Hi Koenrad,

Below you express your very personal opinion about genetic studies when you write:

"But once they come to conclusions on Homeland theories, they make a jump from their own findings to hearsay about the dominant opinion in Indo-Europeanist circles, or just among the Indian media."This is a rather serious accusation against geneticists such as Reich, when you affirm they rely on "hearsay" and on Indian media, instead of strict analysis.

In this case you are totally wrong. As I said, this study is the most comprehensive to date and the authors didn't consult any sanskritist or archeologist until after they had reached their conclusions on purely genetic grounds. Only then did they talk to specialists outside their field. The study cannot be brushed aside by dismissively calling it merely "...only one among many...," as if all studies carried the same weight. That already points to a prejudice on your part.

Then you go on about language not being necessarily equivalent to genetics. You could have saved yourselves many words, as I wrote that myself in my previous post.

In any event, this study doesn't pretend to be the last word on the matter, as this is a rapidly evolving field. But is is worthy of very serious consideration.

Talageri is a different matter that has nothing to do with genetics. So please don't try to draw a comparison to Talageri. Those are two different fields of study. Don't conflate them.

For anyone interested, here is the abstract of the paper:

Abstract.
The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations has been unclear because of an absence of ancient DNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from ancient individuals, including the first from eastern Iran, Turan (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), Bronze Age Kazakhstan, and South Asia. Our data reveal a complex set of genetic sources that ultimately combined to form the ancestry of South Asians today. We document a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE). These Steppe communities mixed genetically with peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) whom they encountered in Turan (primarily descendants of earlier agriculturalists of Iran), but there is no evidence that the main BMAC population contributed genetically to later South Asians. Instead, Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout the 2nd millennium BCE, and we show that they mixed with a more southern population that we document at multiple sites as outlier individuals exhibiting a distinctive mixture of ancestry related to Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gathers. We call this group Indus Periphery because they were found at sites in cultural contact with the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and along its northern fringe, and also because they were genetically similar to post-IVC groups in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. By co-analyzing ancient DNA and genomic data from diverse present-day South Asians, we show that Indus Periphery related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia—consistent with the idea that the Indus Periphery individuals are providing us with the first direct look at the ancestry of peoples of the IVC—and we develop a model for the formation of present-day South Asians in terms of the temporally and geographically proximate sources of Indus Periphery related, Steppe, and local South Asian hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. Our results show how ancestry from the Steppe genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age, and identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.

Luis