Sorry if it came of as rude .I liked the article.It is just that I am tired of listening to hindus preaching for tolerance and secularism ( I interpreted the comment to which I replied to as the same sort of stuff )
I don't know why Indians prefer "invasion by people from Iran" over "invasion by people from Russia", but it is almost as unfounded as Out-of-India. The Southern Arc hypothesis wouldn't place IE in Iran, it would almost certainly be in the Southern Caucasus because the entire reason for its existence is Anatolia/Lev ancestry being mediated from the South in Yamnaya rather than the North. It's irrelevant these days because now we know this ancestry already existed north of the Caucasus before 5000 BC. Even if Southern Arc placed IE in Iran, it is still completely in support of an Andronovo-derived Indo-Aryan migration between 2000 and 1500 BC. It makes no sense to quote Reich when discussing Heggarty Hypothesis, because the two theories are far more different from each other than Reich's theory is to the Steppe hypothesis. No justification which Reich uses for a transcaucasian origin applies to Indo-Iranic.
While there isn't a great deal of literary or archaeological evidence for an Indo-Aryan migration, there is a great deal of literary and archaeological evidence associating Late Andronovo with early Iranians. Also, there are other Indo-European migrations which did not result in archaeological discontinuity. For example, Middle Helladic pottery isn't derivative of the Catacomb Culture, and reflects a continuity of the earlier tradition, and Yamnaya influence in the Balkans was ephemeral in general and got replaced by Corded Ware, pre-Yamnaya, and Neolithic traditions. The Indo-Aryans, like the Greeks, were a small militant elite that were not the ones making pottery in their new homelands.
CHG and Iran_Neo are related but diverged during the Mesolithic, way earlier than even the Heggarty Hypothesis would suggest as the origin of the Indo-European languages. The population that introduced CHG to Yamnaya was likely not the population which introduced Iran_N to India or Central Asia.
Not all Iranians have significant BMAC DNA, or should I say, had. Cimmerians, Altai Scythians, European Scythians, and the earliest archaeologically Scythian cultures (Tagar, Karasuk, Mezhovskaya) have little BMAC ancestry, if any.
As for heggarty, plz read Kassian's recent refutation of the Heggarty paper.
2. These anachronisms are explained away with contrived arguments that go against the consensus (ex: late PIE did not have words for vehicles, domesticated horses)
3. Several of the nodes predicted are only predicted with low probability and don't line up with the archaeological justification for the Heggarty tree, and are just in general flying in the face of prior linguistic consensus (ex: Tocharian and Albanian splitting off at the same time as Greco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian)
As far as Chariots go, the first spoke-wheeled Chariots were definitely invented on the Steppe. It's simply not true that Chariots arose out of onager-drawn solid-wheeled wagons. The introduction of the Chariot proper starts only around the time the Mitanni Aryans reach Syria. The term for chariot warriors used as far as Egypt was Indo-Aryan in origin. The Chariot used by the Egyptians and Hittites was much closer to those found in the Sintashta Culture than anything in Sumer. The Sinauli "chariot" is not a chariot, but even if you assume it is meant to be chariot-like in appearance it is quite likely that non-local mostly Andronovo-derived people were buried at Sinauli. I don't know if you were around for that debacle, but basically an Indian academic who worked at Sinauli threatened to sue someone for leaking a Dashtiqozy-like sample from Sinauli (albeit, probably low quality). I don't know what Shahr-i-Sokhta chariot you speak of, but the pottery shown is not from Shahr-i-Sokhta and is either from the Lut Desert or Tepe Giyan in the Zagros Mountains. The only information about it at all online is from a very sparse Louvre page with a date of 2000-1800 BC but as far as I know this is not derived from any carbon date and is based on the layers of Tepe Giyan. Even the 2000-1800 BC date is compatible with a northern origin of chariots but there really isn't any meaningful info on this vase online. Chariots could have spread into India without linguistic or genetic influence but the emphasis on horses and chariots in the Vedas does not correspond to their relative absence in IVC remains. You wouldn't expect a single horse burial, you would expect a great deal as well as a great deal of horse iconography. If what is found at Arkaim is not a Chariot then what is found in IVC/Iran probably isn't either.
There is good reason to believe that the Saraswati described in RV books 2-7 is in fact the Haraxvaiti (Arghandab-Helmand) in Afghanistan, which is cognate and shares many characteristics with the described Saraswati. The region of Arachosia derives its name from Haraxvaiti. The Ghaggar did not fully dry up until the middle ages, but it was no longer a powerful river and may have dried up for parts of the year. It is possible that the Saraswati refers to multiple rivers, referring to the Haraxvaiti early on and then later on referring to the ever-weakening Ghaggar. The spread of river names to unrelated rivers is a common feature of Indo-European hydronymy and this could be the case even when it is a river of particular religious significance. It would not be the first time something like that happened. The Saraswati is never said to drain into the ocean, it is just said to drain into a large body of water.
You're going to have to elaborate on the evidence of the Vedic tribes being an "urban" people. Southern Andronovo (Tazabagyab, Chust) were only really semi-nomadic and were already engaging in a good deal of agriculture. Even in pastoral societies, rain is extremely important because drought means no pasture. Rivers are important no matter what, people need water to survive and rivers are a great source of transportation and extra food. Mercantile peoples are very often total nomads, though, such as the Turkic and Scytho-Sogdian groups who kept the early Silk Road propped up. Seafaring is also completely compatible with pastoral life. The Indo-Europeans, when in Europe, became sea-nomads and horses became associated with the sea and boats in both Greece and Scandinavia. The Druhyus and Pakhtas are Indo-Aryan tribes, and it would make no sense for them to be BMAC. BMAC was very far away from the Kuru Kingdom and would have been of little relevance to anything going on in the IVC or in the region after. I don't know where Parni is mentioned in the Vedas. Dasyu=Dahae and Parsu=Persian are not strong etymologies. Neither group was anywhere near the area where the Vedas were taking place. Indra is not a demon in early Zoroastrianism and his identity as a demon in later Zoroastrianism is almost certainly not due to some sort of Indo-Iranic schism, especially since Verethragna is probably also derived from Indra.
Steppe DNA in South Asia is not "too late" because it actually corresponds quite perfectly with what the vast majority of linguists consider the actual reasonable dating of the Indo-European languages. It is too late to Heggarty, who is heterodox. TKM_IA is very clearly an early East Iranian, so he definitely wouldn't be "going into India". It is very genetically similar to modern Tajiks, just with less East Asian, and it is a Yaz II sample. Yaz II shows very clear signs of Zoroastrian ritual and it is in the same area as the 16 good lands. It also continues into the historical period when we know very well that this area was Iranic. This sample is way more distant from India than the Andronovo samples from Kokcha, Dashtiqozi, and Ferghana. Steppe ancestry was already in South Asia by the late 2nd millennium BC as shown by the Gandhara Graves samples.
It is very unlikely that Scythians contributed much at all to the Indian genome. The Sakas who invaded India had substantial Siberian ancestry which would make modeling Indians as AASI + Zagros + Sintashta quite bad. And yet, most Indian groups model very well with just this. There is no need for BMAC, no need for Siberian. Maybe in the east there is a need for something Han-like or SEA, but definitely not Siberian. The best BMAC-admixed proxy for Steppe in India, if any is, is the low-steppe Kokcha sample which is around 70% Sintashta + 30% BMAC, but you don't need that anyways.
Do you have evidence that Rors/Jats are non-indigenous? Where would they even have come from? Rors at least, have more Steppe ancestry than any Indo-Iranian population other than Tajiks, but they are very clearly not Tajik-descended. Rors are definitely not getting their Steppe from Sakas.
The ancient samples from Iran are all from Mazandaran and Gilan, which today are the lowest Steppe areas in Iran. Wait for samples from Persis, Media, and especially Khorasan and Parthia before making any judgements. The Indian epics are obviously full of anachronisms, ex: Greeks being in Vedic India.
I have observed many Hindus commenting online that Muslim Pakistanis are Hindu converts or that their forefathers converted to Islam. Maybe, except for some Punjabis and Sindhis, I do not agree with their conclusion. I support your finding that the people in that part of the world (Pak, Afghan, Balochistan, Iran) have always been different to the Vedic Hindus of the IVC.
But going forward, I feel that Hindus must disown their tribal affiliations and spread the universal truths of Hindu faith that are applicable to all Jivas in the world. And they have done this in the past when they went to SE Asia and married into royal families there. We must not become an ethnicity based religion like Judaism. To do this, leadership matters and we are lucky to have a right-minded Hindu leader at the helm of affairs.
Well they were either Hindu, Zoroastrian, or Buddhist. Almost all dynasties that ruled in the region followed one of the three.
While Iranians have always been different due to Zoroastrianism, Afghans did historically follow Buddhism more than Zoroastrianism.
Like how Punjabis or Sindhis may have had Zoroastrian influence, Balochis and Afghans (east Iranians) did have Hindu influences too. The Paratarajas for example were possibly Hindu. The Kabul Shahi definitely were.
If we look at it, Pakistan was ruled by Zoroastrian Iranian dynasties, Indian Hindu dynasties, or nomadic dynasties that invaded through Afghanistan that more often than not, converted to Buddhism. The thing is, there were hardly any dynasties in Pakistan’s history that were native (Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, or Baloch) as it was almost always ruled by outsiders. The few native Sindhi dynasties though were Hindu and Buddhist.
Sorry if it came of as rude .I liked the article.It is just that I am tired of listening to hindus preaching for tolerance and secularism ( I interpreted the comment to which I replied to as the same sort of stuff )
My journal does not preach secularism. Its called the “Hindutva Chronicle” for a reason ;)
This is a scholarly take on this subject. Thanks for painstakingly referring to all the sources and writing this.
I don't know why Indians prefer "invasion by people from Iran" over "invasion by people from Russia", but it is almost as unfounded as Out-of-India. The Southern Arc hypothesis wouldn't place IE in Iran, it would almost certainly be in the Southern Caucasus because the entire reason for its existence is Anatolia/Lev ancestry being mediated from the South in Yamnaya rather than the North. It's irrelevant these days because now we know this ancestry already existed north of the Caucasus before 5000 BC. Even if Southern Arc placed IE in Iran, it is still completely in support of an Andronovo-derived Indo-Aryan migration between 2000 and 1500 BC. It makes no sense to quote Reich when discussing Heggarty Hypothesis, because the two theories are far more different from each other than Reich's theory is to the Steppe hypothesis. No justification which Reich uses for a transcaucasian origin applies to Indo-Iranic.
While there isn't a great deal of literary or archaeological evidence for an Indo-Aryan migration, there is a great deal of literary and archaeological evidence associating Late Andronovo with early Iranians. Also, there are other Indo-European migrations which did not result in archaeological discontinuity. For example, Middle Helladic pottery isn't derivative of the Catacomb Culture, and reflects a continuity of the earlier tradition, and Yamnaya influence in the Balkans was ephemeral in general and got replaced by Corded Ware, pre-Yamnaya, and Neolithic traditions. The Indo-Aryans, like the Greeks, were a small militant elite that were not the ones making pottery in their new homelands.
CHG and Iran_Neo are related but diverged during the Mesolithic, way earlier than even the Heggarty Hypothesis would suggest as the origin of the Indo-European languages. The population that introduced CHG to Yamnaya was likely not the population which introduced Iran_N to India or Central Asia.
Not all Iranians have significant BMAC DNA, or should I say, had. Cimmerians, Altai Scythians, European Scythians, and the earliest archaeologically Scythian cultures (Tagar, Karasuk, Mezhovskaya) have little BMAC ancestry, if any.
As for heggarty, plz read Kassian's recent refutation of the Heggarty paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04986-7
Some of the criticisms he makes are:
1. The proposed datings are anachronistic
(see: https://zenodo.org/records/10113208 )
2. These anachronisms are explained away with contrived arguments that go against the consensus (ex: late PIE did not have words for vehicles, domesticated horses)
3. Several of the nodes predicted are only predicted with low probability and don't line up with the archaeological justification for the Heggarty tree, and are just in general flying in the face of prior linguistic consensus (ex: Tocharian and Albanian splitting off at the same time as Greco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian)
As far as Chariots go, the first spoke-wheeled Chariots were definitely invented on the Steppe. It's simply not true that Chariots arose out of onager-drawn solid-wheeled wagons. The introduction of the Chariot proper starts only around the time the Mitanni Aryans reach Syria. The term for chariot warriors used as far as Egypt was Indo-Aryan in origin. The Chariot used by the Egyptians and Hittites was much closer to those found in the Sintashta Culture than anything in Sumer. The Sinauli "chariot" is not a chariot, but even if you assume it is meant to be chariot-like in appearance it is quite likely that non-local mostly Andronovo-derived people were buried at Sinauli. I don't know if you were around for that debacle, but basically an Indian academic who worked at Sinauli threatened to sue someone for leaking a Dashtiqozy-like sample from Sinauli (albeit, probably low quality). I don't know what Shahr-i-Sokhta chariot you speak of, but the pottery shown is not from Shahr-i-Sokhta and is either from the Lut Desert or Tepe Giyan in the Zagros Mountains. The only information about it at all online is from a very sparse Louvre page with a date of 2000-1800 BC but as far as I know this is not derived from any carbon date and is based on the layers of Tepe Giyan. Even the 2000-1800 BC date is compatible with a northern origin of chariots but there really isn't any meaningful info on this vase online. Chariots could have spread into India without linguistic or genetic influence but the emphasis on horses and chariots in the Vedas does not correspond to their relative absence in IVC remains. You wouldn't expect a single horse burial, you would expect a great deal as well as a great deal of horse iconography. If what is found at Arkaim is not a Chariot then what is found in IVC/Iran probably isn't either.
There is good reason to believe that the Saraswati described in RV books 2-7 is in fact the Haraxvaiti (Arghandab-Helmand) in Afghanistan, which is cognate and shares many characteristics with the described Saraswati. The region of Arachosia derives its name from Haraxvaiti. The Ghaggar did not fully dry up until the middle ages, but it was no longer a powerful river and may have dried up for parts of the year. It is possible that the Saraswati refers to multiple rivers, referring to the Haraxvaiti early on and then later on referring to the ever-weakening Ghaggar. The spread of river names to unrelated rivers is a common feature of Indo-European hydronymy and this could be the case even when it is a river of particular religious significance. It would not be the first time something like that happened. The Saraswati is never said to drain into the ocean, it is just said to drain into a large body of water.
You're going to have to elaborate on the evidence of the Vedic tribes being an "urban" people. Southern Andronovo (Tazabagyab, Chust) were only really semi-nomadic and were already engaging in a good deal of agriculture. Even in pastoral societies, rain is extremely important because drought means no pasture. Rivers are important no matter what, people need water to survive and rivers are a great source of transportation and extra food. Mercantile peoples are very often total nomads, though, such as the Turkic and Scytho-Sogdian groups who kept the early Silk Road propped up. Seafaring is also completely compatible with pastoral life. The Indo-Europeans, when in Europe, became sea-nomads and horses became associated with the sea and boats in both Greece and Scandinavia. The Druhyus and Pakhtas are Indo-Aryan tribes, and it would make no sense for them to be BMAC. BMAC was very far away from the Kuru Kingdom and would have been of little relevance to anything going on in the IVC or in the region after. I don't know where Parni is mentioned in the Vedas. Dasyu=Dahae and Parsu=Persian are not strong etymologies. Neither group was anywhere near the area where the Vedas were taking place. Indra is not a demon in early Zoroastrianism and his identity as a demon in later Zoroastrianism is almost certainly not due to some sort of Indo-Iranic schism, especially since Verethragna is probably also derived from Indra.
Steppe DNA in South Asia is not "too late" because it actually corresponds quite perfectly with what the vast majority of linguists consider the actual reasonable dating of the Indo-European languages. It is too late to Heggarty, who is heterodox. TKM_IA is very clearly an early East Iranian, so he definitely wouldn't be "going into India". It is very genetically similar to modern Tajiks, just with less East Asian, and it is a Yaz II sample. Yaz II shows very clear signs of Zoroastrian ritual and it is in the same area as the 16 good lands. It also continues into the historical period when we know very well that this area was Iranic. This sample is way more distant from India than the Andronovo samples from Kokcha, Dashtiqozi, and Ferghana. Steppe ancestry was already in South Asia by the late 2nd millennium BC as shown by the Gandhara Graves samples.
It is very unlikely that Scythians contributed much at all to the Indian genome. The Sakas who invaded India had substantial Siberian ancestry which would make modeling Indians as AASI + Zagros + Sintashta quite bad. And yet, most Indian groups model very well with just this. There is no need for BMAC, no need for Siberian. Maybe in the east there is a need for something Han-like or SEA, but definitely not Siberian. The best BMAC-admixed proxy for Steppe in India, if any is, is the low-steppe Kokcha sample which is around 70% Sintashta + 30% BMAC, but you don't need that anyways.
Do you have evidence that Rors/Jats are non-indigenous? Where would they even have come from? Rors at least, have more Steppe ancestry than any Indo-Iranian population other than Tajiks, but they are very clearly not Tajik-descended. Rors are definitely not getting their Steppe from Sakas.
The ancient samples from Iran are all from Mazandaran and Gilan, which today are the lowest Steppe areas in Iran. Wait for samples from Persis, Media, and especially Khorasan and Parthia before making any judgements. The Indian epics are obviously full of anachronisms, ex: Greeks being in Vedic India.
I have observed many Hindus commenting online that Muslim Pakistanis are Hindu converts or that their forefathers converted to Islam. Maybe, except for some Punjabis and Sindhis, I do not agree with their conclusion. I support your finding that the people in that part of the world (Pak, Afghan, Balochistan, Iran) have always been different to the Vedic Hindus of the IVC.
But going forward, I feel that Hindus must disown their tribal affiliations and spread the universal truths of Hindu faith that are applicable to all Jivas in the world. And they have done this in the past when they went to SE Asia and married into royal families there. We must not become an ethnicity based religion like Judaism. To do this, leadership matters and we are lucky to have a right-minded Hindu leader at the helm of affairs.
Well they were either Hindu, Zoroastrian, or Buddhist. Almost all dynasties that ruled in the region followed one of the three.
While Iranians have always been different due to Zoroastrianism, Afghans did historically follow Buddhism more than Zoroastrianism.
Like how Punjabis or Sindhis may have had Zoroastrian influence, Balochis and Afghans (east Iranians) did have Hindu influences too. The Paratarajas for example were possibly Hindu. The Kabul Shahi definitely were.
If we look at it, Pakistan was ruled by Zoroastrian Iranian dynasties, Indian Hindu dynasties, or nomadic dynasties that invaded through Afghanistan that more often than not, converted to Buddhism. The thing is, there were hardly any dynasties in Pakistan’s history that were native (Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, or Baloch) as it was almost always ruled by outsiders. The few native Sindhi dynasties though were Hindu and Buddhist.
So just forgive what muslims did to us.No thank you .we have seen what this kind of tolerance leads to .
Muslims slaughtered all 3 Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Hindus from Iran to Pakistan. And in India they did the exact same.
We should obviously not forgive this especially when their religion is predicated on killing polytheists.