Harvard Scientist Debunks Hindu Nationalists "Racial Purity" Myth

[Riaz Haq]

Male ancestors of the vast majority of present-day South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis) came from West Eurasia, Central Asia and Iran, according to the latest DNA research led by Harvard geneticist Dr. David Reich. Reich's team came to this conclusion after studying the Y-chromosomes of present-day Indians. Some Hindu Indian scientists have used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) samples, extracted from the bones of recently discovered ancient skeletal remains of a couple in Rakigarhi in Haryana, to claim the local indigenous origins of all Hindus. Y-chromosomes are passed from father to son while mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to children. The Harvard team's findings thoroughly debunk Hindu Nationalists' "racial purity" myth similar to that promoted by White Supremacist racists in the West.  Reich writes: "The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years". 

David Reich's "Who We Are"

Reich's Indian counterparts were highly resistant to the Harvard team findings of foreign origins of modern-day South Asians. Here's an excerpt from David Reich's "Who We Are and How We Got Here":     

"Based on their own mitochondrial DNA studies, it was clear to them (Indians) that the great majority of mitochondrial DNA lineages present in India today had resided in the subcontinent for many tens of thousands of years.They did not want to be part of a study that suggested a major West Eurasian incursion into India without being absolutely certain as to how the whole-genome data could be reconciled with their mitochondrial DNA findings. They also implied that the suggestion of a migration from West Eurasia would be politically explosive. They did not explicitly say this, but it had obvious overtones of the idea that migration from outside India had a transformative effect on the (South Asian) subcontinent". 

To see why the Indian researchers believed the acceptance of West Eurasian origins of present-day Hindus would be political explosive, it is important to understand the myth of racial purity that underlies the Hindu Nationalists' racist ideology. Here's an excerpt from a book by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) :

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by." 

Based on DNA studies, Reich divides Indians into two major groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). He finds that the ANI have much higher percentage of ancestral DNA from Central Asia and Iran than the ASI.  He also finds links between ancestral DNA and castes in India. Here is an excerpt:

"Groups of traditionally higher social status in the Indian caste system typically have a higher proportion of ANI ancestry than those of traditionally lower social status, even within the same state of India where everyone speaks the same language. For example, Brahmins, the priestly caste, tend to have more ANI ancestry than the groups they live among, even those speaking the same language. Although there are groups in India that are exceptions to these patterns, including well-documented cases where whole groups have shifted social status, the findings are statistically clear, and suggest that the ANI-ASI mixture in ancient India occurred in the context of social stratification".

South Asian Ancestry. Source: Arain Gang

Could there have been out-of-India migration that might explain common genetic origins of Indians and West Eurasians? This is a possibility raised by Indian researchers in response to the inward migration of West Eurasians to India. Reich doubts it based on the absence of any ASI ancestry in West Eurasia.  Here's how Reich responds to it: 

"Although (Indian researchers) Singh and Thangaraj entertained the possibility of a migration out of India and into points as far west as Europe to explain the relatedness between the ANI and West Eurasian populations, I have always thought, based on the absence of any trace of ASI ancestry in the great majority of West Eurasians today and the extreme geographic position of India within the present-day distribution of peoples bearing West Eurasian–related ancestry, that the shared ancestry likely reflected ancient migrations into South Asia from the north or west". 

1901 Indian Census of UP Muslims

Reich specifically refers to the racial purity myths of Nazis and Hindutva ideologues.  Here's an excerpt of his book: 

"The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source. The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years. Similarly, the idea that the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have ancestry from West Eurasian farmers that Hutus do not—an idea that has been incorporated into arguments for genocide—is nonsense. We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is—or could be—“pure.”"

Light Skin Gene Distribution. Source: PLOS Genetics

Genetic studies of common ancestral origins have also shown that populations of the Middle East, Central Asia, Pakistan and North India share a light skin gene (allele of SLC24A5) that occurs in Europe. 

1901 India Census UP Hindu Population By Castes

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[Riaz Haq]

“What our (#Indian) textbooks don't tell us: Why the #Rajputs failed miserably in battle for centuries. They were defeated by Ghazni, Gloria, Khilji, Babur, Akbar (#Mughals) the #Marathas and the #British”. #Hindutva #Modi #BJP #India http://scroll.in/article/728636/what-our-textbooks-dont-tell-us-why...

Girish Shahane

What’s astonishing is that centuries of being out-thought and out-manoeuvred had no impact on the Rajput approach to war. Rana Pratap used precisely the same full frontal attack at Haldighati in 1576 that had failed so often before. Haldighati was a minor clash by the standards of Tarain and Khanua. Pratap was at the head of perhaps 3,000 men and faced about 5,000 Mughal troops. The encounter was far from the Hindu Rajput versus Muslim confrontation it is often made out to be. Rana Pratap had on his side a force of Bhil archers, as well as the assistance of Hakim Shah of the Sur clan, which had ruled North India before Akbar’s rise to power. Man Singh, a Rajput who had accepted Akbar’s suzerainty and adopted the Turko-Mongol battle plan led the Mughal troops. Though Pratap’s continued rebellion following his defeat at Haldighati was admirable in many ways, he was never anything more than an annoyance to the Mughal army. That he is now placed, in the minds of many Indians, on par with Akbar or on a higher plane says much about the twisted communal politics of the subcontinent.

There’s one other factor that contributed substantially to Rajput defeats: the opium habit. Taking opium was established practice among Rajputs in any case, but they considerably upped the quantity they consumed when going into battle. They ended up stoned out of their minds and in no fit state to process any instruction beyond, “kill or be killed”. Opium contributed considerably to the fearlessness of Rajputs in the arena, but also rendered them incapable of coordinating complex manoeuvres. There’s an apt warning for school kids: don’t do drugs, or you’ll squander an empire.

[Riaz Haq]

Proponents of Indigenous Aryanism believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation was Aryan and Vedic.^[7] There are two common objections against such a correlation: "the Rg Vedicculture was pastoral and horse-centered, while the Harappan culture was neither horse-centered nor pastoral";^{[note 1][3]} and "the complete absence of the horse (equus caballus)."^{[note 2]} Support for the idea of an indigenous Indo-Aryan origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation mostly exists among Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India,^{[8][9][10][11]} and has no support in mainstream scholarship.^{[note 3]}

The paucity of horse remains in pre-Vedic times could be explained by India's climatic factors which lead to decay of horse bones. Horse bones may also be rare because horses were probably not eaten or used in burials by the Harappans.^[12][13] Remains and artifacts ascribed to domesticated horses are limited to Late Harappan times^{[14][3][note 10]} indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times,^[1] "when the Vedic people had settled in the north-west part of the subcintinent."^[3] It can therefor not be concluded that the horse was regularly used, or played a significant role, in the Harappan society.^[2]

Horse remains from the Harappan site Surkotada (dated to 2400-1700 BC) have been identified by A.K. Sharma as  Equus ferus caballus.^{[subnote 3]} The horse specialist Sandor Bökönyi (1997) later confirmed these conclusions, and stated the excavated tooth specimens could "in all probability be considered remnants of true horses [i.e. Equus ferus caballus]".^{[subnote 4]} Bökönyi, as cited by B.B. Lal, stated that "The occurrence of true horse (Equus caballus L.) was evidenced by the enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form of incisors and phalanges (toe bones)."^{[subnote 5]} However, archaeologists like Meadow (1997) disagree, on the grounds that the remains of the Equus ferus caballus horse are difficult to distinguish from other equid species such as Equus asinus (donkeys) or Equus hemionus (onagers).^[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_horse_in_the_Indian_su...

[Riaz Haq]

Traces of sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern lineages in Indian Muslim populations


Muthukrishnan Eaaswarkhanth, Ikramul Haque, Zeinab Ravesh, Irene Gallego Romero, Poorlin Ramakodi Meganathan, Bhawna Dubey, Faizan Ahmed Khan, Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Toomas Kivisild, Chris Tyler-Smith, Lalji Singh & Kumarasamy Thangaraj

https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2009168


We analyzed 472 samples for variation in mtDNA control regions and haplogroup-diagnostic coding region sites. Pooled haplogroup frequencies are shown in Table 1 and detailed haplogroup frequencies and definitions are given in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 and Supplementary Figures 1 and 2. Altogether, haplogroups restricted to the Indian Subcontinent were observed at an average frequency of 63% in Indian Muslim populations as compared with 74% among the non-Muslim neighbors (Table 1). The average contribution of haplogroups of West Eurasian origin to Indian Muslims was 18%, which is not significantly higher than the value observed in non-Muslim populations (14%). In contrast, Iranian Shia Muslims exhibit a high frequency (54%) of West Eurasian lineages. It is interesting that the sub-Saharan African- and Arabian-specific L0a2a2 and R01 lineages were found only in Dawoodi Bohras (TN and GUJ), whereas these lineages were generally absent in Indian non-Muslims, although a related L0a2a2 lineage has been detected previously among the Sindhi population of Pakistan (Figure 2). The Central Asian lineages were found at a lower average frequency of 6% and the haplogroups U7 and W, which exist in similar frequencies in India and Iran, were observed at an average frequency of 6 and 3%, respectively, in Muslim populations. The gene diversity in Muslim populations ranged from 0.80±0.05 to 0.93±0.02, which is slightly higher than that among non-Muslim populations, 0.74±0.02 to 0.86±0.02 (Table 2), and reveals the prevalence of a comparatively high genetic diversity among Indian Muslims. We completely sequenced the mtDNA genome of nine M* samples, which harbor 16223–16275 substitutions in hypervariable segment I (HVS-I), to determine their potential source region. All nine samples were found to share common coding region variants, which enabled us to define a new autochthonous South Asian-specific haplogroup M52, which turned out to share a common origin with one of its sister branches, labeled here as M52a (Figure 3), detected among Indian non-Muslims. The same haplogroup has been recently reported in the Tharus of Nepal and in the Andhra Pradesh population.50 All nine sequences of Muslims are nested within the M52 lineage (Figure 3). Considering this phylogenetic structuring, the newly characterized haplogroup M52 is most likely to have an Indian rather than West Asian or Arabian origin. AMOVA yielded no statistically significant results for any group distinctions on the basis of religion (Indian Muslims and non-Muslims), geography (North India, South India and West India) or other criteria investigated (Supplementary Table 3).

[Riaz Haq]

When Ancient DNA Gets Politicized
What responsibility do archaeologists have when their research about prehistoric finds is appropriated to make 21st-century arguments about ethnicity?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-ancient-dna-gets-politi...

The study analyzed DNA from ten individuals who had been buried at Ashkelon, a coastal city in Israel, between the Bronze Age and Iron Age. The results suggested that the appearance of new genetic signatures in four of the individuals coincided with changes in the archaeological record that have been associated with the arrival of the Philistines more than 3,000 years ago. These genetic traits resembled those of ancient people who lived in what is now Greece, Italy and Spain. The authors asserted that these findings supported the idea that the Philistines, a group of people made infamous in the Hebrew Bible as the enemies of the Israelites, originally migrated to the Levant from somewhere in southern Europe, but quickly mixed with local populations.

Commenting on the study, Netanyahu wrote: “There’s no connection between the ancient Philistines & the modern Palestinians, whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years later. The Palestinians’ connection to the Land of Israel is nothing compared to the 4,000 year connection that the Jewish people have with the land.”

The logic here for those who had read the study was confusing. The new research had nothing to say about the genetic history of Jews or Palestinians or the connection those modern populations have to the land. (Though the word "Palestinian" comes from "Philistine," Palestinians are not thought of as the descendants of Philistines; it appears that Netanyahu was using this unrelated point to launch into his argument.)



“To me it seemed like it just provided another opportunity—even if it's just tangential—to take a swipe at Palestinians,” says Michael Press, an independent scholar who studies the presentation of archaeology in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. “It's hard to blame the authors much here since Netanyahu's use of the study really was a non-sequitur.” (The authors of the study did not wish to comment but are preparing a formal response.)

Despite evidence that Jews and Palestinians are genetically closely related, Press and others were also torn about even addressing such inaccuracies in Netanyahu’s comments. Tom Booth, a researcher in the ancient genomics laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, worried that picking apart what the prime minister got wrong about the study would suggest that, in an alternate reality, where his interpretation was scientifically sound, Netanyahu would be justified in using such a study to support his claims about Palestinian rights. “You just need to condemn any attempt to use a study on the past in this way,” Booth says. “The way our ancestors were 4,000 years ago does not really bear on ideas of nation or identity, or it shouldn't in modern nation states.”

This incident has dredged up tensions that have been lurking in archaeology ever since ancient DNA studies started gaining wide attention a decade ago. Advances in technology have made it possible to extract and analyze DNA from ancient bones, teeth, and other sources, and the resulting studies have made discoveries that might otherwise be invisible in the archaeological record: that anatomically modern humans mated with Neanderthals; that ancient populations in Africa moved and mixed more than previously thought; that the ancestors of the first people to set foot in North America may have taken a 10,000-year pause in their migration route in the now-submerged landmass between Siberia and Alaska. “Without knowing whether populations are staying the same or changing, we ended up potentially misunderstanding what's happening in the archaeological record,” Booth says.

[Riaz Haq]

Middle-Eastern genomes fill historical gaps
137 full genomes from eight Middle-Eastern populations reveals links to agriculture


Despite being the cradle of agriculture, the birthplace of urbanisation and the land bridge that brought early hominins out of Africa, the Middle East as a region has flown relatively under the radar when it comes to genetic research. Now, a new study from the University of Birmingham and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK, has sequenced 137 full genomes from eight Middle-Eastern populations to reveal fascinating insights about human history.



https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/civilisations/middle-eastern-gen...



“The Middle East is an important region to understand human history, migrations and evolution: it is where modern humans first expanded out of Africa, where hunter-gatherers first settled and transitioned into farmers, where the first writing systems developed, and where the first major known civilisations emerged,” says co-author Mohamed Almarri of the Wellcome Sanger Institute. With this in mind, many of our modern languages, cultures and behaviours can trace their roots to the region.

The team, led by Almarri and Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham, were able to reconstruct the genomic history of the region with unprecedented precision, noting that many of their findings vindicate theories in the fields of archaeology and linguistics.

The key findings included the identification of 4.8 million new gene variants that are specific to the Middle East, and that were not identified in the Human Genome Diversity Project. The authors say these genes could provide clues about population health specific to the region.

“These are variants that were not previously discovered in other populations,” Haber says. “Hundreds of thousands of these are common in the region, and any of them could hold medical relevance.”

Bastien Llamas, an expert in population genomics and ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide (who was not involved in the study), says expanding our knowledge of the human genome to cover these blind spots will confer many potential benefits.

“Downstream benefits include addressing health issues specific to these populations that are under-represented in global reference databases, but also improving our understanding of disease molecular mechanisms – and this could be relevant for all humans.”

Another finding was evidence of a population bloom coterminous with the development of agriculture in the Levant region during the transition to the Neolithic some 8,000-10,000 years ago, supporting the long-held belief among archaeologists that farming – and the sedentary lifestyle it afforded – would’ve boosted the region’s population. Meanwhile, the genomes showed evidence some 6,000 years ago of a massive population crash in Arabia, around the time the once-verdant region experienced a dramatic drying event.

Shining light on the field of linguistics, the study also found that population movement in the Bronze Age may have spread the Semitic languages (these form the basis for today’s Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic) out from the Levant into Arabia and East Asia.

Another key finding sheds light on the development of disease susceptibility, with the research showing an increase in the frequency of variants associated with type 2 diabetes in some Middle-Eastern populations over the past 2,000 years, showing that variants that may once have been evolutionarily beneficial can end up coding for disease.

“In this case, it looks like some genetic variants that are associated with diabetes in present-day Emirati populations were at high frequency in the population 2,000 years ago,” says Llamas. “It is entirely possible that these variants were positively selected to survive the arid environment and the nomadic herder lifestyle of the ancestors of Emirati people.”

[Riaz Haq]

Arabians Have Different Origins, Middle East Genomic Study Finds
The Arabians have deeper roots in Africa, while the Levantines’ roots lie in Europe and Anatolia in today’s Turkey. They differ in their amount of Neanderthal DNA as well

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/genomic-study-levantines-and-ar...


Apparently, it is so: Anatomically modern humans have been leaving Africa for almost a quarter million years, but they all went extinct until an exit around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. A new study of genomes in the Middle East shores up this hypothesis, finding no trace of the early humans in any of the genomes tested.

One of the routes out of Africa for hominins going back 2 million years, and later, for humans too, was the Levant, Iraq and Arabia. Indeed, researchers have found evidence of human and hominin exits in various places, including Israel and Saudi Arabia: stuff like the odd bone or a batch of stone tools.

The prevailing belief is that the groups taking part in the earliest migrations went extinct (though not before encountering other hominins in Eurasia). Then about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, anatomical humans left Africa – and survived. They met and mixed with Neanderthals and heavens knows who else, and begat modern humanity.

---------------

“We used a new whole genome sequencing technology to study human populations from the Levant [Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank], Iraq and Arabia, and we reconstruct the population history of the region from over 125,000 years ago up to the last millennium,” Almarri says. “We show how changes in lifestyle and climate have affected the demography of human populations in the region.”

How does one test latter-day DNA for signals older than 60,000 years? By the density of mutations, he explains: “The more mutations there are, the older the segments will be.”

That’s a generalization; some genetic sequences are more evolutionarily conserved than others. If you check the sequence for the protein ubiquitin, it will be the same from a human to a tree frog and obviously, for earlier humans. But if a given segment has a ton of mutations (that didn’t kill the bearer), we may assume it’s old.

[Riaz Haq]

Arabians Have Different Origins, Middle East Genomic Study Finds
The Arabians have deeper roots in Africa, while the Levantines’ roots lie in Europe and Anatolia in today’s Turkey. They differ in their amount of Neanderthal DNA as well

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/genomic-study-levantines-and-ar...

And indeed, genomic studies of today’s non-African populations show a genetic bottleneck around that time, Almarri says. Non-Africans all descend from exiters around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and are much less genetically diverse than sub-Saharan Africans, who suffered no bottleneck.

Moving on, Levantines and Iraqis share the same Neanderthal signals as Eurasians, the team found. Arabians on the other hand have less Neanderthal DNA.



Also, present-day Africans are believed to have a contribution from Neanderthals after all, a very small one, conferred by early humans who trekked in reverse – from Europe back to Africa – after mixing with Neanderthals.

Anyway, the Arabians of today apparently didn’t arise from early Levantine farmers but from Natufian hunter-gatherers who preceded these farmers and Africans, the study shows. Nor do the findings support the theory that Levantine farmers later replaced the indigenous Arabian population



It bears stressing that human fossil remains are incredibly rare; from the deep prehistoric past Saudi Arabia has so far produced one finger bone from 85,000 years ago, but it has also produced tools that may have been special to humans (as opposed to other hominins) from 125,000 years ago. In Israel there are a lot more very ancient human remains, starting with the 200,000-year-old jawbone found in Misliya, and there are more when you get to the Natufian period but they’re still very rare.



Another difference the genomic analysis indicated relates to the Neolithic Revolution – the “invention” of agriculture.

But here it bears stressing that the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa weren’t always baking-hot deserts. Sometimes, depending on planetary orbital cycles, they “greened.” Hippos and crocodiles cavorted in lakes and rivers, and hominins – and later, modern humans – could comfortably roam.

When the Neolithic Revolution – the gradual transition from a life of hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry – began over 10,000 years ago, Arabia and the Sahara were in such a lush period. The Arabian Desert as we know it today, the biggest sand desert in the world, didn’t exist. It began to form sometime between 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. (That might help explain the paucity of prehistoric human remains.)

[Riaz Haq]

#Nazis tried to trace #Aryan race myth in #Tibet. #Hitler believed that "Aryan" Nordic people entered #India from the north 1,500 years ago, & Aryans committed "crime" of mixing with the local "un-Aryan" people, losing attributes that made them "superior".https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58466528


In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of Germany's Nazi party and a key architect of the Holocaust, sent a five-member team to Tibet to search for the origins of the supposed Aryan race. Author Vaibhav Purandare recounts the fascinating story of this expedition, which passed through India.

A little over a year before World War Two began, a group of Germans landed surreptitiously along India's eastern borders.

They were on a mission to discover the "source of origin of the Aryan race".

Adolf Hitler believed that "Aryan" Nordic people had entered India from the north some 1,500 years earlier, and that the Aryans had committed the "crime" of mixing with the local "un-Aryan" people, losing the attributes that had made them racially superior to all other people on earth.

Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy for the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, articulating his sentiments in his speeches, writings and debates.

Yet, according to Himmler, one of Hitler's top lieutenants and the head of the SS, the Indian subcontinent was still worth a close look.

This is where Tibet came into the picture.

Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt.

All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world".

In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage - to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.

In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation".

Two of the team's members stood out from the rest. One was Ernst Schafer, a gifted 28-year-old zoologist who had been to the India-China-Tibet border twice earlier. Schafer had joined the SS soon after the Nazi triumph of 1933, long before Himmler became his patron for the Tibet expedition.

Schafer was crazy about hunting and loved to gather trophies in his Berlin home. On one hunting expedition, while attempting to shoot a duck from a boat he and his wife were in, he slipped when taking aim and shot his wife in the head accidentally, killing her.

The second key man was Bruno Beger, a young anthropologist who had joined the SS in 1935. Beger would take measurements of the skulls and facial details of Tibetans and make face masks, he said, "especially to collect material about the proportions, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region".

[Riaz Haq]

Ancient rice bowl discovered in #TamilNadu complicates #BJP's story of #Hindu civilization in #India. It see not strength, but weakness in diversity. It also tends to view the past as a simple story of the rise of a #Sanskrit civilization in North India. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/12/04/an-ancient-rice...


Rarely can a spoonful of rice have caused such a stir. When M.K. Stalin, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, addressed the south Indian state’s legislature on September 9th, he celebrated a musty sample of the country’s humble staple. Carbon dating by an American laboratory, he said, had just proved that the rice, found in a small clay offering bowl—itself tucked inside a burial urn outside the village of Sivakalai, near the southernmost tip of India—was some 3,200 years old. This made it the earliest evidence yet found of civilisation in Tamil Nadu. The top duty of his government, the chief minister triumphantly declared, was to establish that the history of India “begins from the landscape of the Tamils”.

The received wisdom about India’s early history has been that civilisation generally flowed the other way, from north to south. So why is a provincial politician so keen to turn this narrative upside down? The answer lies in modern identity politics as much as archaeology.

Mr Stalin’s party, which returned to power in Tamil Nadu in May after a decade in the wilderness, has secular roots and is sworn to defend south India, and particularly its Dravidian languages, from perceived cultural dominance by the far more populous north. This threat has grown since 2014, when the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) won control of the national government. With its stronghold in the conservative north, the bjp tends to see not strength, but weakness in diversity. It also tends to view the past as a simple story of the rise of a Sanskrit civilisation—Sanskrit being the language of Hindu texts, and ancestor of most Indo-European languages spoken across north India—which peaked in a pan-Indian golden age, followed by sad decline during a millennium of Muslim and Christian rule.

Sustaining a Tamil counter-narrative requires evidence—which is why archaeology matters. Aside from the rich and sophisticated ancient Tamil poetry known as Sangam literature, until now proof of the south’s claim to equal antiquity has been thin on the ground. Tamil Nadu’s two annual monsoons and long seasons of extreme heat are destructive to brick or wooden remains. Ethnic nationalists also accuse authorities in far-off Delhi, India’s capital, of devoting far more resources to archaeology in the north than in the south.

But the balance of discoveries has been changing; Mr Stalin’s rice pot was not the first startling recent find in Tamil Nadu. Over the past decade estimates of when urban settlement began in the state have been pushed steadily back, from around 300bc to the 1155bc carbon date of the Sivakalai rice offering. The biggest breakthrough came in 2014 near a village called Keeladi, outside the city of Madurai. It is said that a local lorry driver overheard archaeologists chatting at a roadside tea stall. He took them to a palm grove where he confessed to stealing coconuts. It was littered with sherds of ancient pottery.


---------
Tamils for the most part fit happily into today’s Indian mosaic of some 22 major language groups and hundreds of smaller ones. But they do feel a bit different, and a bit special. “They portray us as little states and want to make the history of the south a small event,” says Kanimozhi Mathi, a lawyer in Chennai who in 2018 sued the government when it threatened to close the Keeladi dig. “But we are not just one state among many. We are a nation.”

[Riaz Haq]

A study published recently in the American Journal of Science shows that east Africa (including modern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique), and Madagascar, will override India in about 200 million years. This will also lead to the ‘formation of a long mountain range along the modern west coast of India’ which the team named ‘Somalaya’.

https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/india-somalia-...

https://www.ajsonline.org/content/321/6/955

Speaking to indianexpress.com, Utrecht University geologist Prof. Douwe van Hinsbergen, who led the team, said ‘we now have the answer as to how the mountains and continents of the future will look like.

“I had made reconstructions of the past – of a continent that disappeared in the Mediterranean region, another major continent that disappeared in Southeast Asia whose relics we find all over Indonesia. But I had never made any future simulations. But the question caught my attention and I discussed it with my student and after about two years we now have an answer,” said Dr. van Hinsbergen.

The research team noted that Seychelles and Mauritius islands will all be pushed up and Mumbai will lie at the foot of the Somalaya range, as New Delhi lies at the foot of the Himalayas today.

“You will get a depression in southwest India, from Trivandrum all the way to Karachi. And the Horn of Africa which includes Somalia will override or bulldoze over southwest India and make this big mountain belt,” explained Dr. van Hinsbergen.

How did they arrive at this conclusion?

Thomas Schouten, a PhD student at ETH Zürich, in Switzerland, and one of the authors explained: “We have so many studies that have reconstructed the past, for which we have knowledge on how tectonic plates moved – how fast, which way they went etc. In our study, we assumed that the rift that goes through the African continent and underlies the east African lakes will continue to split the two parts of Africa and an ocean will be formed in the next 200 million years.”

He added that when this space is created in Africa, we must remove space in the Indian Ocean. “So basically the beaches of Malabar will be scooped up like a bulldozer, and coral reefs, beaches, and low lying areas will fold up to become high peaks. Seychelles will also get placed next to the Lakshadweep and along with the Malabar sediments they may become a mountain range of eight kilometers high, similar to the Himalayas where we find old coral reefs at the tops of mountains like Everest,” explains Schouten.

Why break Africa?

The team explained that the fault lines along which two ancient continents collided in the past remain weak. “So, modern continents like Africa can break along those old fault lines. And it’s a similar thing to how India broke off from Madagascar, 90 million years ago,” explains Dr. van Hinsbergen “The most important thing to remember is, continents do not exist forever. India has existed as we know it today only for the last few tens of million years. Before that, it was an island. The Indian Ocean will surely close one day. And then there will be a continent hitting India. And it’s either Africa or Antarctica, or it might be Australia.”


In the construction of the future, the team looked at Africa. They added that they ignored Southeast Asia, which will likely collide with east India. “India may sometime in the future even look like Mongolia – situated right in the middle of an enormous supercontinent surrounded by high mountain ranges of which the Somalaya may be one,” said Dr. van Hinsbergen.

The team said that the main goal was to think through which features of the modern Indian Ocean will be preserved in mountain belts, and which may not. This helps to better reconstruct the history of the Earth’s plates and surfaces of the geological past, which is important to help understand the evolution of climate, life, and resources.