Debunking Out of India

Debunking of Out of India

Out of India (OoI) is a hypothesis that has been gaining ground in many right-wing

hindutva circles, especially in recent years. It is fueled by two main factors:

1. The right-wing ultra-nationalist hindutva ideology

2. The fact that India has, for centuries prior to independence, been

ruled by foreign invaders. As such, many Indians do not want this

history of invasion to go back even farther.

The second point is due to a misunderstanding of the Indo-Aryan Migration theory,

where the theory itself states that it was a migration, or “trickling in”(Witzel 2001) of

Indo-Aryans from Central Asia. It stems ultimately from the original hypothesis

formulated by the British linguists and philologists during the Raj. Their own biases

were introduced which obviously made the hypothesis quite insensitive and racist (19th

century imperialism, am I right?). However, the core idea of the hypothesis - that

Sanskrit and its daughter languages were descended from a language that was also

ancestral to most European languages - was correct. This original hypothesis was terms

the “Aryan Invasion Theory.” This name is still used by OoI proponents to attempt to

discredit the current model by associating it with a much more race-based older version (This is not only done by 17 year old hindu nationalists on youtube, but is also done by academics and pseudo-academics as well, like Koenrad Elst, B.B. Lal, S.G. Talageri, and so forth)(sidetone: the whole "thousands of years old civilization" trope isn't just 17-year olds either, it's been said by several people who are quite influential (such as the chief minister of Tripura(Madrigal, 2018)).

The current model deals mostly with linguistics, though genetics does play a role.

However, the role genetics plays has nothing to do with race. 

The origin of IE languages

has been a heated debate for the last 200 years. Many right-wing hindu nationalists have

seized the opportunity to try and make India the IE homeland, and to try and elevate the

Vedas - the oldest Hindu scriptures and probably among the oldest surviving religious texts in the world - to the position of being the source of Indian civilization. They try to portray the Indus Valley Civilization(IVC) as being Indo-European and Vedic, in order to associate their religion with the prestige of being the religion of the oldest civilization in India and of the largest civilization of its time. This essay is meant to refute such nationalist make-believe stories.

I will have each section be about one category of proof - archeological, linguistic, genetic,

etc. - and will cite sources in-text as well as at the end. 

I would like to point out that though I will be presenting evidence specific to the Steppe Urheimat hypothesis, I will be doing so to disprove a South Asian origin, not to prove a Steppe origin. This essay is not meant to discuss where exactly the Indo-Europeans originated; it is only meant to discuss why they could not have originated in India.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Linguistics and Literary Evidence

Since the IE language family is a language family (hence the name), linguistic evidence

naturally plays a major role in determining its homeland. Using the comparative

method, historical linguists have reconstructed quite a few IE words as well as many

grammatical features of the proto-language - the last common ancestor of all IE

languages, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

Many of these words refer to things necessary to a pastoralist economy and some words refer to things that either first originated in the Steppe, or were exclusively found in the Steppe around this time period (like horses). 

There are also some non-pastoralist word that indicate a sedentary lifestyle, but these could either refer to a lifestyle where pastoralism is supplemented by cultivation, or to trade contacts. Maybe both. In any case, many reconstructed words relate to pastoralism. There are also words for many animals that simply could not have been in India, like beavers, geese.

Additionally, there is also a word for snow in most IE languages, and this word for snow can be reconstructed in PIE, so the Indo-Europeans would have known of snow. If we

presuppose a homeland in India, then this would restrict the Indo-Europeans to a very

small area in North India.

The cereal terminology (i.e. the words for the different grains and cereals known to the IE peoples) also indicates a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core IE languages (Kroonen et al., 2022). The paper goes way more into the evolution of IE languages, but as that does not apply here, I will not discuss it here.

The Rig Veda (RV) (the oldest Veda) does not know of cities, but only of ruins (armaka) and small forts (pur)(Witzel, 2001b). It must therefore be dated to after the disintegration of the cities of the IVC in around 1900 BCE(Witzel, 2001b). Its composers do not know of Iron, which appears in the Indian subcontinent in around 1200 BCE, so it must have been composed before 1200 BCE (Witzel, 2001b). Since the RV was composed after the IVC collapsed, we can safely say that the IVC was not Vedic. There is also the fact that the AV (Arthavaveda) and other mantra language texts are the first Vedic texts to mention Iron, and are thus dated to around 1200 BCE - 1000 BCE (Witzel, 2001b).

The YV(Yajur Veda) Samhitā texts overlap both geographically and culturally with the

attested Painted Grey Ware culture, and are thus dated between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE

(Witzel, 2001b). None of these fall within or before the Mature Harappan Culture (the IVC) (2600 BCE to 1900 BCE).

Another factor that makes it very difficult to fit an Indian origin for IA languages is that

Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants, which are not reconstructible for PIE, or even

Proto-Indo-Iranian. They aren't even found in the Mitanni IA words, which are the closest non-Indian relative to Vedic Sanskrit available. Clearly, they developed in the Indian IA languages exclusively. Why is it that only Indian IA languages developed this feature, if even PIE was in contact with several languages in the subcontinent that had retroflex consonants (e.g. Munda languages, Dravidian languages)?

There are many claims that the RV contains no memory of immigration. This doesn’t

disprove immigration (many immigrant groups forget their origin after a few

generations (think Sinti and Roma, or the Germanic peoples)). In any case, in the RV, there are memories of areas like the BMAC, and even possibly from the Steppe (Witzel, 2001b). The Indo-Iranian (IIr.) river *Rasā is cognate to the Greek Rhā, which designates the Volga. 

There is also the famous River Sarasvati, which has frequently been misattributed to the Gaggar-Hakra river. The GH river is rain-fed and feeble. The Sarasvati in the RV is described as “mighty”. Autochtonists (OoI proponents) use a very misleading and probably made up “fact” to show that the RV was written before 2000 BCE. They claim

that the GH is the Sarasvati, and (with no evidence what so ever) claim that the GH lost

its glacial source of water around 2000 BCE, and so the RV must have been written before this magic date because it

describes a mighty river.

For example, Nicholas Kazanas says, “Since the Ghaggar seems to have begun drying up

some 3,900 years ago, the Vedic people who describe the river as flowing from the hills to

the sea must have been on its banks well more than 3,900 years ago.”

This argument was debunked in the '60s, and has been further debunked in recent years as well.

The GH river routinely had its water diverted between the Indus and Ganga following a

cycle; the most recent diversion was about AD 500, so by this logic, the RV was written

sometime before 500 CE (Raikes, 1968). However, a more recent study has found that

there was never a glacial river flowing where the GH is now in the Holocene (Gioson et

al., 2012).  I’ll come back to the geological aspect of this in the Archaeology section.

Anyways, I’ve gone a bit off-topic, as this section is about linguistics. The

reason I brought up the Sarasvati here is because there is evidence for the Sarasvati not

being the GH that is linguistic in nature. The Avesta speaks of the Haraxvaiti, which is

the Iranian cognate to the Indo-Aryan (IA) Sarasvati. Following the separation from IA,

Ir (Iranian) languages underwent the sound change s > h. This could mean that the Sarasvati was originally used to refer to the Helmand, which is a mighty river flowing from the mountains, and the later geographic location of the Sarasvati is being drawn from a composite memory (Joseph, 2021).

There is also the fact that Vedic Sanskrit has a non-IE substrate. None of the substratum

words have cognates in other IE languages, so IA languages must have only have had

contact with them after they had split up from the other IE languages. However, given

that many of these substrate languages are known to be native to India (Dravidian,

Munda) and some of them are otherwise unknown languages thought to have been spoken in the BMAC, it’s quite unlikely then that IE languages originated in India, since only IA languages were influenced by the substrate.

There is an OoI argument that the IA superstate in Mitanni, which has been solidly dated

to have been in place by 1500 BCE, is post-Vedic. This is due to some names and naming conventions that appear later on in the Vedas and in Mitanni tablets. This is then used to date the RV way before the accepted dating of 2000-1500 BCE, since clearly the Mitanni superstrate would have come from India, and it was in place at around 1500 BCE at the latest, with the names supposedly being post-Vedic. Thus, the RV must have been composed waaaay before 1500 BCE to allow for this. This has been refuted in Witzel, 2001b. Firstly, Mitanni words preserve pre-Vedic phonemes and features such as IIr -zdh- > Ved. -edh-, in Priyamazdha : Ved. priyamedha : Avest.-mazdā; IIr ai > Ved. e (aika : eka in aikavartana); and IIr. j'h > Ved. h in vašana(š)šaya 'of the race track' = [važhanasya]cf. Ved. våhana- (Witzel, 2001b). Mitanni IA also shares the RV and Avestan preference for r (pinkara rather than pingala, parita rather than palita) that goes away in later Vedas. Mitanni also lacks IIr. ižd(h) > Ved. īḍ(h) (Parpola, 2015).

Mitanni IA also doesn’t have retroflex consonants, which are pretty common in the RV.

So-called “Prakritic influences” in Mitanni IA are due to the pecularities of cuneiform (certain sounds have to be represented weirdly, which leads to the word looking post-Vedic, when it is in fact pre-Vedic) and the fact that the actual language of Mitanni was Hurrian.

(Witzel, 2001b). For example, the name ending -šena is a Hurrian name ending, and is totally unrelated to the later Indo-Aryan names ending -sena (Witzel, 2001b).

Mitanni words also show no sign of retroflexion that would be visible if they were post-Vedic. Based on the authochtonous argument, the Indo-Aryans would have left South Asia after the Vedas were composed, but retaining pre-Vedic features, while having words relating to horses, chariot racing, etc. centuries if not millennia before their introduction to South Asia. They would have forgotten all of the typically Indian words (lion, tiger, peacock, lotus, etc.)(while remaining with elephants, as per autochtonists), while only retaining typical IE words. This would require a type of special pleading that no other science would accept, so why should linguistics accept this?

There is another argument regarding the word pingala. It appears later on in the RV and subsequent Vedas, but doesn’t really make an appearance in the early RV.

The related word pinkara appearing in Mitanni words has been used to try and show

that the Mitanni were post-Vedic or at least Late Vedic in origin. This is just idiocy.

Not only are the Vedas not a complete dictionary of the language of the time (a word for

the color reddish-brown (the meaning of pingala) very much could still have existed and

just not been mentioned in the text), but pinkara is actually older than pingala. This has

to do with the aforementioned Mitanni preference for r over l, which is a distinctly early Vedic and pre-

Vedic feature. It’s quite likely that even early Vedic people knew of the color reddish-brown, because it’s a fairly common color for horses, with whom the Vedic people were in contact from their earliest stages(see above and below).

Mitanni also doesn’t have the Vedic au > o (For example, Mitt. Indrauta versus Ved. Indrota;) (Witzel, 2001b) or the Ved. vašana > vāhana (Witzel, 2003). Witzel (2001b) also discusses the naming conventions in Mitanni and why they don’t reflect a post-Vedic origin for the Mitanni IA. However, it should be noted that the ai > e and au > o may or may not be a matter of orthography. If they aren’t, that’s more preserved sound changes. If they are, then there are still other sound changes preserved showing that the IA superstrate in Mitanni separated from Indian IA languages prior to the composition of the Vedas.

Additionally, as Anthony (2007) and Anthony&Ringe(2015) have pointed out, the Uralic languages have loanwords originating in PIE, which would suggest a homeland close to the Uralic languages (i.e. not India). An example of this is the Finnish word for slave (orja), which originates from the IIr. endonym arya (Parpola, 2015). People have historically taken enemies in war as slaves, so it makes sense that the word for slave would be a derivation of the endonym for the group.

Similarly, Caucasus languages (notably, Proto-Kartvelian) also have either loaned words to or from PIE, which would suggest a homeland close to the Caucasus (again, not South Asia)(Anthony&Ringe, 2015).

Moreover, when examining the word for elephant in many Near Eastern languages, one will find it is related to the Proto-Dravidian word for elephant, which itself derives from the Proto-Dravidian *pal and its alternate forms (meaning tooth). Given that the word for tooth is an ultra-conserved word that is rarely borrowed, this means that a substantial number of people in the IVC must have spoken a Dravidian language pretty close to Proto-Dravidian, in order for the Mesopotamians to have borrowed the word (Mukhopadhyay, 2021). Specifically, those in power and merchants would have to have spoken PD (Proto-Dravidian), as they were probably the ones who had most contact with Mesopotamians and were the ones who likely introduced them to elephants.

As per Parpola(2020), many river names in Eastern Europe have IIr. etymologies (like the Don, Dnieper, and Dniester).

Witzel(2014) also comes to the conclusion that Airiianəm Vaējah of the Avesta is in the Central Afghan highlands.

Archaeology

First off, there is the fact that the material culture described in any of the Vedas is not

anything like that of the IVC. For example, there is the horse. The Vedas

and their composers obviously held horses in high esteem, even using them in rituals

and the like. By contrast, there is not a single image of a horse in IVC artifacts. No

sculptures of horses, no images, no statues… nothing. There have been some bones

excavated that could be horses, but they are few in number, may or may not be horses, and do not mean that horses played nearly as central a role in the IVC’s culture as they clearly do in Vedic culture.

There are other difference, like the IVC’s cities, and Vedic society’s lack thereof. The IVC was also not very warlike either, with very few if any depictions of war being found. The only depiction of human-on-human violence is more likely a religious/symbolic depiction than a depiction of actual events, and seems less like war and more like a personal conflict between two people. The Vedas (especially the RV), on the other hand, laud warriors and place an emphasis on war and warriors, with the god Indra himself being praised for his feats in war.

The Vedas couldn't have been composed before the IVC, as the horse was not domesticated then, nor did the chariot exist (as far as is known now; people can speculate, but no evidence exists to support such speculation). Then there's also the fact that this means that the language would have changed extremely slowly to account for the level of differentiation between Vedic Sanskrit and modern IA languages. This isn't impossible as such, but it's not very likely either (This is more linguistic in nature, but is included here because it fits the "IVC couldn't be post-Vedic" point I'm making here).

Many ritual sites of the Sintashta culture also very closely resemble some rituals described in the RV (Anthony 2007; Anthony 1995). The same goes for many Sintashta and Potapovka-Filatovka burial sites, which closely match Vedic descriptions (Anthony, 2007).

There is an argument from autochtonists that later Indian material cultures lack

elements from the steppe and Central Asia. They may be right (although there is a significant influx of BMAC pottery at a later date), in addition to the case that Mallory(1989) makes regarding the Gandhara Grave culture, but this does not disprove an influx of migrants from the steppe or Central Asia. It is a well-known fact that the Vedic Indo-Aryans utilized the service of indigenous populations for things like agriculture, washing, and especially pottery (Witzel 2001b). So then it makes sense that the pottery style and agricultural equipment would remain continuous, given that the same people are still making it, and they have had no reason to change the way they make it. Presumably, a similar thing would have happened with the Mitanni Indo-Aryans, explaining their lack of Central Asian and steppe elements in their material culture. 

As for the peacock argument that is often brought up, the peacock motif is

attested in Mesopotamia well before Mitanni, at around 2100 BCE (Witzel, 2001b). Not only is this before the Mitanni state (c. 1500 BCE), but this is also centuries before even the first attestation of IA peoples in the Near East (c.1761 BCE)

(Kroonen et al., 2018).

There has been some work done on the subject of Syrian Elephants. The reason I bring

this up is because OoI proponents use the fact that elephants appear in the

archaeological record in Mesopotamia around the same time as the Mitanni to try and

prove an Indian origin. Peter Pfälzner has done quite a bit of research into elephants in

the Near East, especially around the Orontes River. In his 2016 paper “The Elephants of

the Orontes,” Pfälzner finds that “In the specific environment of the Orontes River

System, the natural population of elephants could flourish continuously over a very long

time. Even human occupation during the Early to Late Bronze Age need not have

repelled the elephant herds, as human settlements and agricultural activities were

situated far away from the marshy river basins”(Pfälzner, 2016).  Pfälzner also found that, based on cutting marks on elephant bones in the Orontes

region, the elephants were also likely hunted in the area for their meat (Pfälzner, 2016).

In fact, he has also found that elephants could have been hunted in the Middle Euphrates Valley region since the Early Bronze Age (Pfälzner, 2020). This is centuries before the Mitanni Kingdom, or even the earliest Near Eastern attestation of peoples who could possibly be Indo-Aryan. I should make myself clear here, however, that the bones in question that are so old could be elephant bones or hippo bones. It’s still up for debate, so don’t take what I’m saying here regarding EBA elephant hunting in the Near East as a fact; I’m just saying that it could have happened, based on bones that could be elephant bones.

Depictions of juvenile elephants have also been found in the Near East, showing that

these elephants were not necessarily all kept in captivity(Çakırlarand Ikram 2016). This

is because elephants generally do not breed in captivity (save for in modern zoos, where

relatively newer techniques are employed).

The transport of enough elephants to form a breeding population would

require logistics that just didn’t exist in the Bronze Age (i.e. either a way to bring them

across Iran with enough food and water or a way to store enough food and water on ships

large enough to ship such large populations of elephants). This is especially true when you keep in mind that the Indus Valley Civilization was experiencing a drought at that point in time that would eventually cause it to collapse in the next century or so. It makes no sense that, during a drought, hundreds of elephants would be brought across the Iranian Plateau or through the Persian Gulf, along with enough food and water to keep them supplied for days to weeks (depending on which route they took) as they made the journey(which would easily amount to tens of tons).

There are also depictions of elephants in Mesopotamia coming from the end of the 3rd

millennium BCE, though they are more of the type that would be created by someone

who has never actually seen an elephant and seem to be based heavily off of IVC

depictions of elephants(Çakırlar and Ikram 2016). Raw ivory, however, does make an

appearance in Mesopotamia around this time(Çakırlar and Ikram 2016).

Girdland-Flink et al.(2018) has shown that genetic evidence does not rule out a natural migration to the area.

Then there is also the fact that a lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary,

especially for something like this. Albayrak (2019) further emphasizes this ambiguity in the exact origins of the elephants in the Near East, and points out that a set of elephant remains in Gavur Lake, Turkey, do not have any cut marks or anything else indicating that they were killed by humans. They were also not found near any known settlement. This would indicate that this was a wild population of elephants. The existence of wild elephant populations in the Near East is corroborated by Pfälzner (2016), where it is pointed out that there are elephant remains in the Orontes area that also do not show evidence of human involvement in their death, and were found far from any known human settlements of the time.

In the end, while this is a very disputed topic, the existence of the Syrian elephant cannot prove an Indian origin for the Mitanni rulers or disprove a non-India origin (as such, it is not really worth arguing about in the context of this blog post, though I'm sure it would make some wonderful discussion elsewhere).

As for archaeological evidence linking the IA to the Steppe/other non-India regions

(which is to say, not just evidence that they didn’t originate in India/lack of evidence for an origin in India, but evidence that they originated outside), there are a few things that can be said. Firstly, as I previously mentioned, there are Sintashta ritual sites that resemble Vedic ritual sites as described in the RV (Anthony, 2007; Witzel, 2014). Secondly, in a recent paper, the world’s oldest horse riders have been found in Yamnaya kurgans in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (Trautmann et al., 2023). Given the importance of horses (and their knowledge of horse riding as a practice) to the Vedic people, they must have at least been in contact with the Yamnaya at some point in their history (presumably after the time period these horse riders are from). This firmly puts their ultimate origin outside of India, with them being outside of India as late as 3000 BCE, and presumably moving south and East soon after to account for the 1761 BCE attestation of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (Kroonan et al., 2018).

Additionally, there is an introduction of horses in what Asko Parpola calls the "urban phase" of the BMAC (Parpola, 2015).

This, along with the genetic evidence in the next section, offers clear evidence of a migration of Steppe pastoralists into Central Asia, and eventually, into South Asia.

Similarly, many Sintashta cultural elements have been found in some BMAC graves, again suggesting an influx of people (when combined with genetic evidence; the expansion of a material culture isn’t always due to migrations) from the Steppe and southern Ural area (Parpola, 2015). This suggests Steppe pastoralists in place by the twentieth century BCE.

There are also attested pastoralist campsites near most, if not all, BMAC settlements in southern Turkmenistan. These settlements all have late Andronovo ceramics (Parpola, 2015).

There is a subsequent southward expansion of BMAC material culture, which is further evidence of a southward migration. Additionally, horses begin showing up in the Swat Valley area around 1700 BCE, with much of the black-gray burnished pottery being connected to BMAC pottery (Parpola, 2015).

The Ghālegay IV period of the Swat Valley also has pottery that is connected to the later Cemetery H culture of Punjab (Parpola, 2015).

Rig Vedic descriptions of fights against the Dāsas match archaeologically with BMAC cities (Parpola, 2015).This would be indicative of Steppe peoples moving south and coming into conflict with the locals, a migration which is known to have happened based on genetic evidence and a clear line of succession of steppe cultures moving south.

Additionally, as I discussed earlier, there was an influx of steppe pottery into the BMAC, which was then followed by an influx of BMAC pottery into South Asia (Parpola, 2015). This, coupled with the genetic evidence discussed later on, shows that there was indeed a migration of Steppe people into South Asia at this time(Witzel, 2014; Parpola, 2015).

While the identification of the Sinauli vehicle is still very much debated, Asko Parpola says that it is not a chariot, because “The ‘chariots’ of Sanauli do not have spoked wheels but solid ones, which would have been too heavy to be pulled by horses… the absence of horse skeletons or horse skulls, of the cheek-pieces used in driving the early horse-drawn chariots, and by the absence of the horse in the imagery of the Sanauli finds, which is dominated by the bull”(Parpola, 2020). Parpola(2020) also revises some arguments made in Parpola(2015) to improve accuracy and keep the arguments up to date.

Now, to the topic of the Sarasvati River, which I said earlier that I'd cover. Yes, there were plaeo-channels between the Sutlej and Yamuna and the Gaggar-Hakra. That has been confirmed. What has not been confirmed is the existence of such paleo-channels in Harappan times. To the contrary, as I mentioned above, there was never a glacial river where the Gaggar-Hakra is now in the Holocene (Gioson et al., 2012). These paleo-channels have been shown to antedate the IVC by a good few millennia (Amir et al., 2023; Khan & Sinha, 2019).

Of course, we must keep in mind that the movement of languages is untraceable in the archaeological record in the absence of written records (so this whole section is largely just pointing out that some cultural elements were transmitted south from the Steppe, so it's not unreasonable for language to also follow these cultural elements). Similarly, the movement of an archaeological culture may or may not indicate the movement of a people. For this, we need genetic evidence. The majority of the evidence presented here that relates to Steppe cultures and the like is only applicable if combined with linguistic and genetic evidence. The other evidence is here largely to disprove certain OoI arguments that are centered around archaeology.

Genetics

This one is a bit controversial. One such controversial aspect about this collection of

evidence is that people often associate genetics with stuff like race. This is obviously not

a correct conclusion to come to, but some people still arrive at this conclusion. So I would

like to start this section by saying that none of this section has to do with race and other

phenotypes like that. It has solely to do with genotypes and the ancestry of an individual

based on their genotype.

First off, we need context. In a fairly recent study, it has been found that there was an

influx of Steppe_MLBA (Middle-Late Bronze Age) ancestry into the Swat Valley ~2000

BCE(Narsimhan et al., 2019). There are some who say that this influx came way later into the rest of the Indian subcontinent, from a different source. However, David

Reich, one of the co-authors of the paper, has this to say:

“It is entirely possible (and indeed likely in my opinion) that the steppe ancestry

both in the Swat Valley groups, and the modern Indian Cline, comes from the

same source. The steppe ancestry sampled from the Swat Valley was more mixed

with local South Asian groups, than was the case for the unsampled ‘Ancestral

North Indian’ terminus of the modern Indian Cline, which we haven’t sampled in

the available ancient DNA data”(D. Reich, personal communication, November 3,

2023).

In other words, it’s not necessary for the ancestry to have come from a different source

for modern Indians and Swat Valley skeletons. It could simply be that they share the same source of Steppe ancestry and it just contributed more to Modern Indian populations than it did to Swat Valley populations.

As for the late dating, Ummonk (2023) demonstrates that some samples from quite a bit farther south in the subcontinent do show Steppe ancestry admixture dates ~2000 BCE. Another piece of evidence debunking a later entry of Steppe ancestry is the lack of East Asian ancestry in Indian Steppe_MLBA showing that the ancestry must have made its way to India before the Iron Age, which would be before an influx of East Asian ancestry into the Central Asia region (Narsimhan et al., 2019).

In fact, Ummonk (2023) has shown an early entry of Steppe ancestry into South Asia, using some other samples which are from a later time period but have had their ancestry date back to the 2nd millennium BCE. As Ummonk points out, this only means that the latest admixture happened at this time; the actual influx likely happened well before this. Even then, the dating for the admixture ranges from ~1900 BCE to ~1500 BCE.

Narsimhan et al.(2019) also found that the people of the BMAC made little to no genetic impact on the Indian subcontinent’s population. This means that the influx of BMAC material culture into the Indian subcontinent discussed earlier cannot have been brought by the people of the BMAC, and was thus probably brought by Steppe migrants (this is because there was a lot of Steppe pottery surrounding many late BMAC settlements).

I have heard some autochtonists claim that Iranian ancestry was already in South Asia 12000 years ago. The reason I bring this up has to do with the nature of Steppe_MLBA ancestry, which I’m not going to go into right now. Suffice to say, this is an idiotic claim. The paper being cited - Shinde et al. (2019) - only says that this ancestry split from Iranian farmers around 12500 BP. To say that these Iranian pastoralists were already in South Asia at this point is idiotic, because they would have had to cross the entirety of Iran in just a century or so, without really aiming for South Asia. They also would have had to set off right when this split between populations happened, which is also incredibly unlikely. Additonally, this is unsupported by other evidence. For example, no skeletons have been found that show relatively unmixed Iranian ancestry that far back in South Asia (Of course, one must keep in mind that the South Asian climate does make it hard to find preserved bodies, which would probably explain why we have no evidence of this, if it weren't for all the other stuff I listed earlier).

As for the Sinauli individuals who allegedly don’t have Steppe Ancestry, I couldn’t find any relevant publications. There is a lecture on YouTube that I have seen cited, but I couldn’t find any associated literature. Nothing is cited, and I am not aware of any papers that cover this. To the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been a study on Sinauli DNA. Until relevant literature is brought to my attention, I will proceed under the assumption that there is no data for Sinauli. The same goes for the Kashmiri samples from ~1200 BCE.

Later Edit: So apparently it's supposed to be from an as yet unpublished paper from Niraj Rai. I can't comment on this until the paper is published.

Sourcing issues

Autochtonists love to cite people like Talageri and Elst, who make arguments that, on the

surface at least, seem reasonable. That’s why people fall for these arguments, because

they have no experience with things like linguistics or archaeology themselves, and so

cannot debunk the bad arguments made. I’m no expert either, but I do not blindly trust

someone on the internet by virtue of them being a contrarian, especially when they have

come under heavy criticism from the academic community. Talageri’s work, for example,

has been repeatedly debunked by Witzel and others. This is examplified by Witzel (2001a), which dissects one of Talageri’s works and explains Talageri’s mistakes, thus showing that Talageri has no working knowledge of linguistics or even basic chronologies that have been established through 200 years of rigorous study.

People like Elst and Talageri are both ideologically motivated fanatics, with Elst often lending far-right ideologies a platform through his works. All in all, such people are by no reasonable measure reliable sources. They are not usually academics, and when they

are, they do not generally have the qualifications and/or experience to write about such

topics. When I say this, I do not mean you must have a degree. I mean you must have

worked in the field enough to have a basic understanding of it, which Talageri clearly

does not. You need to know what you are talking about when you say something. Witzel

(2001b) also debunks Talageri’s and Misra’s arguments surrounding the linguistic

“evidence” for OoI. 

Twitter user @dxrsam_0 wrote a post on why Talageri’s

linguistic “evidence” for an Indian homeland that involves animal names is not actually

evidence for such a claim, and why Talageri was wrong in jumping to such a conclusion.

It will be in the sources list.

Talageri even tried to associate the Angles and Saxons with the Vedic Sanskrit word “anguli,” based solely on the fact that the words look similar(Witzel, 2001a). He did not use any proper linguistic methodology (i.e. using known sound changes and correspondences, etc.) to derive his claim. He basically just bs’d it. It's like if someone claimed the Latin deus and Greek theos are related because they look similar, even though there is no linguistic evidence to that effect. In fact, linguistic evidence links deus with Zeus, not theos.

Talageri is also not peer-reviewed. This alone should be a reason to outright dismiss someone, though it definitely reduces the weight of what they say if their work hasn’t been double-checked by other people who know what they’re doing. However, given that his lack of being peer-reviewed has allowed for huge problems in his methodology to develop (see Witzel(2001a), Witzel(2001b), @dxrsam_0(2022)), we can safely say that if he was peer-reviewed, he would be much more reliable and accurate. He also thinks of people who value peer-reviewed work more as “monkeys”(Talageri, 2022). His clear disdain for standard academic procedure makes itself very evident in his works.

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