Early Steppe vs Middle to Late Steppe

Early Steppe population does not have the Y-chromosome marker that is present in a large proportion of Indians even today: Indians had migrated to Steppe, and not the other way around*.

NOTE: This is an overview counter to both the lay-press hype, which was unnecessary and unethical (please see below), and the context and setting of the methodologies used in the so-called scientific study by Reich and Co of Harvard and his compatriots. A detailed technical and scientific evidence-based (from previous published peer-reviewed work) will be published here and/ or in the appropriate scientific and academic forums. *For a deeper technical prelude (and updates) please watch Dr Priyadarshi’s current blog – The Aryan Invasion Issues.

SEPOYS OF HARVARD’S THIRD REICH GALORE

The Christian British colonialists did not rule India by having a huge army of a Christian British White soldiers, but an army made almost entirely of Indian sepoys. One would have imagined that with the 1947 transfer of power that the sepoys would have reformed themselves and converted the transfer of power from Britain to India into a real independence.

From Nehru to the academic foot soldiers, everybody became a sepoy, again. Recently, the recruitment appears to have only widened and deepened, perhaps in preparation for the 2019 elections war. Now the war is fought in the academia, in the media and the wider perception engineering arena of the PR world, the intellectual Kurukshetra. (Malhotra 2018)

Many people would criticise this author for such a polemical start for an article that is written to counter the professional work of (the so-called) scientists and academicians. That criticism is not valid as these sepoys have started behaving increasingly unethically. It has already been pointed out that the hype that the lay press created was unethical given the paper is pre-peer-review and has only been submitted to an open-peer-review platform, bioRxiv (pronounced ‘bio archive’). Of course, the sepoy authors and their Western White masters (publicly called collaborators to give a false semblance of equality) have now gone further. They have directly “leaked” their data to the lay press and in addition given open interviews where they have spouted false, or at least non-peer-reviewed, pre-submission-based conclusions. This is completely out-of-the-way from the standard ethical practice and leads one to rightfully believe that this is pure propaganda and just a hit job, not science. Is 2019 elections in their mind? Have these sepoys been knowingly bought, or inadvertently collaborating? Why stoop so low? Even one is made to wonder if Cambridge Analytica is involved? (Murali KV 2018)

CONCLUSIONS CHANGE EVEN AFTER PEER-REVIEW AND PUBLICATION

It is important to note here that the conclusions of a scientific paper is many a times changed even after it has been published. For example, a pro-Aryan-invasion “scientist” from Calcutta claimed that the phenomenon of caste-by-birth formed during the Gupta era. (Basu, Sarkar-Roy, and Majumder 2016) However, using the exact same data from the Calcutta scientist’s genetic data a reanalysis was published in the same journal altering the conclusions completely, and showing that the caste-by-birth formed only during the Islamic era. (Vadivelu 2016)

It also raises very interesting issues to think – how come within hours of these pre-peer-review articles being posted a whole multi-thousand worded article, with slides and elaborate graphics, gets posted on a lay press online portal and that too by an author who has no scientific background? Who gives them the data beforehand?

It is common practice for large journals to provide ‘previews’ and short write-ups (such as press notes, releases, etc.) to the lay press, before publication, of scientific papers of public interest by their respective PR desks. However, it is not known of any ethical scientist or journal to do that before peer-review, and immediately after submission, or even prior to that. Do you smell anything fishy?

NOW LET US GET TO THE SCIENCE

Note: This is based on the assumption that these “scientists” data can be trusted. It is indeed worrying after taking note of the above issues, the repeated ethical infarctions exhibited by these “scientists,” and what had been written before. (Murali KV 2018; Shukla and Venkataraman 2018; Chavda 2018)

Though this author places the validity of linguistics at a very low ranking, one should note the ridiculousness of the claims that “Indo-European” (IE) languages came from the Steppe or Central Asia. The region claimed is almost completely devoid of IE languages, but is filled with speakers of what was previously called the Altaic family. Please see the map below.

Did the Steppe people take a flight to Haryana? The coloured regions do not speak the so-called Indo-European languages

It has already been pointed out by writers in Swarajya Magazine that the Brahmins of the South India do not have any excess Steppe genetic component in their DNA in the words of the authors of the “scientific” paper themselves. In fact, by their own data and analysis, 43 percent of people who appear to have an excess of Steppe genetic component are non-Brahmins and non-Bumihars. If the Brahmins are the outsiders who brought the Indo-European languages to India from the Steppe or Central Asia, where did the Brahmins of the South India come from who have no excess Steppe DNA ancestry compared to the rest of the population? If they imported Sanskrit along with their arrival why not all Brahmins in the North, South, East, Central and West India admittedly have the excess Steppe contribution, but only some.

By these authors own criteria and classification of the data, as revealed in one tiny part of the pre-peer-review article, namely Figure 2E, the early Steppe_EMBA samples have no R or R1a Y-chromosome DNA markers. But they suddenly appear in later samples, Steppe_MLBA and Steppe_LBA, indicating these arrive to the Steppe from somewhere else. This clearly contradicts their own fancy hypotheses. Previously it is known that the predominant Indian R1a, R1a-Z93, is different from the European R1a. So we also need to know the type of R1a these Steppe samples appear to have in the latter periods. (Priyadarshi 2014, 2011)

About a week ago, an Indian scientist who has recently (2016–17) been awarded a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Medical School (where the new age race-theorist Third Reich is a faculty), and with access to ancient Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) bone samples with the ancient DNA in them, has claimed the following in an interview with the Open Magazine before the data has been submitted, peer-reviewed and published, “While Rai and Shinde are tight-lipped about what the DNA samples extracted from the Indus Valley remains show, Rai does reveal that the R1a genetic marker is missing in the sample. This is a significant revelation. R1a is believed to have originated sometime between 22,000 and 25,000 years ago.”

During the last ice age (about 18,000 years ago), the northern latitudes were all severely cold and bone dry and humans went extinct. This ice age (last glacial maximum, LGM) ended about 13,000 years ago.

If it is missing in the IVC samples and is also missing in early Steppe samples, it must have got to both the places from somewhere else. Kindly note that this is assuming that the current samples from IVC is not skewed by sampling. What is sampling and how it is relevant will be explained below. We know from previously published peer-reviewed scientific research that the South Indian populations are (both the caste groups and long-isolated tribes) rich in R1a Y-chromosome DNA markers. (Priyadarshi 2014, 2011)

This brings a huge evidence-based hypothesis to the table – is it the South Indians who migrated to IVC and the Steppe about 3500–4000 years ago?* This will explain the relatively smaller proportion of the so-called South Indian DNA (the hypothesised, Ancestral South Indian [ASI] and Ancient Ancestral South Indian [AASI]) in Northwest India, about 20 per cent depending on the study and source data. (Kivisild et al. 2003; Sharma et al. 2009)

Perhaps, to deliberately hide the South Indian ancestry from Steppe and elsewhere, did they use the Andamanese population’s (Onge) DNA as the control? The Andamanese population is known to have separated from India 40,000 years ago without any admixture thereafter. The further away in time and geography a control population is, the DNA analysis will more likely show no or only a very distant relationship.

With over 90 authors involved in the paper, if so many defects are identifiable even before the complete data is available, which is usually available as supplementary data on publication, should not one consider a deliberate attempt at painting a certain picture (a.k.a. propaganda)? Remember, all this is assuming that the data itself has not been tampered with. Usually, one gives the benefit of doubt to the scientists, but these “scientists” as they say in the legal circles have “not come with clean hands.” (Baker 2016)

More skeletons might come out of the closet if the data (assuming they are reliable) are reanalysed. For now, let us assume the best, but keep our eyes and ears open.

To be continued…

Note:
1. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.

References:

1. Baker, Monya. 2016. “1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility.” Nature 533 (7604): 452–54.
2. Basu, Analabha, Neeta Sarkar-Roy, and Partha P. Majumder. 2016. “Genomic Reconstruction of the History of Extant Populations of India Reveals Five Distinct Ancestral Components and a Complex Structure.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (6): 1594–99.
3. Chavda, Abhijit. 2018. “What Reich’s Study Says And Doesn’t About How Indians Came To Be.” Accessed April 29. https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/what-reichs-study-says-and-doesnt-about-how-indians-came-to-be.
4. Danino, Michel. 2010. The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.
5. Kivisild, T., S. Rootsi, M. Metspalu, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E. Metspalu, et al. 2003. “The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations.” American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2): 313–32.
6. Malhotra, Rajiv. 2018. “Introduction to Rajiv Malhotra’s Vocabulary – Infinity Foundation.” Infinity Foundation. Accessed April 29. https://infinityfoundation.com/course/rajiv-malhotra-vocabulary/.
7. Murali KV. 2018. “There Are Lies, Damned Lies and (Harvard’s ‘Third’ Reich and Co’s) Statistics – PGurus.” PGurus. April 29. https://www.pgurus.com/there-are-lies-damned-lies-and-harvards-third-reich-and-cos-statistics/.
8. Priyadarshi, Premendra. 2011. The First Civilization of the World. Siddharth Publications.
9. ———. 2014. In Quest of the Dates of the Vedas: Comprehensive Study of the Vedic and the Indo-European Flora, Fauna and Climate in Light of the Information Emerging from the Disciplines of Archaeolo. Author Solutions.
10. Sharma, Swarkar, Ekta Rai, Prithviraj Sharma, Mamata Jena, Shweta Singh, Katayoon Darvishi, Audesh K. Bhat, A. J. S. Bhanwer, Pramod Kumar Tiwari, and Rameshwar N. K. Bamezai. 2009. “The Indian Origin of Paternal Haplogroup R1a1* Substantiates the Autochthonous Origin of Brahmins and the Caste System.” Journal of Human Genetics 54 (1): 47–55.
11. Shukla, Aseem, and Swaminathan Venkataraman. 2018. “Why The Latest Genetic Study Does Not Rewrite India’s History.” Accessed April 23. https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/why-the-latest-genetic-study-does-not-rewrite-indias-history.
12. Vadivelu, Murali K. 2016. “Emergence of Sociocultural Norms Restricting Intermarriage in Large Social Strata (endogamy) Coincides with Foreign Invasions of India.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113 (16): E2215–17.

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Murali KV

A medic and a graduate of the University of Cambridge, England,involved in inter-disciplinary research for the inculcation of a scientific rigour in the outdatedfields of humanities: putting "science"
into social sciences.

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