Was The Indian Sub-Continent The
Original Genetic Homeland Of The Europeans?
By
Subash Kak
Did Indians migrate to Europe as early
as 3300 BC?
Iceman’ theories are often promoted by the
colonialist historians and their successors in the field of ancient Indian
history. They seem to do that like the eponymous character of The
Iceman Cometh, one of the most famous plays by the great American writer
Eugene O’Neill, which deals with how people hold on to delusions that provide
meaning to their lives only to be shattered by an individual who calls them out
for what they are.
The beginnings of this story go back to September
1991. Two tourists found the body of a person, now named
Ötzi the Iceman, frozen at 10,000 feet on the Alps near the Austria-Italy
border. A variety of medical tests showed that he died around 3300 BC. This is the oldest known natural human mummy
in Europe that has provided much information on Chalcolithic (Copper and Bronze
Age) Europeans.
DNA tests have shown that the Iceman has living
relatives in Austria. Microevolution, as in the mutations of the mitochondrial
DNA (inherited from the mother) and the Y chromosome (inherited from the
father), makes it possible to trace and connect populations across time and
region. When the random mutations are calibrated one has a genetic clock.
Other studies can complement the DNA evidence. Thus,
even without historical evidence related to the spread of the potato plant, a
scientist can deduce the Andean origin of the plant from the fact that there
exist many varieties of it in Peru and just a few lines in Asia, Europe, and
Africa.
Pathogens with distinct phylogeographic pattern can
also be used to reconstruct recent and ancient human migrations. Researchers at
the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) thought of doing so and they picked on
the stomach bacterium ‘Helicobacter pylori’, which is found in all
human populations, with two major strains that are Asian and African. The
modern Europeans have ‘H. pylori’ that is a hybrid between Asian and African
bacteria.
In research published in the 8 January, 2016 issue
of the Science Magazine, the EURAC authors announced that the Iceman’s stomach has ‘H. pylori’
that is of Indian origin (but now extinct) and not related to the hybrid
variety of the modern European “admixture.” This means that Indians as migrants
were present in Europe in 3300 BC.
This is the earliest example of a pattern that has
been repeated in history many a time. We have Mitanni kings with Sanskrit names
who ruled in Syria for centuries in the second millennium BC. The Gundestrup
cauldron found in a peat bog in Denmark and estimated to have been made about
2000 years ago has images of Indian deities on it (including, most strikingly,
that of a goddess worshiped by two elephants, Gajalakshmi), and thus may have
been done by craftsmen of Indian origin, perhaps in Thrace. Trade between India and the West has been traced back to the
third millennium BC. Such continuing interaction must have led to
diffusion of art and culture.
Now let’s go back to DNA evidence harnessed to
reconstruct ancient migrations. An extensive genetic study of today’s
Europeans, which was published in June 2015 by the journal Nature, shows that
they descend from three groups. First of these are the
hunter-gatherers who arrived about 45,000 years ago and then came farmers from
the Near East about 8,000 years ago. Finally, nomadic sheepherders from western Russia, called
the Yamnaya, arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the study
suggest that the Yamnaya language most likely gave rise to many of the
languages spoken in Europe today. Apparently, Yamnaya were speakers of a Sanskritic
(Indo-European) language, and the wave that came in 8,000 years ago might also
have been Indo-European.
The Iceman findings appear to corroborate this study
as well as the work of Stephen Oppenheimer, who
in his book The Real Eve, synthesized the available genetic
evidence together with climatology and archeology with conclusions which have
bearing on the debate about the post-migration population of India.
Much of Oppenheimer’s theory is based on
mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the mother, and Y chromosomes, inherited
by males from the father. According to him, modern man
left Africa approximately 90,000 years ago, heading east along the Indian
Ocean, and established settlements in India. It was only during a break
in glacial activity 50,000 years ago, when deserts turned into grasslands, that
people left India and headed northwest into the Russian
steppes and on into Eastern Europe, as well as northeast through China and over
the now submerged Bering Strait into the Americas.
Oppenheimer makes two major conclusions:
First, that the Europeans’ genetic homeland was originally in South Asia
in the Pakistan/Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, that the Europeans’ ancestors
followed at least two widely separated routes to arrive, ultimately, in
the same cold but rich garden. The earliest of these routes was the Fertile Crescent. The second early
route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on
to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first
started bringing down game as large as mammoths. (pp. 153-154 of The
Real Eve)
Oppenheimer’s ideas also help explain regularities
in languages that are spread widely across distant lands with an overlap in
India. Thus the Indo-Pacific family covers the languages of the Australian
aborigines and the Papuans, the Austro-Asiatic cuts across from India to the
Pacific (the Munda in India, the Thai, and the Vietnamese), and the Dravidian
has connections with the Altaic (Japanese, Korean, and the Turkic).
The idea that the development of the Indo-European
languages took place in India explains how a variety of such languages are to
be found in the sub-continent. Both the so-called kentum and satem language
subfamilies are represented: Bangani is kentum, it is found in the
Himalayan region; and languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, and Assamese are satem.
References:
i. Taylor, The Gundestrup cauldron. Scientific
American, 266: 84-89 (1992)
ii.Oppenheimer, The Real Eve. Basic Books (2003)
iii.Kak, The Wishing Tree. Aditya Prakashan (2015)
iv. Maixner et al., The 5300-year-old Helicobacter
pylori genome of the Iceman. Science, 8 Jan 2016: Vol. 351, pp.
162-165 (2016)
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From
Posted by Allison Eck on Thu, 07 Jan 2016
In the long list of genomic “firsts,” scientists
have added another today: the oldest known pathogen ever sequenced. And it
comes from perhaps the most famous “iceman,” Ötzi,
who lived in the Alps of Central Europe more than 5,000 years ago. The secrets
lurking in its genome suggest surprisingly recent ancient migrations of people into Europe.
Ötzi was found on September 9, 1991 by German hikers
at an altitude of 10,000 feet near the Austrian-Italian border. He had a number
of physical ailments: Lyme disease, high levels of arsenic, tooth decay…and
yet, what killed Ötzi appeared to be an arrowhead, found in his left shoulder.
The weapon must have lacerated a major artery once it entered his body.
A little over five years ago, Albert Zink and his
colleagues at the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen (EURAC) decided to look for
the presence of pathogens and microorganism in Ötzi’s stomach. They were also
searching for a special bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.
Our bodies are host to around 100 trillion bacteria—H.
pylori is just one species, but it is present in more than 50% of the
world’s population. When it was first discovered, H. pylori was
thought to cause cancer and ulcers. However, most people with the bacterium do
not experience symptoms or complications, despite its association with
gastrointestinal problems. Instead, H. pylori appears to play
an important role in the overall gut ecosystem, and the absence of it is linked
to several immune and metabolic disorders.
Now, a team of scientists working with Zink and
microbiologist Frank Maixner—also from the EURAC—has processed Ötzi’s genomic
data to better understand the contents of his microbiome and what it can tell
us about our microbial “hitchhikers” through the ages. When the team first
placed samples from Ötzi’s stomach under the microscope, they were
skeptical as to whether or not they would see any H. pylori strains.
But once they extracted the entire DNA of the stomach’s contents, they were
able to isolate the H. pylori sequence.
What the team found is that this ancient strain of H. pylori belonged
to a now-extinct population of the bacterium that was first found in northern
India and other parts of southern Asia. In addition, the scientists found little evidence of the African
strain which is present in the modern European “admixture.”
“This puts things into wonderful perspective for us
with just one genome,” said study co-author Yoshan Moodley of the University of
Venda in South Africa. Since H. pylori has been floating
around inside the human microbiome for a long time, it has co-evolved with
humans, so genetic analyses of H. pylori strains can reflect
the history of human geography as a whole. What this new discovery shows is
that relatively recent migrations (after Ötzi’s time) must have occurred for
the European strain of H. pylori to become what it is today.
“This genome is very unique and gives us an idea of
what we can expect from the emerging field of microbiology in the future,” said
Thomas Rattei of the University of Vienna. “It allows us this absolutely unique
window into the Copper Age.”
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