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Indus Valley Civilisation

The one HARAPPA individual for which we have DNA shows no steppe anchestry, but a mixture of 11ky old Iranian and Indian Hunter Gatherer.
Later populations show significant steppe admixture.

There were two major migrations into India in the last 10,000 years.

The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world's first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India.

This would have been between 7,000 and 3,000BCE. These Zagrosian herders mixed with the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent - the First Indians, descendants of the Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who had reached India around 65,000 years ago - and together, they went on to create the Harappan civilisation.

In the centuries after 2000 BCE came the second set of immigrants (the Aryans) from the Eurasian Steppe, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan. They likely brought with them an early version of Sanskrit, mastery over horses and a range of new cultural practices such as sacrificial rituals, all of which formed the basis of early Hindu/Vedic culture.

Compare Mehrgarh

Sanskrit has significantly influenced the phonology, lexicology, morphology and grammatical systems of South Indian languages[30] of Kannada,[31] Telugu,[30] Tamil[32] and Malayalam.[33]

There is (still) no direct evidence of any such thing as an "Aryan Invasion". This might be due to Aryans being 'city-smiters' but one would at least expect to find some remnants of their camps.

“The horse-and chariot-rich Vedic texts are characterized by small tribal units of late Bronze Age pastoralists roaming around the Punjab”.

Evidence for the so-called massacre of the population of Mohenjo-Daro (Wheeler 1966) was actually found in several archaeological layers, and the irregular arrangement of skeletons may very well be due to flooding that swept the corpses into a street corner and buried them here and there.

According to Surahmaniam et.al., (2019) people from NW India were migrating into Central Asia in large numbers in the third millennium BCE.

“If the steppe nomads had a dominating presence in North-West India in thesubsequent centuries, it would certainly be reflected in the culture and lifestyleof the locals. But what is apparent in the area has nothing in common withthose of second-millennium steppes. But there are many similarities betweenthe culture and life style of IVC settlements and those in the Ganga YamunaDoab and areas further east in later centuries. There are obvious signs of culturalcontinuity between IVC and these later settlements and many of these can befound even in present-day Indians.”

A recentpaper by Won Joon Lee et.al published in Japanese Association of Anatomists reports details of first ever craniofacial reconstruction of the Indus Valley Civilization individuals found at the 4500 year old Rakhigarhi cemetery. These were of a male of 16-18 years age and a female of 35-50 years. The craniumand the facial features are very similar to present population of the area. Thesepeople were ** unusually tall** for the period; the young man was almost 6 feet and the woman was 5 feet 8 inches in height. Reminescent of the red haired 6 foot Jiroft queen.

In fact we suggest (and David Reich's recent DNA analysis tentatively confirms) that the Harappa civilzation beloged to the Iranian-Anatolian technology expansion wave, which dispersed Copper technology across Eurasia. This is slightly different to the second wave which brought Bronze technology and chariot riding. Did the first wave speak something like Dravidian, Semitic, Uralic, PIE or something entirely different? Because of relative cultural continuation it is perceivable that even the first wave (after the goat expansion which reached Mehrgarh 7000BC) spoke PIE:

“Most words for flora and fauna, names of rivers and mountains in Indic languages have clear Indo Aryan/Indo European etymologies. This would mean that if Indo Aryan languages had first reached South Asia in the middle of the second millennium BCE, the new migrants forced a complete change in these names, which is very unlikely. We have the parallel cases of Americas, Australia and many others, where the new migrants had overwhelming military, technological and organizational superiority over the locals and yet most river, mountain and place names were adopted from those used earlier by the locals. Even more unlikely, in the case of most of South Asia, even personal names were changed to Indo Aryan ones. The most plausible inference that can account forthe above would be that Proto Indo Aryan language reached North India at a time when these areas were sparsely populated by very primitive communities,which should be before the sixth millennium BCE.”

There are many references in Rgveda to River Sarasvati. Many hymns describe it as a very large river. RV 10.75 says it flowed between River Yamuna and Satlej. A palaeo-canal that fits the description is now visible in the area. But this river had become a small rain-fed one by 3000 BCE and dried up by 2000 BCE, just about the time Harappan civilization was disintegrating.

Top-level Haplogroups like R*, R1and R2 based SNP individuals are found in some pockets in Pakistan and NW India. Tribes such as the Chenchus speak a Dravidian language and have not mixed with others for over 3000 years. Together this suggests that R1 gene flow was from South Asia to Yamnaya and not the other way round. Special importance should be given to the study of gypsies.

Many of these texts describe the position of the polar star Dhruva Nakshatra in detail. It is said that it was in ‘Simsumara’ constellation. The constellation is stated to have 14 stars andall are named after various Vedic Devas and demigods, though the names oftendiffer in different texts. Dhruva was the last in the tail of Simsumara or Dolphin.This description matches that of what we now call the Draco constellation inevery respect. Draco or dragon also has 14 visible stars. Thuban is the last in thetail of Draco. Kochab and Polaris do not match this description in any way. Thuban or α Draconis was the polar star about 2900 BCE.

As Pargiter has pointed out, the north-West frontier never had any ancient sacred memories and was never regarded with reverence. On the contrary, it was thought of as land of barbarians or as ‘Mlecha’ country; a very unlikely attitude if their ancestor’s home-land was in that direction.

The only ‘migration myth’ mentioned in Vedic literatureis the one by the first man; Manu, from the south; across the seas.

Conclusion: The composers of the Rgveda, "Aryans" must have been present at the flourishing of the Harappa civilization, likely being their founders. That would make PIE slightly older, namely originating from ⋍4000BC. Harappans where children of man, coming via Susa or most definately via the Persian sea.

The split of R1a (M420) is computed to ca. 22,000 years ago. Of the European R1a-M417 samples, more than 96% were assigned to R1a-Z282, whereas 98.4% of the 490 Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to hg R1a-Z93.” There is a common ancestor for the European branch of R1a (Z282) and Indian branch of R1a (M780) but neither is a parent of the other.

Keep in mind that the Harappa culture was by far the most populous of its time (west of China), just like the Hindi are now.