A new research paper draft—The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia—is making news around the world. The authors of the draft have posted its content online and are soliciting reviews and comments.

The new genomic evidences to the origins of ancient Indians will surely rouse the emotions of India’s Right that strongly maintains that people from ancient India migrated “from” India and that the Aryan invasion theory has no basis.

Subramanian Swamy, the Bharatiya Janata Party Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament, has often stated that dividing Indians into Aryans and Dravidians was the West’s idea and that it is all “bunkum”.

Even Dr Ambedkar in his book, “Who is Shudra?”, seems to strongly argue that the Aryan Invasion theory was false.

Another book, “Return of the Aryans” by Bhagwan Gidwani narrates a fable that the Aryans migrated from India and named the Nile river “Neela” (blue), and returned to India from Europe.

In the 21st century, modern biology, based on the shared sequences of conserved homologous DNA, is considered the most reliable evidence in the process of organic evolution, speciation and diversity.

DNA fingerprinting is now considered definitive evidence in criminal cases, and on issues of parentage. The advances in molecular biology of nucleic acids and the convergence of various fields, such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, bioinformatics, statistics, anthropology, archeology, agriculture and linguistics, have updated and enriched our knowledge of how human beings began spreading around the globe thousands of years ago.

A new comprehensive research paper, released on March 29 by 92 global experts led by Vagheesh M Narasimhan of the Department of Genetics at Harvard University, once again lends credence to some recent papers on the Aryan migration to the Indian subcontinent. The authors have generated genome-wide data from 362 ancient individuals from eastern Iran, Turan (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), Bronze Age Kazakhstan and South Asia to fill the gap of the missing genetic information of Central and South Asian populations. A complex analysis of an equally complex data set seems to offer insights into the origin of today’s South Asians.

The document reveals a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the steppe to Turan around 2300-1500 BCE.  These steppe communities mixed genetically with the peoples of Turan’s Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), who were primarily descendants of the earlier agriculturists from Iran. It is worthwhile to note the epicenter of modern day agriculture is from the agriculture crescent in Iran.

There is really no evidence that the BMAC population contributed to the later migration of people to the south. But there is evidence to show that the BMAC population contributed genetically to the later southward migration to South Asia. Steppe communities integrated farther south throughout 2nd millennium BCE.

Further, this population also mixed with the southern population as documented at different sites. This created outlier individuals who exhibit a distinctive mixture of ancestry related to Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunters and gatherers. They are known as the Indus periphery, according to Narasimhan et al (and others). The Indus periphery is called so because they were found at the cultural sites near the Indus Valley Civilisation, and along its northern fringe. They are genetically similar to the post-Indus Valley Civilisation groups in the current Swat valley of Pakistan.

Narasimhan et al, by co-analysing ancient DNA and genomic data from the diverse South Asians of today, show that the Indus Periphery people, the people from steppe as well local South Asian hunters and gatherers offer the first direct look at the ancestry of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

This paper also shows how the steppe ancestry genetically linked Europe and South Asia in the Bronze Age. It also identifies the populations that almost certainly were responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.

Hindutva proponents in India propose the opposite, the Out-of-India theory, to claim that Indo-European languages originated in India and spread westward. They also argue that Aryans originally came from India and spread to Europe. The genomic evidence from the mitochondrial genome has given many confusing signals in the past as the mitochondrial DNA passed only from female to female.

This data suggested that the inhabitants of India are indigenous to India.  However, Y chromosome that passes from male to male, showed links to Eurasians and Europeans, the people of Iran and Central Asia. One has always wondered as to where the Indus Valley people came from?

The question often asked is were the Indus valley people more connected to Dravidians who were then pushed southwards by the invading Aryans, or were they themselves Aryans who moved to south India?

We often hear from Dr Subramanian Swamy that the Aryan and Dravidian divide of the Indian population is bunkum propagated by western researchers and should not be believed.  He gets a lot of applause for saying this from the Hindutva crowd and from other Right-wingers.

But, if the Narasimhan’s paper is to be believed, the idea of Aryans migrating to India from outside gains credibility. It debunks the out-of-India theory. This is bound to rouse passions in India’s charged political milieu of today.

According to the current genetic understanding, David Reich writes in his 2018 book Who We Are And How We Got Here, there were two separate groups in ancient India: ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Asians. They solidified as distinct from each other in the same way as Europeans and East Asians.

The three main groupings of populations and the interbreeding among them must have created the Ancestral North Indian and the Ancestral South Indian populations.

The three groupings are the South Asian hunter-gatherers related to modern-day Andaman islanders, the Iranian agriculturists who must have brought wheat and barley cultivation to India, and the steppe pastoralists who have been referred to earlier as Aryans.

The Indus Valley Civilisation is a distinct grouping that might somehow link all the above groupings through interbreeding.  The mixing of Iranian agriculturists with South Asian hunter-gatherers resulted in the Indus Valley people. The Ancestral South Indian populations were created by Indus Valley people mixing with South Asian hunter-gatherers.  The steppe pastoralists mixed with the Indus Valley people and created Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians. Thus the people of the Indus Valley served as a bridge to the present day Indian populations. The paper concludes that the Indus periphery-related people are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia.

A population with a mix of Iranian agriculturists and South Asian hunter-gatherers and Indus Periphery was established around 3rd millennium BCE. The Iranian agriculturists’ and Ancient Ancestral South Asians’ sources mixed around 4700-3000 BCE suggesting that Iranians had migrated to the Indus Valley by 4th millennium BCE.

It is also possible that many agricultural practices of Iran agriculturists such as wheat and barley cultivation and goat herding had reached around 7th millennium BCE, attested by evidences gathered from Mehrgarh in the hills around the Indus Valley. The linguistic evidences suggest that the spread of the Indus Valley people dispersed Dravidian languages, although the origins of Dravidian languages arise from pre-Indus valley languages of the peninsular India.

The paper also provides new evidence for a linkage between steppe ancestry and Indo-European culture. By using a complicated statistical test, Indus Periphery showed two strongly enriched groups of priestly class in northern India. They were Brahmins and Bhumihars, who are the traditional custodians of texts written in early Sanskrit. The priestly class did not show up in southern Indian groups. Due to strong endogamy in south Asia that has kept the groups separate for thousands of years, this stratification still exists in present day India.  Relatively more steppe ancestry seems to have played a central role in spreading Vedic culture.

The paper further highlights a remarkable parallel between the prehistory of two sub-continents of Eurasia, namely, South Asia and Europe.  In both regions, West Asian agricultural technology spread from an origin, the agricultural crescent, in the near east in the 7th and 6th millennia CBE.  In South Asia, this occurred via the Iranian plateau, and in Europe via western Anatolia.  The technology spread was aided by movements of the people and admixing of incoming agriculturists and resident hunter-gatherers in South Asia.

Without a doubt Narasimhan’ s paper will stir up lots of passions and emotions among the Hindutva crowd in India. Such conflicts need to be settled peacefully and amicably by more academic research and discussion. In no way should these kinds of academic reports be allowed to rouse political heat. They must enrich our knowledge and help us identify the cause of several genetically embedded illnesses and diseases that threaten present day populations.

Indeed scientific evidences must not be politicised by anyone.