[INDOLOGY] Article about the politics surrounding indology at the IHRC

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

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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