Freethought & Rationalism Archive

07-27-2001, 02:40 PM

HH: Since you couldn't penetrate the NewScientist website, here is the article to whihc I referred:

Quote:

Written in Blood 19 May 01

The Origins of India's rigid caste system are confirmed by DNA tests

UPPER-CASTE Indians are genetically more like Europeans, while members of India's lower castes are more like other Asians, says an international team of researchers.

"It seems to confirm much of the research that basically has drawn from linguistic analysis and theories about the movements of people into South Asia," says Robert Hardgrave of the University of Texas, Austin, who has written extensively on India and its caste system. Based on such evidence, most historians believe that waves of Indo-European-speaking people from eastern Europe and the Caucasus set up the caste system as they moved into the Indian subcontinent about 5000 years ago.

"When the Aryans came in, they brought with them a social hierarchy," says Hardgrave. We have some historical evidence which suggests that as the Aryans came in, they intermarried with indigenous people and also absorbed many into their system of ranking."

Some people dismiss this theory as a myth, claiming it "devalues" India's history. Now, however, genetic studies have produced strong evidence supporting the theory. A team led by Michael Bamshad of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City compared the DNA of 265 Indian men from different castes with DNA from nearly 750 African, European, Asian and other Indian men.

First they analysed mitochondrial DNA, whihc people only inherit from their mothers. When the researchers looked at specific sets of genes that tend to be inherited as a unit, they found about 20 to 30 per cent of the Indian sets resmbled those in Europeans. The percentage was highest in upper-caste males. Overall, though, each caste resembled other Asians most.

Next, the team studied genetic variations in the Y chromosome, which is inherited from the father. "We saw a strikingly different pattern," says Bamshad. In this case most castes resembled Europeans more closely than Asians. "The upper castes were more similar to Europeans, the middle castes were genetically equidistant from Europeans and Asians, and the lower castes were more similar to Asians," he says.

The researchers got similar results when they examined 40 sets of genes on other chromosomes. The findings support the theory that the Indo-European immigrants appointed themselves to the higher castes, Bamshad says. The Y chromosome evidence also supports the idea that the original immigrants were mostly male.

The caste system was based on occupation and socioeconomic status. The upper castes were the Brahmans (priests), the Kshatriyas (warriors) and the Vaisyas (traders). The Sudras, who were the farmers and artisans, comprised the lower caste. Later, a fifit caste - "the untouchables" - was established for those who did menail tasks...

Anil Ananthaswamy from New Scientist magazine, Vol 170 issue 2291, 19/05/2002 page 17

More at www.genome.org/papbyrecent.shtml

[ July 27, 2001: Message edited by: DMB ]

lpetrich · 07-27-2001, 04:07 PM

I think that it is unlikely that those Aryan immigrants were mostly male, since they would have to have propagated themselves before they arrived in India.

However, if caste membership was mainly propagated in the male line, then that would explain why upper-caste men have more European-like Y's than lower-caste men. Caste is not absolutely fixed; a promoted man could contribute an Asian Y to the upper castes, while a demoted man could contribute a European Y to the lower castes.

Furthermore, propagation in the male line has not excluded marrying lower-caste women; this could explain dark-skinned upper-caste people, who would have acquired their dark skin from having lots of originally-lower-caste dark-skinned female ancestors. And mitochondria, which are inherited in the female line, show that pattern well -- European sequences are not as well-represented in mitochondria as in Y's.

lpetrich · 07-27-2001, 04:23 PM

HindooHeathen:
There has been no Aryan invasion.

LP:
I disagree. And I don't see English people claiming that there had been no invasions of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 1500 years ago.

HindooHeathen:
Oldest Tamil literature is Thol Kappiyam written around 2000BCE.

LP:
How was that document dated???

HindooHeathen:
The question is not the historical reality of the mentioned king but the way of life depicted there, which is Vedic.

LP:
If that document is much more recent, then references to the Vedas are understandable.

HindooHeathen:
In Vedas you find Indra, Rudra, Prajapathi and many other deities who are connected to later day Hindu deities such as Vishnu , Brahma and Shiva. Most deities are composite deities having attributes of different deities. So distinguishing Dravidian and Aryan deities is to say the least ridiculous.

LP:
Not necessarily the case. If the deities of later Hinduism had some features of some Vedic deities, then they may also have had some features of Dravidian deities (Shiva, for example).

HindooHeathen:
For example Harappa and Mohenjadaro (dated 3250 BCE) have a lot of fire altars. Vedas speak of Saraswathi river and more than 100 Harappan like sites have been discovered along its now-dried course.

LP:
That is certainly an interesting conundrum; the interesting question is when exactly the Sarasvati dried up.

HindooHeathen:
There have been no "fights between Aryan deities and Dravidian deities". The crude interpretatin of Vedas in the lines of Old Testament has led to this fallacy.

LP:
Why would there necessarily be such fights? The Vedas describe fights against noseless phallus-worshippers, who would not necessarily be Dravidian deities.

HindooHeathen:
Please note the very careful wordings of these academics in which they clearly dissociate themselves from AIT. ...

LP:
More likely, they don't want to jump to conclusions too quickly.

lpetrich · 07-27-2001, 05:11 PM

Summary:
Horses: when did they get to India?

One interesting bit of evidence on the Indo-European homeland is to find out which plants and animals the ancestral Indo-European speakers had been familiar with. However, this does have certain pitfalls, such as transfer of words; the word for beech tree got transferred to a light-barked Mediterranean oak by early Latin speakers. However, domestic animals do not have that sort of transference problem, and by seeing which words for them are shared, we can tell what the ancestral IE speakers were familiar with. Which include:

Dog *k'won- - hound, Lat canis, Gk kuon kun-, Skt s'van
Cow *gwou- - cow, Lat bos bov-, Gk bous, Skt gau go-
Sheep *owis - ewe, Lat ovis
Pig *sus - sow, Lat sus, Gk hys
Horse *ek'wos - OEngl eoh, Lat equus, Gk hippos, Skt as'va

No words for cats or chickens, however.

Some of these animals were domesticated well before a reasonable ancestral IE time, about 4500-3500 BCE, but the horse was not. In fact, the first evidence of horse domestication is found in the putative Indo-European homeland: Dereivka, Ukraine. A stallion there had teeth with bit-wear marks.

And for many early Indo-European speakers, horses were very important, sometimes being involved in some important rituals; some examples of this are to be found in the Vedas.

True, if we see horses, we don't necessarily see Indo-European speakers, but no horses very likely means no IE speakers.

Now let's look at India. If the Vedas describe the Harappans, then Harappan remains ought to be full of horse remains and horse depictions. But horse remains are rare and horse depictions are absent. And at least one putative depiction appears to be a retouched depiction of a bull. Here are some URL's on this "Piltdown Horse":
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/method/antiquity/harappa.html http://www.safarmer.com/horseseal/update.html

hinduwoman · 07-28-2001, 08:44 PM

Now that I am a lot calmer, let me explain my position.

I don't give a damn about whether Aryans invaded India or whether the social system was originally based on race.

What I do care is the way western Academicians are using this theory to insist on the evilness of hinduism further. From their papers and interviews I get the impression that they are saying, Westerners are guilty or racism but hinduismn is guilty of racism + casteism which makes us twice more bad and therefore makes them morally superior. Never mind that today race and caste have nothing to do with each other; if you try to say it they call you Hindu Nazi, which apparently settles need for any further debate in their minds.

As for the way people who should know better treat Hinduism: Professor Susan Wadley of Syracruse University received federal grants to teach Ramayana in American classrooms. she included a 'folksong'about how lower castes view Rama:
The rulers who control all knowledge,
Claim the Ramayana to be India's history
And called us many names - demons, low castes, untouchables.
But we were the aborigines of this land.
Listen to our story.
Today we are called the dalits - the oppressed.
Once the Aryans on their horses invaded this land.
Then we who are the natives became the displaced.
Oh Rama, Oh Rama, You became the God and we the demons.
You portrayed our Hanuman as a monkey,
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
You enslaved us to form a monkey army,
Those you could not subjugate
You called a rakshasa a demon.
But we are the forest rakshak - the protectors.
You invented the hierarchy of caste
Through your laws of Manu, the first man.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
And you trampled on the rights of women.
You made your wife Sita undergo the ordeal of fire
To prove her chastity.
Such were your male laws, Oh Rama.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
When Shambuka, the Untouchable
Tried to gain knowledge,
You beheaded him, Oh Rama.
Thus did you crush those who tried to rise above their caste.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
Days passed, years and centuries,
But our lives remained the same.
We skinned your cattle,
So that you can wear shoes.
We clean your gutters,
So that you can stay clean.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
Did you ever even ask, Oh Rama,
What our caste is?
Did you ever even ask
What our religion is?
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
Independence dawned.
It began with the rule of the constitution.
The author of the constitution Dr. Ambedkar
Framed the constitution around secular ideals.
The castle of caste privileges began to crumble.
No longer could the elite skim
The milk of religious exploitation.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.
But poverty grew and to divert the poor
From their real need, a new enemy was found.
Muslims were targeted and "taught a lesson".
To destroy Lanka, Oh Rama, you
Formed us into a monkey army.
And today you want us,
The working majority,
To form a new monkey army
And attack Muslims.
Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans.

Quiet aside from the Ait debate and what Rama did or did not do, the choice is ridiculous on a number of counts.
1. Which lower castes sing this? In all communities Rama is honoured. I could not get her address on the net. If anyone has any contact with the university shall he or she please ask her where she got this so-called 'folksong'?

2. Just look at the wording and the themes. that is very very modern. Obviously it was written by someone educated in western theories of oppression and ideologies and whatnot. the ordinary man has no idea Rama oppressed him so much, unless the academicians taught him. the reference to muslims is another give-away.

3. If Wadley is so concerned about social justice, then why did not she include the Shatanami group as well who fought untouchability in Rama's name?. I suppose this particular song fits in with Wadley's idea of what a protest should be like, while the other being religious is not worth considering.

4. Similarly about Rama's oppression of women, why did she not get genuine Maithali folk songs sung by women? I suppose since these songs are about marriage, they cannot fit in with femininsm.

PS. Hindooheathen, according to that song you have been devalued into an animal, made into a slave and brainwashed into fighting your kinsmen. worse, you still worship your oppressor. We North Indians are really something superior are we not?

07-29-2001, 10:22 AM

Hinduwoman: I can see why you feel angry. But I think one must distinguish between the theory, for which there is evidence, and misuse of the theory. The one doesn't lead inexorably to the other.

I don't think anyone on this board has been coming up with the sort of rubbish you quote.

copernicus · 07-29-2001, 12:21 PM

Hinduwoman, I agree very much with what DMB said. Personally, I feel no more disrespect for Hinduism than any other religion, and I consider classical Hindu scholarship to be the foundation of modern linguistic science. I have never encountered any anti-Hindu feeling in the modern literature, although it clearly existed in works written during the last two centuries (e.g. Whitney's classic grammar of Sanskrit).

The question here is the correctness of the AIT and not whether people on one side or the other of it are behaving badly.

phaedrus · 07-29-2001, 10:04 PM

copernicus

Could you clarify your position on the IE homeland issue further? I am a little confused by these two statements of yours

Quote:

To the best of our knowledge, now, the original homeland was somewhere in central or eastern Europe, not northern India, which lacked some of the requisite plants and animals in ancient times.

Quote:

If you want to read a well-written linguistic discussion of the original homeland, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's Scientific American article, which promotes the view that the homeland was in western Asia and the southern Caucasus rather than Europe. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov challenge the more conventional theory that it was in the plains of central or eastern Europe

Which of the views do you subscribe to?

Now to the remainder of your post...

Elst is not a professional linguist. He has no research credentials in the field, nor does he appear to have a very deep understanding of the literature that he does cite. His article presents a skewed review of the linguistic literature, and he does his best to promote the idea that northern India could be the homeland, despite strong evidence (not cited by him) to the contrary.

Well I am not a professional linguist, and at the same time i understand that sometimes individuals acquire enough expertise inspite of "recognised" degrees and stamps of approval. But you are still to refute in "specifics" Elst's article and i read the article yet again and unlike you still feel that the point the author is trying to make is - linguistic evidence is not strong enough to prove AIT incontrovertibly and the shaky linguistic evidence could be used to propose an Indian homeland as well (let me add here I am aware of views that elst, frawley among others are seen to be funded by political polemicists on the Indian right wing)

As for the migration/invasion hypothesis, I do not think that the lack of reference to invasion in the Vedic literature provides proof of anything at all. Indo-European tribes have always been a scrappy lot, and they were not shy about invading new territories. I repeat: there is no linguistic evidence one way or the other as to whether there was fighting. It's just that it seems rather implausible that a massive tribal migration of that sort would be peaceful.

1. Have you missed out on the Bactria Margiana Archeological Complex and related data cited by Parpola and Sarianidi etc., These developments suggest that if any fighting occurred it is very likely involving aryas, occurred “outside” the Indian peninsula.

2. Evidence for an onetime annihilation of local civilization is very very shaky to say the least and migration and gradual fusion of races is more likely.

What puzzles me is why opponents of AIT make such a point about "invasion". The Indian subcontinent does not appear to have been any more peaceful than other areas of the world in recorded history. If Indo-Europeans invaded and conquered the indigenous cultures, so what?

Like HW mentioned above, frankly speaking don’t give a fuck whether hordes of barbarians (were they?) rode into the Indian peninsula and butchered the civilized (were they?) inhabitants. My problem lies with people trying to use the particular issue for political, and to paint a rasicist perspective of history, when there is not enough evidence to suggest either theory.

[ July 29, 2001: Message edited by: phaedrus ]

phaedrus · 07-29-2001, 10:11 PM

lpetrich

Want to respond?

Quote:

Originally posted by phaedrus:
Ipetrich

I read that article, and I don't find it very convincing. It does get some of the linguistic comparisons correct, such as how other IE language consistently distinguish vowels that are turned into a in Sanskrit

Could you give specific reasons for which you find the article not convincing?

However, that article claims that it was India that was the Indo-European homeland, and I believe that there are significant reasons to disagree. Consider the Harappans, who were settled and who had writing; the writers of the Vedas appear to have been nomads without writing. Furthermore, the Harappan script has still not been decoded, though I once saw a half-convincing Dravidian interpretation of it.

How does the harappan writing link to the significant reasons to not believe about the IE homeland?

This would imply that the Aryan presence in India is at most 3500 years old. Hittite and Greek speakers were already in their adopted homelands at that time, meaning that IE must have split a few millennia before.

Aryan presence is 3500 years old??(Are you suggesting 1500bc, just like all those AIT chaps do?) How did you come to the conclusion?

[ July 29, 2001: Message edited by: phaedrus ]

phaedrus · 07-29-2001, 10:48 PM

DMB and others

Any reason why the sample of 265 studied belongs to only one state (Andhra Pradesh) in India? Why didnt the researchers take a much more broad based sample, given the hypothesis that the original inhabitants were pushed towards the southern part of the peninsula (of which andhra pradesh is a part. Didnt such a study warrant the sample being much more representative of India, ie take the samples from all parts of the country???? Since Tamilnadu in India is considered to be more “Dravidian”, shouldn’t the study concentrated on that part too?? Too many questions

Since the findings of the study have been made public recently, it would be interesting to see whether any “specialists” in the field have any comments to make on the study.

PS : Does anyone have subscription to Genome Research site? Seen another article there which sort of talks about this study and what the future outlook could be.

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07-27-2001, 04:07 PM	#32
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	I think that it is unlikely that those Aryan immigrants were mostly male, since they would have to have propagated themselves before they arrived in India. However, if caste membership was mainly propagated in the male line, then that would explain why upper-caste men have more European-like Y's than lower-caste men. Caste is not absolutely fixed; a promoted man could contribute an Asian Y to the upper castes, while a demoted man could contribute a European Y to the lower castes. Furthermore, propagation in the male line has not excluded marrying lower-caste women; this could explain dark-skinned upper-caste people, who would have acquired their dark skin from having lots of originally-lower-caste dark-skinned female ancestors. And mitochondria, which are inherited in the female line, show that pattern well -- European sequences are not as well-represented in mitochondria as in Y's.

07-27-2001, 04:23 PM	#33
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	HindooHeathen: There has been no Aryan invasion. LP: I disagree. And I don't see English people claiming that there had been no invasions of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 1500 years ago. HindooHeathen: Oldest Tamil literature is Thol Kappiyam written around 2000BCE. LP: How was that document dated??? HindooHeathen: The question is not the historical reality of the mentioned king but the way of life depicted there, which is Vedic. LP: If that document is much more recent, then references to the Vedas are understandable. HindooHeathen: In Vedas you find Indra, Rudra, Prajapathi and many other deities who are connected to later day Hindu deities such as Vishnu , Brahma and Shiva. Most deities are composite deities having attributes of different deities. So distinguishing Dravidian and Aryan deities is to say the least ridiculous. LP: Not necessarily the case. If the deities of later Hinduism had some features of some Vedic deities, then they may also have had some features of Dravidian deities (Shiva, for example). HindooHeathen: For example Harappa and Mohenjadaro (dated 3250 BCE) have a lot of fire altars. Vedas speak of Saraswathi river and more than 100 Harappan like sites have been discovered along its now-dried course. LP: That is certainly an interesting conundrum; the interesting question is when exactly the Sarasvati dried up. HindooHeathen: There have been no "fights between Aryan deities and Dravidian deities". The crude interpretatin of Vedas in the lines of Old Testament has led to this fallacy. LP: Why would there necessarily be such fights? The Vedas describe fights against noseless phallus-worshippers, who would not necessarily be Dravidian deities. HindooHeathen: Please note the very careful wordings of these academics in which they clearly dissociate themselves from AIT. ... LP: More likely, they don't want to jump to conclusions too quickly.

07-27-2001, 05:11 PM	#34
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Summary: Horses: when did they get to India? One interesting bit of evidence on the Indo-European homeland is to find out which plants and animals the ancestral Indo-European speakers had been familiar with. However, this does have certain pitfalls, such as transfer of words; the word for beech tree got transferred to a light-barked Mediterranean oak by early Latin speakers. However, domestic animals do not have that sort of transference problem, and by seeing which words for them are shared, we can tell what the ancestral IE speakers were familiar with. Which include: Dog k'won- - hound, Lat canis, Gk kuon kun-, Skt s'van Cow gwou- - cow, Lat bos bov-, Gk bous, Skt gau go- Sheep owis - ewe, Lat ovis Pig sus - sow, Lat sus, Gk hys Horse *ek'wos - OEngl eoh, Lat equus, Gk hippos, Skt as'va No words for cats or chickens, however. Some of these animals were domesticated well before a reasonable ancestral IE time, about 4500-3500 BCE, but the horse was not. In fact, the first evidence of horse domestication is found in the putative Indo-European homeland: Dereivka, Ukraine. A stallion there had teeth with bit-wear marks. And for many early Indo-European speakers, horses were very important, sometimes being involved in some important rituals; some examples of this are to be found in the Vedas. True, if we see horses, we don't necessarily see Indo-European speakers, but no horses very likely means no IE speakers. Now let's look at India. If the Vedas describe the Harappans, then Harappan remains ought to be full of horse remains and horse depictions. But horse remains are rare and horse depictions are absent. And at least one putative depiction appears to be a retouched depiction of a bull. Here are some URL's on this "Piltdown Horse": http://www.umass.edu/wsp/method/antiquity/harappa.html http://www.safarmer.com/horseseal/update.html

07-28-2001, 08:44 PM	#35
hinduwoman Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: India Posts: 6,977	Now that I am a lot calmer, let me explain my position. I don't give a damn about whether Aryans invaded India or whether the social system was originally based on race. What I do care is the way western Academicians are using this theory to insist on the evilness of hinduism further. From their papers and interviews I get the impression that they are saying, Westerners are guilty or racism but hinduismn is guilty of racism + casteism which makes us twice more bad and therefore makes them morally superior. Never mind that today race and caste have nothing to do with each other; if you try to say it they call you Hindu Nazi, which apparently settles need for any further debate in their minds. As for the way people who should know better treat Hinduism: Professor Susan Wadley of Syracruse University received federal grants to teach Ramayana in American classrooms. she included a 'folksong'about how lower castes view Rama: The rulers who control all knowledge, Claim the Ramayana to be India's history And called us many names - demons, low castes, untouchables. But we were the aborigines of this land. Listen to our story. Today we are called the dalits - the oppressed. Once the Aryans on their horses invaded this land. Then we who are the natives became the displaced. Oh Rama, Oh Rama, You became the God and we the demons. You portrayed our Hanuman as a monkey, Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. You enslaved us to form a monkey army, Those you could not subjugate You called a rakshasa a demon. But we are the forest rakshak - the protectors. You invented the hierarchy of caste Through your laws of Manu, the first man. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. And you trampled on the rights of women. You made your wife Sita undergo the ordeal of fire To prove her chastity. Such were your male laws, Oh Rama. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. When Shambuka, the Untouchable Tried to gain knowledge, You beheaded him, Oh Rama. Thus did you crush those who tried to rise above their caste. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. Days passed, years and centuries, But our lives remained the same. We skinned your cattle, So that you can wear shoes. We clean your gutters, So that you can stay clean. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. Did you ever even ask, Oh Rama, What our caste is? Did you ever even ask What our religion is? Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. Independence dawned. It began with the rule of the constitution. The author of the constitution Dr. Ambedkar Framed the constitution around secular ideals. The castle of caste privileges began to crumble. No longer could the elite skim The milk of religious exploitation. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. But poverty grew and to divert the poor From their real need, a new enemy was found. Muslims were targeted and "taught a lesson". To destroy Lanka, Oh Rama, you Formed us into a monkey army. And today you want us, The working majority, To form a new monkey army And attack Muslims. Oh Rama, you representative of the Aryans. Quiet aside from the Ait debate and what Rama did or did not do, the choice is ridiculous on a number of counts. 1. Which lower castes sing this? In all communities Rama is honoured. I could not get her address on the net. If anyone has any contact with the university shall he or she please ask her where she got this so-called 'folksong'? 2. Just look at the wording and the themes. that is very very modern. Obviously it was written by someone educated in western theories of oppression and ideologies and whatnot. the ordinary man has no idea Rama oppressed him so much, unless the academicians taught him. the reference to muslims is another give-away. 3. If Wadley is so concerned about social justice, then why did not she include the Shatanami group as well who fought untouchability in Rama's name?. I suppose this particular song fits in with Wadley's idea of what a protest should be like, while the other being religious is not worth considering. 4. Similarly about Rama's oppression of women, why did she not get genuine Maithali folk songs sung by women? I suppose since these songs are about marriage, they cannot fit in with femininsm. PS. Hindooheathen, according to that song you have been devalued into an animal, made into a slave and brainwashed into fighting your kinsmen. worse, you still worship your oppressor. We North Indians are really something superior are we not?

07-29-2001, 10:22 AM	#36
DMB Guest Posts: n/a	Hinduwoman: I can see why you feel angry. But I think one must distinguish between the theory, for which there is evidence, and misuse of the theory. The one doesn't lead inexorably to the other. I don't think anyone on this board has been coming up with the sort of rubbish you quote.

07-29-2001, 12:21 PM	#37
copernicus Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Bellevue, WA Posts: 1,531	Hinduwoman, I agree very much with what DMB said. Personally, I feel no more disrespect for Hinduism than any other religion, and I consider classical Hindu scholarship to be the foundation of modern linguistic science. I have never encountered any anti-Hindu feeling in the modern literature, although it clearly existed in works written during the last two centuries (e.g. Whitney's classic grammar of Sanskrit). The question here is the correctness of the AIT and not whether people on one side or the other of it are behaving badly.

07-29-2001, 10:48 PM	#40
phaedrus Veteran Member Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Indus Posts: 1,038	DMB and others Any reason why the sample of 265 studied belongs to only one state (Andhra Pradesh) in India? Why didnt the researchers take a much more broad based sample, given the hypothesis that the original inhabitants were pushed towards the southern part of the peninsula (of which andhra pradesh is a part. Didnt such a study warrant the sample being much more representative of India, ie take the samples from all parts of the country???? Since Tamilnadu in India is considered to be more “Dravidian”, shouldn’t the study concentrated on that part too?? Too many questions Since the findings of the study have been made public recently, it would be interesting to see whether any “specialists” in the field have any comments to make on the study. PS : Does anyone have subscription to Genome Research site? Seen another article there which sort of talks about this study and what the future outlook could be.

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