Wikinerds/Nerdshift (NOT Wikipedia) error was editing "Wales" to read "Britain". SLOPPY!
A lot more of their article was a jumbled mess, too.
If you use their 'external link' to the BBC's Timeline, there is a lot worth looking at, if Welsh history is an interest.
India is truly a mixed society. I believe the first people were Vedda, which I suspect they are related to Ainus of Japan.
Thanks for this ping......I have always been perplexed about these competing theories.
I don't know how soon after 1066 the first Norman incursion into Wales was, but the final conquest of Wales wasn't until much later, 1276-1284, under King Edward I, although Henry II (1154-1189) had nominally subjugated the country.
Yes, they state it took over two hundred years. The conquest is given in a fairly long article devoted to that one topic. That BBC Wales site is fairly extensive.
It has the interactive timeline, with linked pages of Welsh history for each period, starting well before Roman incursions, up to modern times.
A separate page of Welsh Language developmental history, which is the one the (apparent) juveniles at Wikinerds mangled when they paraphrased it.
Another set of information on Welsh culture.
They also have an interactive map of each shire, that I didn't try. It seems to give a brief rundown on what each region is specifically noted for, as well as, IIRC, its geography and tourist & cultural sites. I only have a passing mild interest in it, just to have a little bit of background of where my maternal grandmother's ancestors came from. She was Welsh & Cornish extraction, heavy on the Cornish.
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