Dear all,

As part of this thread, the clear differences between the IVC and the culture of the Rg Veda have been briefly mentioned. Veeranarayana Pandurangi brought up another issue, the genetic evidence regarding the entrance of peoples into India during the Rgvedic period. He attached an article (Metspalu et al.) which, he said, "disproves the influx of people into India."

In a new article called "Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia (Allentoft et al.)," published in Nature only five day ago, the authors conclude that their "analyses support that migrations during the Early Bronze Age is a probable scenario for the spread of Indo-European languages." This goes in the opposite direction of the article by Metspalu et al., and gives strong genetic support to the notion of an influx into the Sub Continent between 3000-1000 BCE.  The authors of the new article used a very large data set for their study.

Here is the abstract.

The Bronze Age of Eurasia (around 3000–1000 BC) was a period of major cultural changes. However, there is debate about whether these changes resulted from the circulation of ideas or from human migrations, potentially also facilitating the spread of languages and certain phenotypic traits. We investigated this by using new, improved methods to sequence low-coverage genomes from 101 ancient humans from across Eurasia. We show that the Bronze Age was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale population migrations and replacements, responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesized spread of Indo-European languages during the Early Bronze Age. We also demonstrate that light skin pigmentation in Europeans was already present at high frequency in the Bronze Age, but not lactose tolerance, indicating a more recent onset of positive selection on lactose tolerance than previously thought. 

And this is the link to the article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/pdf/nature14507.pdf

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann

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