Various Y chromosome haplogroups correlate with continental boundaries, except for one – R1a. The R1a is spread over a huge area from South Asia to Central East Europe to South Siberia. It also covers a large number of language groups like Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Finno-Ugric, Dravidian and Turkic. This combination means only one thing: the R1a can give us clues about the Indo-European homeland. But the R1a is not helpful in finding the Indo-European homeland because we still don’t know where it originated. Some say it originated in North India; others, Eastern Europe near Ukraine[2].
Since R1a is spread over a vast region, it often associated with one version of AMT: the Kurgan hypothesis. According to the theory which argues for the homeland in the Caucasus, Indo-Europeans mounted their horses and imposed their culture in Old Europe. These violent people changed history in the fifth and fourth millennium BCE and eventually arrived in India[1].
This theory had its own share of criticism. For example, just because the horse was domesticated in steppes does not mean that they fought on horsebacks; there is no linguistic evidence for it. Also when linguists compared the flora, fauna and technology of Kurgan culture with the reconstructions in PIE, there were discrepancies. Does the reconstructed word for horse mean a domesticated horse or a wild one? We don’t know[1].
Now a new R1a marker named the M458 has been found which has been helpful, not in finding the origins of the Indo-European homeland, but where it could not have come from. The M458 originated between 10, 000 to 7000 years back in Eastern Europe and is related to a number of Central and East European farming cultures. This marker, which is from the Kurgan area, does not extend eastward beyond the Ural Mountains and southward beyond Turkey[2].
Since the origin and spread of this marker coincides with the transformation of foragers to farmers, could those Neolithic farmers have spread from Eastern Europe to India like in the Anatolian hypothesis? An alternative to the Kurgan hypothesis, the Anatolian hypothesis states that Indo-Europeans were not aggressive people, but sedentery agriculturalists who spread along with the spread of farming techniques. Here the date is not the fourth of fifth millennium BCE, but the seventh[1].
The new paper says that there is no trace of the M458 marker, which peaks among Finno-Ugric and Slavic speakers, in India. This means that male genes did not flow from East Europe to India since 7000 – 5000 years back or that Indo-Europeans did not come from the following locations in Europe or these[2].
References:
- Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
- Peter A Underhill et al., “Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a,” Eur J Hum Genet (November 4, 2009), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2009.194.
Dear Varnam, as usual it is a pleasure to read your clear and direct way of writing that focuses on facts and logic, leaving us to draw our own conclusions!
Sunil, Thanks!
Your theory is right only if dating is correct. If we assume that M458 originated between 0 and 1000 AC there is plenty of time for Aryan invasion. The latter dating corresponds better with etnogenesis of the Slavic people.
Another fact is that India and Eastern Europe share the same R1a with slightly different supgroups, but in India R1a is popular amongst upper casts. This means that there must be common forefather of the both people.
If you switch R1a and M458 in your reasoning it is more appealing to me.