the palm leaf

"The perennial concept of people, language and agriculture arriving in India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny,"

The proponents of the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory believe that Central Asian people bought agriculture to India. Also since we Indians descended from them, there should be some evidence for this in our genetic makeup.

May such theories are being put to rest now. Newly surfaced evidence shows that agriculture developed in Middle Ganga Valley much before Europe. Research by Oppenheimer, Michael Petraglia and Hannah James show that Europeans are descendents of people from India. Two recent genetic studies done in India dispute the European parenthood theory.

A study by scientists at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Calcutta has revealed that most present-day Indians are the descendants of early humans who began to arrive in India about 60,000 years ago. It suggests that modern Indians do not owe much genetic makeup to central Asians who arrived much later.

The findings do lend support to the migration of people from central Asia into India.

"Although we did find genetic signatures from central Asian populations in Indian communities, there are not enough (signatures) to prove large-scale mixture with local populations," research team leader Vijendra Kashyap told The Telegraph.

"The perennial concept of people, language and agriculture arriving in India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny," Kashyap and his colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Estonian Biocentre said in their research paper.[Aryan impact myth crumbles]

A separate study by Partha Mazumder at ISI Calcutta also proves that genetic signatures of Indian men are older than 10,000 years and this predates the arrival of Europeans in India.