A note on the early expansions of the Indo-Europeans

There have been a whole lot of developments in ancient human genomics that have more or less solved key issues pertaining to the early Indo-European expansions. We would like to discuss these but then it would need a long article which we are not currently inclined to write because it would need enormous amount of data to be presented in an understandable form. Moreover, there are indications via various channels that, exciting as the current developments are, there are going to be new ones which will make things even clearer with respect to the Indian situation. Hence, we were somewhat disinclined to engage in any long writing on this topic. Nevertheless, we could not control our temptation to at least say a few words in this regard.

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We sat in front of Agni making the preliminary offering with the ancient mantra-s, where Agni is described as being that of Bhṛgu, Apnavāna, and Aurva, our illustrious ancestors. The observant individual would note, as we had done, that these mantra-s contain a key reference that gives the identity of the original homeland of the Indo-Iranians, and now likely all Indo-Europeans. We have never been to that place, but if one realizes those mantra-s of the Bhṛgu-s, or the Bharadvāja-s or the Vaiśvāmitra-s one immediately sees the land it corresponds to – the land where there is fire within water.

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About 21-22 years ago a strange, new aberration in Hindu thought came to our attention. The Out-of-India-theory (OIT), which posited that the Indo-Aryans were autochthons of the Indian subcontinent. At first we brushed it aside as being a mere fantasy of some ill-educated raconteurs, who might simultaneously see Tipoo Sultan as a freedom fighter. But as the 1990s came to an end the the 2000s began this stream of thinking became a dominant theme among the Hindus. So much so that most politically pro-Hindu individuals also tied themselves to some version of OIT. Across different fora you would see them thundering as though they were Parjanya: “The Aryan invasion is a myth.” They started seeing it as an instrument created by the English or more generally the Leukosphere to sow dissension among the autochthonous Hindus. We can provide a long list of prominent Hindus on the internet and associates of Hindus who were proponents of some form OIT: S. Talageri, S. Kak, N.S. Rajaram, V. Agrawal, B.B. Lal, S. Kalyanaraman, D. Frawley, R. Malhotra, M. Danino, K. Elst, N. Kazanas and so on.

However, only a few of those who took a stand against the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) ever had a clear idea of what form the alternative hypothesis, i.e. OIT was to take. If we ignore its more nonsensical manifestations that deny the Indo-European monophyly then we are left with few clear formulations. OIT’s basic form was explicitly spelled out by Frawley and Talageri. They held the view that the Indo-Europeans originated in India and expanded westwards and eastwards from India. Talageri equated the Indo-Europeans with the Vedic pañcajana: The Druhyu-s and the Anu-s formed the non-Indian branches of Indo-European, whereas the Turvaśa-s, the Yadu and the Pūru-s formed the Indo-Aryan branches. Of them he ascribed Vedic culture purely to the Pūru-s. Talageri’s confidence in his scheme was so high that he titled his book: “Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence”; i.e. final evidence for OIT – this was after genetics had prepared the coffin for OIT. By 2009 Kazanas had climbed down to propose more confused alternatives: he proposed either a “continuum” from the Pontic steppes to the Sapta-Sindhu in India or an invasion around 4500 BCE or before.

Even as OIT was making its way up in India, in the west we had another such theory, which was likewise rather contrary to the evidence – the Anatolian homeland theory. Spearheaded by archaeologist Renfrew, this hypothesis proposed that the Indo-Europeans originated in Anatolia and as the Neolithicization spread from Anatolia to Europe it carried the IE languages. In this hypothesis the first farmers who spread out from Anatolia to Europe were the bearers of the IE languages to Europe. Renfrew was vague about the Indian side of the problem. He initially proposed that like the farming wave from Anatolia to the west, there was a corresponding wave to the East that carried the Indo-Aryan and Iranian eastwards. He even posited that the Harappan civilization was founded by these farmers who bore the IA language to India. Then there were a series of papers published in high profile magazines applying methods from the study of molecular evolution, like construction of Bayesian phylogenies, to linguistic data to support Anatolianists’ contention. However, the use of rather flawed assumptions resulted these results being severely criticized. Eventually, at least some of the Anatolianists climbed down positing an Anatolian scenario only for the early phase and part of the European side of things, while for the east and the later phase they accept the standard model of dispersal of IE from the steppes.

To those who were not swayed by the delusions of the genie of OIT or Anatolianism these were largely sideshows that spiced dinner-time or late night chatting sessions. However, to us at least OIT was a matter of concern. It hit us that this was not the figment of some unerudite Hindus but a wrong idea of some potency that was seizing the brains of otherwise intelligent and discerning people – indeed, we have long observed that false ideas with a middle-level of complexity have a seductive effect on the minds of intelligent people (i.e. people with above-average IQ as a group). Parallel cases are Marxism, liberalism, and related ideas of occidental vintage, which are ultimately modernized derivatives of the older Abrahamisms (A testimony of the fact that high IQ does not translate to proper discernment). On one hand it was exposing the Hindus “as idiots”, a suspicion or a belief which some white indologists had privately harbored. On the other, it alarmed us that if Hindus were unable to understand a theory as AIT with a great weight of evidence behind it – if they failed to grasp something so clear-cut then what could one say of the complex droha-s the mlecchas were hatching on the Hindus.

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In 2004 Cordaux et al published a clear and simple article titled “Independent Origins of Indian Caste and Tribal Paternal Lineages” that put the genie of OIT firmly back in the bottle. Yet, the Hindus including Talageri went on as though nothing had happened. There were some issues with that old article and it was based only on Y-chromosome haplogroups, but the wealth of new data on the genome-scale that has emerged since has only gone on to confirm the AIT and provide several interesting new details. In the past two years a wealth of ancient DNA is literally making the skeletons, if not the pots, of the steppe culture cultures speak and they are telling us great stories. Much of this work is done from a Eurocentric viewpoint but it has tremendous implications for us because were are the “other branch of Indo-European”. So what has happened?

• First going really back in time for a global view outside Africa: Molecular evidence shows that modern humans coming out of Africa split up into multiple branches. These included –
(1)the ancestral “Eurasian branches” situated in inner Eurasia.
(2) the common ancestor of the Onge of the Andamans and the main-land proto-Indians (unfortunately called Ancestral South Indians by the researchers; ASI) which moved through India and into the far east.
(3) the branch leading to part of the ancestry of the Papuans and the Australian aborigines, which moved eastwards and mixed with the archaic Denisovans (the remaining part of Papuan-aborigine ancestry coming from the Onge-ASI branch). Between 45-36.2 thousand years before present (kyr BP) the split of the Western Eurasians and East Asians can be clearly discerned among the “Eurasian” branches. The Western Eurasians spread from Europe to Central Asia. A northern lineage known as the Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANE), which is a sister group of the Western Eurasian branch, is seen at least ~24 kyr BP in the form of the remains of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer MA1 from Siberia published by Raghavan et al. The ANE branch together with the major contribution of the East Asian branch and a smaller contribution from an Onge-like branch, constituted the ancestry of the Native Americans.

• What happened in the Holocene in western Eurasia? We see many differentiated populations in Western Eurasia by around 9-7 kyr BP, which include:
(1) cline of European hunter-gatherers – Western European hunter-gatherers (WHG) who sit at one end of the cline, followed by the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers from Scandinavia (SHG) and the eastern hunter-gatherers (EHG) from the Middle Volga region who sit at the other end of the cline. The EHG show clear evidence for a component of ancestry from the ANE. The report of a ~13.5 kyr BP WHG-like genome from young male with a Cro-magnon type morphology from Switzerland suggests that the hunter-gatherer cline had differentiated before that time.
(2) In Anatolia by around 9 Kyr BP we see the emergence of Neolithic farming and these constitute a group known as Early Farmers (EF).
(3) In the Caucasus, from at least as early as 13.3 to 9.7 kyr BP (i.e. late Paleolithic to Mesolithic) we have records of a hunter-gatherer population the Caucasian hunter-gatherer (CHG). The CHG forms a clade with EF rather than grouping with the members of the WHG-SHG-EHG cline.

• How did Neolithicization proceed in Western Eurasia? Around 8-7.5 kyr we see the Neolithicization of Europe with intrusive farmers entering and bringing about the transition from hunting and gathering to Neolithic agriculture. Ancient genomes of the early Neolithic farmers (8-7.5 kyr) from Europe group tightly with the EF from Anatolia suggesting that a front of farmers moved out from Neolithic Anatolia into Europe and replaced the older hunter-gatherer groups. The famous Iceman is once such EF. In the southern arc across the Mediterranean these intrusive farmers appear to have largely displaced the older groups in some places. These migrating EFs constitute the primary ancestry of the modern day populations like Sardinians, the Spanish, and Basque. They also moved northwards and westwards via the Danubian system into Hungary and Germany to overrun the hunter-gatherers. After the initial overwhelming of the hunter-gatherers it appears that they seem to have lingered on in marginal zones or also adopted farming and admixed with the intrusive EFs. Thus, through much of Europe from ~6-5 kyr BP (i.e. Middle Neolithic) we see the resurgence of WHG ancestry in the farmers. Thus they are now a mixed population with both hunter-gatherer and EF ancestry as evidenced by ancient genomes from Germany, Spain,Hungary and Sweden. Thus, ancient genomes have confirmed the early suspicion from archaeology that the Neolithicization of Europe was driven by the intrusion of EF from Anatolia. What it further clarified is that this process involved a massive replacement of hunter-gathers followed by resurgence of their ancestry resulting in an admixed European farming population by the middle-Neolithic.

• What happened in Eastern side? Starting at least around the transition between the late Neolithic and the beginning of the metal age around 7.2-6 kyr BP ancient genomes from the Middle Volga region (Samara) show that the EHG were beginning to undergo admixture with the CHG to give rise to an composite population. By the advent of the bronze age proper, a well-admixed population (~EHG (42-52%)-CHG(48-58%) is clearly in place in the entire arc to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian lake (Pontic steppes) all the way to the Middle Volga region as suggested by ancient genomes from ~5 kyr BP from Kalmykia and the Middle Volga region. This corresponds the archaeologically bronze age defined Yamnaya culture dated ~5.6-4.3 kyr BP. In the Middle Volga region the Yamnaya culture is succeeded by the archaeologically defined Poltavka culture (~4.9-4.2 kyr); the ancient genomes from Poltavka culture indicate that it had a genetic composition very close to the preceding Yamnaya in the region suggesting that there was no genetic transformation in course of this archaeological succession.

• The invasion of the Altai region of Asia from the Pontic steppes. Between 5.3-5 kyr BP the archaeological defined Afanasievo culture suddenly appears in the Altai and appears to show cultural links to the Yamnaya from the western steppes. Ancient genomes from the Afanasievo sites in the Altai show no links to the East Asia populations but are very close to the people from the Yamnaya sites. This suggests that the Afanasievo was founded by a massive invasion from the Pontic steppes across the steppes of Kazakhstan into the Altai.

• The invasion of Neolithic Europe from the Pontic steppes. Around ~4.9 kyr BP an archaeologically defined culture, the Corded Ware culture, appeared in central Europe. They were characterized by a pottery with a distinctive corded appearance and male graves with a battle axe. By the time the archaeological defined culture is last observed ~4.3 kyr BP it had reached the Atlantic shores of Europe and catalyzed a major cultural change across Europe as attested by archaeology. The recovery of ancient genomes from remains of Corded Ware people from Germany (~4.5 kyr BP) showed that they were specifically related to the Yamnaya populations with little local admixture from the original WHG and EF ancestry groups. The sudden appearance of Corded Ware with little initial admixture with the older groups is also paralleled by considerable disappearance of middle Neolithic European Y-chromosome and mitochondrial haplogroups suggesting a degree of population replacement. This showed that the entry of these people was most likely a massive invasion. The modern Europeans are are all admixtures of this Yamnaya derived population, at least in part via the Corded Ware people, with the early mixed population formed by the WHG and the EF.

In conclusion, these results show in a span of 500 years ~5.4-4.9 kyr BP the Yamnaya type people from the Pontic steppes launched at least two major invasions, first eastwards into the Altai and then westwards into Europe.

continued…