Out of India theory

The Out of India theory (OIT, also called the Indian Urheimat Theory) is the proposition that the original homeland of the Indo-European language family is India. The theory proposes that the Proto-Indo-European language group originated in the Indian subcontinent, after which a series of migrations saw various groups leave the subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region. Proponents of the theory today include Koenraad Elst, Srikanth Talageri,and historian S.P. Gupta..

The Out of India theory cites mainly linguistic, philological, and archeological evidence to base its claims. Support of the OIT stems out of specific interpretations of the Rig Veda and Iranian Avesta. Debate also falls into the dating of the Rig Veda, the Kurgan hypothesis would not hold true if the Rig Veda were dated earlier than 1500 BC.

The proposition has divided scholars of the relevant academic fields, and has remained consitent in always holding some scholarly support. Some, such as population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and archaeologist J. P. Malloryexpress support for Indo-European homelands elsewhere. However, others such as the prominent archeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer express support for the theory. Recent studies (2006) by the population geneticist V.K. Kashyap, whilst not conclusively proving OIT, nevertheless also lend strong support to out of India and out of Iran theories for the origin and spread of Indo-European languages.

There has also been a recent Hindu nationalist revival that incoprorates the OIT. However, historian Thomas Trautmann recently warned against muddling or attempting to mix nationalist claims with real OIT scholarly support.

History

See also: Aryan Invasion Theory (history and controversies)

Early proposals

When the finding of connections between languages from India to Europe led to the creation of Indo-European studies in the late 1700s some Indians and Europeans believed that the Proto-Indo-European language must be Sanskrit, or something very close to it. A few early Indo-Europeanists, such as Friedrich Schlegel, had a firm belief in this and essentially created the idea that India was the Urheimat of all Indo-European languages. Most scholars, such as William Jones, however realized from earliest times that instead, Sanskrit and related European languages had a common source, and that no attested language represented this direct ancestor.

The development of historical linguistics, specifically the law of palatals and the discovery of the laryngeals in Hittite, shattered Sanskrit's preeminent status as the most venerable elder in this reconstructed family. The demotion of Sanskrit to the status of one daughter language among many eroded the remaining support of India as the Indo-European homeland.

The ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham was the first to state that, according to the principles of natural science, a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity which, in the case of Indo-European, is roughly in Central-Eastern Europe, where the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of the Indo-European language family are attested, as opposed to South Asia, where only the Indo-Aryan branch is. Lachhmi Dhar Kalla responded by arguing that the greater linguistic diversity of Indo-European in Europe is the result of absorbing foreign linguistic elements, and that a language family's point of origin should be sought in the area of least linguistic change, since it has been least affected by substrate interference. Dhar's line of argument has a history in Western debates in the Indo-European homeland (e.g. Feist 1932 and Pissani 1974 as cited in Bryant 2001, p. 142-143) where it has been used to locate the Indo-European homeland near the area where the Lithuanian and Anatolian branches of Indo-European are attested.

1999 "revival"

An Indian Urheimat has been promoted more recently by Elst (1999) and Talageri (2000), which led to an exchange of criticisms with Michael Witzel.

In what its editor J. P. Mallory (2002) described as a "sense of fair play," the Journal of Indo-European Studies waived peer review in order to publish Kazanas' (2002, 2003) defence of the "Indigenous Indo-Aryan" viewpoint — which cited Elst (1999) and Talageri (2000). Mallory's reasoning for this exceptional omission of peer-review was as follows:

The reasons for the acrimony between the two camps is not purely academic but may involve agendas that are variously associated with Hindu nationalism, western cultural imperialism, communalism, post-colonialism, and just about any other form of -ism that reflects current political frictions. [...] For the editor of a Western peer-reviewed journal, the publication of an article in support of the Indigenous Indo-Aryan camp poses obvious problems. Many regard the scholarship of the Indigenous Indo-Aryan camp so seriously flawed that it should not be given an airing. They view the Indigenous Aryan camp as more a religion than an academic position and no amount of scholarly refutation is likely to have the least impact on its adherents. On the other hand, we might also invoke some sense of fair play [...] I indicated that I thought it would be unlikely that any referee would agree with [Kazanas'] conclusions but that I would consider publication if one of the referees believed that the article had made a case to answer; I requested the referees to view the article in that light. This is indeed what happened and the authors agreed with my suggestion that we might treat the article in a review format where I would invite a series of relevant scholars to comment upon the article and then provide the author with space to make his final reply to his critics.

The debate consisted of an article by Kazanas (2002), nine highly critical reviews by referees, and Kazanas' (2003) response to those criticisms.

Witzel (2003) warned:

It is certain that Kazanas, now that he is published in JIES, will be quoted endlessly by Indian fundamentalists and nationalists as "a respected scholar published in major peer-reviewed journals like JIES" -- no matter how absurd his claims are known to be by specialist readers of those journals. It was through means like these that the misperception has taken root in Indian lay sectors that the historical absurdities of Kak, Frawley, and even Rajaram are taken seriously by academic scholars.

Chronology

Neolithic and Bronze Age Indian history is periodized into the Pre-Harappan (ca. 7000 to 3300 BC), Early Harappan (3300 to 2600), Mature Harappan (2600 to 1900) and Late Harappan (1900 to 1300 BC) periods.

The Indian Urheimat proposal put forward by Elst (1999), which he dubs the "emerging non-invasionist model," is as follows: During the 6th millennium BC, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were living in the Punjab region of Northern India. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria as the Kambojas. The Paradas moved further and inhabited the Caspian coast and much of Central Asia while the Cinas moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, forming the Tocharians group of I-E speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that region by 2000 BC. These people took the oldest form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE) language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region, transformed it into its own dialect. While inhabiting Central Asia they discovered the uses of the horse, which they later sent back to Urheimat. Later on during their history, they went on to take Western Europe and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that region. During the 4th millennium BC, civilization in India was evolving to become the urban Indus Valley Civilization. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-Indo-Iranian Some time during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas. They also expanded into parts of Central Asia. By the end of this migration, India was left with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river began drying up and the remainder of Indo-Aryans split into separate categories. Some travelled westwards and became the Mitanni people by around 1500 BC. The Mitanni are known for their links to Vedic culture, after assimilating and establishing a presence in the Hurrian homeland, they established a culture very similar to that of Vedic India. Thus the Mitanni language is still considered Indo-Aryan. Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

Linguistics

See also linguistics or historical linguistics.

According to Bryant (2001:75), OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and inconclusive (e.g. Chakrabarti 1995 and Rajaram 1995, as cited in Bryant 2001:74), or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude and neglect significantly minimizes the value of most OIT publications.

Talageri (2000) and Kazanas (2002) have adapted the language dispersal model proposed by Johanna Nichols (in Blench & Spriggs 1997) to support OIT by moving Nichols' proposed Indo-European point of origin from Bactria-Sogdiana to India. These ideas have not been accepted in mainstream linguistics.

Elst (1999) argues that it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form. This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Comparative linguistics

Diachronic map showing the Satem areal in red. The central area of Satemization is shown in darker red, corresponding to the Sintashta/Abashevo/Srubna cultures.

There are twelve accepted branches of the Indo-European family. The two Indo-Iranian branches, Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian, dominate the eastern cluster, historically spanning Scythia, Iran and Northern India. While the exact sequence in which the different branches separated or migrated away from a homeland is disputed, linguists generally agree that Anatolian was the first branch to be separated from the remaining body of Indo-European.

Additionally, Graeco-Aryan isoglosses seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian may have shared a common homeland for awhile after the splitting of the other IE branches. Such a homeland could be northwestern India (which is preferred by proponents of the OIT) - or the Pontic steppes (as preferred by the mainstream supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis).

According to Hock, if evidence like linguistic isogloss patterns is ignored, then the hypothesis of an Out-of-India migration becomes "relatively easy to maintain".

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit

Main article: Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit

Evidence of a pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum in South Asia is solid reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland.

Burrow compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the Ṛgveda that he considered to be loans predominantly from Dravidian. Kuiper identified 383 Ṛgvedic words as non-Indo-Aryan—roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary—borrowed from Old Dravidian, Old Munda, and several other languages. Thieme has questioned Dravidian etymologies proposed for Vedic words, most of which he gives Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies, and condemned what he characterizes as a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskrit”. Das contends that there is “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”. Burrow in turn has criticized the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words". Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative material—and the scarcity of Dravidian or Munda—the inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it is not. Witzel (1999) argues that the earliest level of the Rigveda shows signs of para-Munda influence and only later levels of Dravidian, suggesting—against the older widespread two century old belief—that the original inhabitants of Punjab were speakers of para-Munda rather than speakers of Dravidian, whom the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rgvedic times.

Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical and morphological features that are alien to other Indo-European languages. Phonologically, there is the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals in Indo-Aryan; morphologically there are the gerunds; and syntactically there is the use of a quotative marker ("iti"). Several linguists, all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on other grounds, are quite open to considering that various syntactical developments in Indo-Aryan could have been internal developments (Hamp 1996 and Jamison 1989, as cited in Bryant 2001:81–82) rather than the result of substrate influences, or have been the result of adstratum (Hock 1975/1984/1996 and Tikkanen 1987, as cited in Bryant 2001:80–82). About retroflexion Tikkanen (2005) states that "in view of the strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early loanwords, it is hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that did not have a substratum with retroflexes."

Another concern raised is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.

Elst (1999) proposes that any Dravidian in Sanskrit can still be explained via the OIT. He suggests through David McAlpin's Proto-Elamo-Dravidian theory, that the ancient homeland for Proto-Elamo-Dravidian was in the Mesopotamia region, from where the languages spread across the coast towards Sindh and eventually to South India where they still remain. According the Elst, this theory would support the idea that Early Harappan culture was possibly bi- or multi-lingual. Elst (1999) claims that the presence of the Brahui language, similarities between Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans southwards and the resultant intermixing of races and languages.

Elfenbein (as cited in Witzel 2000) argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late immigration that took place within the last thousand years.

Elst believes that there is evidence suggesting that Dravidian influences in Maharashtra and Gujarat were largely lost over the years. He traces this to linguistic evidence. Some occurrences in Sangam Tamil, or ancient forms of Tamil, indicate small similarities with Sanskrit or Prakrit. As the oldest recognizable form of Tamil have influences of Indo-Aryan, it is possible that they had Sanskrit influence through a migration through the coastal regions of western India.

Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, Thomason & Kaufman (1988) state that there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Erdosy (1995:18) states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

Hydronymy

Indo-Aryan languages are the oldest source of place and river names in northern India - which Shrikant G. Talageri sees as an argument in favor of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest documented population of that area.

According to Witzel, river names are conservative, and "in northern India, rivers in general have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter languages of Sanskrit later on." Talageri cites this in support of the Out of India theory, though Witzel himself would dispute jumping to that conclusion. Rather, he points out that non-Sanskritic names are common in the "Sarasvati" (Ghaggar) area.

Kazanas argues that this indicates that the Harappan civilization must have been dominated by Indo-Aryan speakers, supposing that the arrival of Indo-Aryan migrants in Late Harappan times to the remnants of a Indus Valley Civilization formerly stretching over vast area could not have resulted in the suppression of the entire native hydronymy.

However, Witzel argues exactly that: "The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions, noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population." Rather, he points out that non-Sanskritic names are common in the "Sarasvati" (Ghaggar) area.

Paralleling Witzel, Villar (2000) characterizes place names as the deepest ethnic and linguistic layer, and states that the first network of river and place names in Spain was created by very ancient Indo-European populations, and was dense enough to resist successive language changes. According to Villar (2000), even in those areas which are historically Basque (i.e. non-Indo-European), the ancient names of places and people have a prevailing Indo-European character, with very few names of non-Indo-European Basque etymology documented in ancient sources. Alinei (2003) cites this in support of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

Position of Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit conserves many archaic aspects, in the words of T. Burrow: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family".

Kazanas argues that linguistic stability corresponds to geographic stability, claiming that if " the Indo-Aryans were on the move over many thousands of miles (from the Russian steppe, Europe and/or Anatolia) over a very long period of centuries encountering many different other cultures", their "language should have suffered faster and greater changes".

Bryant (2001:144) points out that this reasoning can be countered by arguing that Vedic retained the Indo-European accent because, as a sacerdotal language, it artificially preserved forms that would otherwise have evolved in a normal spoken language. Vedic Sanskrit is, like other sacred languages, an extinct language, having evolved into Classical Sanskrit by the 6th century BC, reaching stability long after Northern India had been settled by Indo-Aryans.

By contrast, Lithuanian is a living, vernacular language that has preserved Indo-European archaisms to the present day, thousands of years longer than Vedic did.

Philology

The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its consequences for the Indo Aryan question. The oldest text, the Rigveda, is full of precise references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Panjab and Haryana, and was unmistakably recorded in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm terminus ante quem for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in India. In the academic mainstream view it was composed the mid to late 2nd millennium BC (Late Harappan) and OIT proponent propose a pre-Harappan date.

OIT proponents propose that bulk of Rigveda was composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization by linking archaeological evidence with data from Vedic text and archaeo-astronomical evidence.

Sarasvati River

Main article: Sarasvati river

Many hymns in all ten Books of the Rig Veda (except the 4th) extol or mention a divine and very large river named the Sarasvati, which flows mightily "from the mountains to the [Indian] Ocean”. Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda that it is worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses".

According to palaeoenvironmental scientists the desiccation of Sarasvati came about as a result of the diversion of at least two rivers that fed it, the Satluj and the Yamuna. "The chain of tectonic events … diverted the Satluj westward (into the Indus) and the Palaeo Yamuna eastward (into the Ganga) … This explains the ‘death’ of such a mighty river (the Sarasvati) … because its main feeders, the Satluj and Palaeo Yamuna were weaned away from it by the Indus and the Gangaa respectively”. This ended at c 1750, but it started much earlier, perhaps with the upheavals and the large flood of 1900, or more probably 2100. P H Francfort, utilizing images from the French satellite SPOT, finds that the large river Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up in the middle of the 4th millennium BC; during Harappan times only a complex irrigation-canal network was being used in the southern region of the Indus Valley. With this the date should be pushed back to c 3800 BC.

The Rig Vedic hymn X, however, gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely mentioned while Sindhu receives all the praise. This may well indicate that the Rig Veda hymn from the latest mandala X RV 10 could be dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati (c 3500) when the river lost its preeminence. It is agreed that the tenth Book of the Rig Veda is later than the others.

The 414 archeological sites along the bed of Saraswati dwarf the number of sites so far recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River, which number only about three dozen. About 80 percent of the sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium B.C.E., suggesting that the river was in its prime during this period. If this date were used, then the Indo-Aryan migration scenario would not be able to logically occur. If the Indo-Europeans were in India in the 4th millennium BC, it would be likely for that the spread of Indo-European languages after this point began within India.

Items not in the Rigveda

The Indus Valley Civilization was quite advanced and urbanized for its era. Based on the IAM, the migrating Aryans, who wrote the Rig Veda, would have had some contact with the Harappans before settling in their lands. The Aryans would also have begun to use some of the resources the Harappans possessed, however, the Rig Veda possesses some gaps which indicate it was composed prior to the first use of these resources in India.

• The Rig-Veda knows no silver. It knows ayas (metal or copper/bronze) and candra or hiran-ya (gold) but not silver. Silver is denoted by rajatám híran-yam literally ‘white gold’ and appears in post-Rigvedic texts. There is a generally accepted demarcation line for the use of silver at around 4000 BC and this metal is archaeologically attested in the Harappan Civilization

• The Harappan culture is also unknown to the RV. The characteristic features of the Harappan culture are urban life, large buildings, permanently erected fire altars and bricks. There is no word for brick in the Rig Veda and iswttakaa (brick) appears only in post-Rigvedic texts. (Kazanas 2000:13) The Rigvedic altar is a shallow bed dug in the ground and covered with grass (e.g. RV 5.11.2, 7.43.2-3; Parpola 1988: 225). Fixed brick-altars are very common in post-Rigvedic texts.

• The RV mentions no rice or cotton, as the Vedic Index shows. Rice was found in at least three Harappan sites: Rangpur (2000 BCE - 1500 BCE), Lothal (c 2000 BCE) and Mohenjodaro (c 2500 BCE) as Piggott, Grist and others testify. Yet, despite the importance of the rice in ritual in later times, the Rig Veda knows nothing of it. The cultivation of cotton is well attested in the Harappan civilization and is found at many sites thereafter.

• Nakshatra were developed in 2400 BCE, they are important in a religious context yet the Rig Veda does not mention this, which suggests the Rig Veda is before 2400 BCE. The youngest book only mentions constellations, a concept known to all cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions.

• On the other hand, it has been claimed that the Rigveda has no term for "sword", while Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and in Pirak. Ralph Griffith uses “sword” twelve times in his translation, including in the old books 5 and 7, but in most cases a literal translation would be more generic "sharp implement" (e.g. vāśī), the transition from "dagger" to "sword" in the Bronze Age being a gradual process.

The fore-mentioned features are found in post Rigvedic texts – the Samhitas, the Brahmanas and fully in the Sutra literature. For instance, brick altars are mentioned in Satapatha Brahmanaṇa 7.1.1.37, or 10.2.3.1 etc. Rice ( vrihi ) is found in AV 6.140.2; 7.1.20; etc. Cotton karpasa appears first in Gautama’s (1.18) and in Bandhāyana's (14.13.10) Dharmasūtra. The fact of the convergence of the post-Rigvedic texts and the Harappan culture was noted long ago by archaeologists. B.and R. Allchin stated unequivocally that these features are of the kind “described in detail in the later Vedic literature” (1982: 203).

Based on these set of statements, OIT proponets argue that the whole of the RV, except for some few passages which may be of later date, must have been composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization.

Memories of an Urheimat

The fact that the Vedas do not mention the Aryans' presence in India as being the result of a migration or mention any possible Urheimat, has been taken as an argument in favour of the OIT. The reasoning is that it is not uncommon for migrational accounts to be found in early mythological and religious texts, a classical example being the book of Exodus in the Torah, describing the legendary migration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.

Proponents of the OIT, such as Koenraad Elst, argue that it would have been expectable that migrations, and possibly an Urheimat were mentioned in the Rigveda if the Aryans had only arrived in India some centuries before the composition of the earliest Rigvedic hymns. They argue that other migration stories of other Indo-European people have been documented historically or archaeologically, and that the same would be expectable if the Indo-Aryans had migrated into India. What Elst appears to overlook however is that the other primary group of Indo-Iranians, the Iranians that is, have no migration legends either.

From the mainstream academic viewpoint, concern is the degree of historical accuracy that can be expected from the Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns, not an account of tribal history, and those hymns assumed to reach back to within a few centuries of the period of Indo-Aryan arrival in Gandhara make for just a small portion of the text.

Regarding migration of Indo-Aryans and imposing language on Harappans, Kazanas notes that " The intruders would have been able to rename the rivers only if they were conquerors with the power to impose this. And, of course, the same is true of their Vedic language: since no people would bother of their own free will to learn a difficult, inflected foreign language, unless they had much to gain by this, and since the Aryan immigrants had adopted the “material culture and lifestyle” of the Harappans and consequently had little or nothing to offer to the natives, the latter would have adopted the new language only under pressure. Thus here again we discover that the substratum thinking is invasion and conquest." "But invasion is the substratum of all such theories even if words like ‘migration’ are used. There could not have been an Aryan immigration because (apart from the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for this) the results would have been quite different. Immigrants do not impose their own demands or desires on the natives of the new country: they are grateful for being accepted, for having the use of lands and rivers for farming or pasturing and for any help they receive from the natives; in time it is they who adopt the language (and perhaps the religion) of the natives. You cannot have a migration with the results of an invasion."

File:Lothal conception.jpg

Ancient Lothal, dating 2400 BCE, as envisaged by the Archaeological Survey of India. The OIT suggests that the Indo-Aryans had built this advanced city.

Material archaeology

Haüsler (as cited in Bryant 2001:141) found that archaeological evidence in central Europe showed continuous linear development, with no marked external influences.

Bryant (2001:236) grants that "there is at least a series of archaeological cultures that can be traced approaching the Indian subcontinent, even if discontinuous, which does not seem to be the case for any hypothetical east-to-west emigration."

Physical anthropology

Main article: Genetics and Archaeogenetics of South Asia

Distribution of R1a (purple) and R1b (red)

There is no clear genetic evidence for a prehistoric migration out of India. There is no evidence of widespread genetic displacement in Europe after the Paleolithic. And Hemphill (1998) finds "no support for any model that calls for the ultimate origins of north Bactrian oasis Oxus Civilization populations to be inhabitants of the Indus Valley."

The virtual absence of India-specific mtDNA haplogroups outside of India precludes a large scale population movement out of India. Tracing a possible "out of India" migration therefore focusses on Y-chromosome haplogroups.

The Y-chromosome haplogroup R2 is characterized by genetic marker M124, and is rarely found outside India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern Central Asia. Outside of southern Eurasia, M124 was found at an unusually high frequency of 0.440 among the Kurmanji of Georgia, but at a much lower frequency of only 0.080 among the Kurmanji of Turkmenistan. The M124 frequency of 0.158 found among Chechens may be unrepresentative because it was derived from a sample size of only 19 Chechens. Outside of these populations and the Gypsies, M124 is not found in Eastern Europe.

The spread of the Indo-European languages is associated with Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a1, which is identified with genetic marker M17. Kivisild et al. (2003) "suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup". However, the Genographic Project conducted by the National Geographic Society states that M17 arose "in the region of present-day Ukraine or southern Russia." The decrease in the frequency of M17 "southward into India overlaps exactly with the inferred migrations of the Indo-Iranians during the period 3,000 to 1,000 B.C." M17 "shows that there was a massive genetic influx into India from the steppes within the past 10,000 years. Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people – not merely their language – from the steppe appears to be true."

Criticism

• The linguistic center of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, is found in India, whereas the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of Indo-European are all found in Central-Eastern Europe. Because it requires a greater number of long migrations, an Indian Urheimat is far less likely than one closer to the center of Indo-European linguistic diversity.

• The Indic languages show the influence of the Dravidian and Munda language families. No other branch of Indo-European does. If the Indo-European homeland was located in India, then all Indo-European languages would show influence from Dravidian and Munda.

• To postulate the migration of PIE speakers out of India necessitates an earlier dating of the Rigveda than is normally accepted by Vedic scholars in order to make a deep enough period of migration to allow for the longest migrations to be completed.(Mallory 1989)

Bibliography and References

• Alinei, Mario (2003), "Linguistic and interdisciplinary evidence for Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic indigenism in Eurasia", Quaderni di semantica, vol. XXIV, no. 2.
• Blench, Roger; Spriggs, Matthew, eds. (1997), Archaeology and Language, vol. I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, London: Routledge.
• Bryant, Edwin (2001), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195137779.
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (2000), Genes, Peoples, and Languages, New York: North Point Press.
• Chaubey; et al. (2007), "Peopling of South Asia: investigating the caste-tribe continuum in India", BioEssays, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 91–100 {{citation}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help).
• Diakonoff, Igor M. (1995), "Two Recent Studies of Indo-Iranian Origins", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 115, no. 3, pp. 473–477.
• Template:Harvard reference
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See also

• Indigenous Aryan Theory
• Aryan Invasion Theory (history and controversies)
• Indo-Aryan migration
• pre-Indo-European
• Proto-Indo-European language
• Proto-Indo-Europeans
• Urheimat
• Indomania, Indophobia
• In Search of the Cradle of Civilization

External links

• Web Index to AIT versus OIT debate
• Rig-Veda is pre-Harappan by Nicholas Kazanas
• The RV date — a postscript by Nicholas Kazanas
• Linguistic aspects of the Aryan non-invasion theory (Koenraad Elst)
• The Proto-Vedic Continuity Theory of Bharatiya (Indian) Languages (S. Kalyanaraman and M. Kelkar)
• The RigVeda - A Historical Analysis by Shrikant Talageri
• The RigVeda IndexRalph T.H. Griffith, Translator 1896
• The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture: Some Thoughts By B.B. Lal
• Why Perpetuate Myths ? - A Fresh Look at Ancient Indian History By B.B. Lal