We’ve been waiting for two years now, and it looks like they’re about to pull the trigger, Indus Valley People Did Not Have Genetic Contribution From The Steppes: Head Of Ancient DNA Lab Testing Rakhigarhi Samples:
Niraj Rai, the head of the Ancient DNA Laboratory at Lucknow’s Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), where the DNA samples from the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana are being analysed, has revealed that a forthcoming paper on the work will show that there is no steppe contribution to the DNA of the Harappan people….
“It will show that there is no steppe contribution to the Indus Valley DNA,” Rai said. “The Indus Valley people were indigenous, but in the sense that their DNA had contributions from near eastern Iranian farmers mixed with the Indian hunter-gatherer DNA, that is still reflected in the DNA of the people of the Andaman islands.” He added that the paper based on the examination of the Rakhigarhi samples would soon be published on bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”), a preprint repository of papers in the life sciences.
At this point none of this is surprising. I also wonder if this preprint was hastened by the release of The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. It seems that the results here are totally consonant with what came before. My expectation is that the lone sample that they got genetic material out of will be similar to the “Indus Periphery” (InPe) individuals in the earlier preprint: a mix of West Asian with ancestry strongly shifted toward eastern Iran, and indigenous South Asian “hunter-gatherer.” That’s pretty much what Niraj Rai states in the piece. I think genetically the individual won’t be that different from the Chamars of modern day Punjab.
In fact, Rai, the lead researcher, ends by twisting the knife:
In other words, the preprint observes that the migration from the steppes to South Asia was the source of the Indo-European languages in the subcontinent. Commenting on this, Rai said, “any model of migration of Indo-Europeans from South Asia simply cannot fit the data that is now available.”
A major caveat here is that we’re talking about one sample from the eastern edge of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). I’m not sure that this should adjust our probabilities that much. From all the other things we know, as well as copious ancient DNA from Central Asia, our probability for the model which the Rakhigarhi result aligns with should already be quite high.
Again, since it’s one sample, we need to be cautious…but I bet once we have more samples from the IVC the Rakhigarhi individual will probably be enriched for AASI relative to other samples from the IVC. The InPe samples in The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia exhibited some variation, and it’s likely that the IVC region was genetically heterogeneous.
But, this is going to be a DNA sample from an individual who lived 4,600 years ago within the orbit of the IVC when it was in its mature phase. That’s still a big deal. As most of you know the IVC is prehistory because we haven’t deciphered the seals which are associated with this civilization. But, the IVC clearly had relationships with West Asia and Central Asia, with parts of eastern Iran and the BMAC culture both being influenced and interaction with it. Traders who were likely from the IVC seem to be mentioned in Mesopotamian records.
Additionally, the genetics of one individual can be highly informative if it’s high-quality whole-genome data (I’m skeptical of that in this case). One could possibly even identify the time period that admixture between West Asian and AASI components occurred from a single genome, by looking at ancestry tract lengths.
A single sample isn’t going to falsify the idea held by some that steppe peoples were long present within the IVC. Perhaps they’ll show up in other samples? That’s possible, and it’s what I would argue if I held their position, but I think the constellation of evidence on the balance now does suggest that a relatively late incursion into South Asia is likely. The steppe ancestry with Northern European affinities shows up in BMAC only around 4,000 years ago. It is hard to imagine it was in South Asia before it was in Central Asia.
As I’ve been saying for a while it seems that though there will be more genetic work written on India in the near future, the real analysis is going to have to come out of archaeology and mythology.
It’s pretty clear that in Northern Europe the arrival of the Corded Ware peoples from the steppe zone resulted in great tumult. A linguistic analysis suggests that the languages of Northern Europe have words related to agriculture with a non-Indo-European origin, of common provenance. But we don’t have much in the way of mythos about the arrival of the Corded Ware.
In contrast, India has a rich mythos which seems to date to the early period of the arrival of the Indo-Aryans. One interpretation has been that since these myths seem to take as a given that Indo-Aryans were autochtonous to India, they were. But the genetic data seem to be strongly suggesting that the arrival of pastoralists occurred in South Asia concomitant with their arrival in West Asia, and somewhat after their expansion westward into Europe. Indian tradition and mythos could actually be a window into the general process of how these pastoralists dealt with native peoples and an illustration of the sort of cultural synthesis that often occurred.