Here is an autobiographical account of how David Reich & Nick Patterson 'invented' the categories of ANI and ASI (Ancient North Indians and Ancient South Indians) to retrofit their genetic extravaganza.
Does this categorisation have any scientific basis? Similary, does the classsification of language groups suggesting the movement of Indo-European speakers into India from outrside of India have any scientific basis? The geneticists are simply aping the linguists' theories, yet to be proven by textual evidence.
Now, the attempt is ongoing to retrofit genetics of mtDNA and R1a haplogroups into these hypothetical language-speaker categories.
A clear case of repeat performance of Piltdown Man of 1950's which is now proven to be a paleoanthropological hoax.
How can geneticists be relied upon to determine who invented and USED Indus Script to represent their spoken languages in written form?
Cylinder seal, ca. 2500-1900 BCE of Shu-Ilishu EME.BAL.ME.LUH.HA.KI (Akkadian cuneiform) translation: "Shu-ilishu "interpreter of Meluhha language". Decipherment: the two traders negotiating with the Sumerian trader (with Shu-ilishu seated on the latter's lap) are: (traders in signified by the symbols they carry) mlekh'goat' rebus: milakkhu'copper' PLUS ranku'liquid measure' rebus: ranku'tin ore'.. Can genetics recognize this Meluhha speech (aka Indian sprachbund, 'language union') in mtDNA and haplogroups?SeeL https://www.harappa.com/sites/default/files/201402/Shu-ilishus-Cylinder-Seal.pdf Gregory Possehl, 2006, Shu ilishu's cylinder seal, Expedition, vol. 48, No. 1
See: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3631775?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentsSimo Parpola, Asko Parpola and Robert H. Brunswig, Jr., 1977,The Meluḫḫa Village: Evidence of Acculturation of Harappan Traders in Late Third Millennium Mesopotamia? Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1977), pp. 129-165
S. Kalyanaraman Sarasvati Research Centre
[quote]The Mixing of East and West
The tensest twenty-four hours of my scientific career came in October 2008, when my collaborator Nick Patterson and I traveled to Hyderabad to discuss these initial results with Singh and Thangaraj.
Our meeting on October 28 was challenging. Singh and Thangaraj seemed to be threatening to nix the whole project. Prior to the meeting, we had shown them a summary of our findings, which were that Indians today descend from a mixture of two highly divergent ancestral populations, one being “West Eurasians.” Singh and Thangaraj objected to this formulation because, they argued, it implied that West Eurasian people migrated en masse into India. They correctly pointed out that our data provided no direct evidence for this conclusion. They even reasoned that there could have been a migration in the other direction, of Indians to the Near East and Europe. Based on their own mitochondrial DNA studies, it was clear to them that the great majority of mitochondrial DNA lineages present in India today had resided in the subcontinent for many tens of thousands of years. 21 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 subcontinent.
Singh and Thangaraj suggested the term “genetic sharing” to describe the relationship between West Eurasians and Indians, a formulation that could imply common descent from an ancestral population. However, we knew from our genetic studies that a real and profound mixture between two different populations had occurred and made a contribution to the ancestry of almost every Indian living today, while their suggestion left open the possibility that no mixture had happened. We came to a standstill. At the time I felt that we were being prevented by political considerations from revealing what we had found.
That evening, as the fireworks of Diwali, one of the most important holidays of the Hindu year, crackled, and as young boys threw sparklers beneath the wheels of moving trucks outside our compound, Patterson and I holed up in his guest room at Singh and Thangaraj’s scientific institute and tried to understand what was going on. The cultural resonances of our findings gradually became clear to us. So we groped toward a formulation that would be scientifically accurate as well as sensitive to these issues.
The next day, the full group reconvened in Singh’s office. We sat together and came up with new names for ancient Indian groups. We wrote that the people of India today are the outcome of mixtures between two highly differentiated populations, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who before their mixture were as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians are today. The ANI are related to Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus, but we made no claim about the location of their homeland or any migrations. The ASI descend from a population not related to any present-day populations outside India. We showed that the ANI and ASI had mixed dramatically in India. The result is that everyone in mainland India today is a mix, albeit in different proportions, of ancestry related to West Eurasians, and ancestry more closely related to diverse East Asian and South Asian populations. No group in India can claim genetic purity.[unquote] (Reich, David, 2018, Who we are and how we got here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, pp. 134-5).
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, David ReichOxford University Press, 29-Mar-2018 - Science - 320 pages |