User:Joshua Jonathan/Dravidian migration

Research-question

So, where did the Dravidians come from? Were they always there, in India - or did they also arrive in India by migration?

Possible sources

Books

• Google Books "Dravidian migration"

• Fuller, D Q (2003a) “An agricultural perspective on Dravidian historical linguistics: archaeological crop packages, livestock and Dravidian crop vocabulary”, in C Renfrew & P Bellwood (eds), Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
• David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1 (1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)
• Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-77111-5.
• Bellwood, Peter (2013). First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-8909-5.
• R. C. Majumdar (1977), Ancient India, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
• Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1980), The Scheduled Tribes of India, Transaction Publishers

Websites

• Is the Harappan civilisation 2000 years older?
• The Ethnic, Linguistic and Religious Composition of india - "The Australoid or Oceanic race remains only in a few pockets in South-Asia (Boyd 1963)"

Wikipedia

• Elamo-Dravidian languages
• Peopling of India
• Indo-Aryan peoples
• Australoid race
• Andaman Islands
• Nicobar Islands
• Andamanese people
• Irulas
• Kurukh people
• Korku people
• Sarnaism

Migrations

Australoid migrations

See also: Indo-Aryan peoples § Origins

The first people to have settled in India during Paleolithic times appear to have been an Australoid group who may have been closely related to Aboriginal Australians. From a genetic anthropological point of view, the research of Basu et al. (2003) indicates that:

1. there is an underlying unity of female lineages in India, indicating that the initial number of female settlers may have been small;
2. the tribal and the caste populations are highly differentiated;
3. the Austro-Asiatic tribals are the earliest settlers in India, providing support to one anthropological hypothesis while refuting some others;
4. a major wave of humans entered India through the northeast;
5. the Tibeto-Burman tribals share considerable genetic commonalities with the Austro-Asiatic tribals, supporting the hypothesis that they may have shared a common habitat in southern China, but the two groups of tribals can be differentiated on the basis of Y-chromosomal haplotypes;
6. the Dravidian tribals were possibly widespread throughout India before the arrival of the Indo-European-speaking nomads, but retreated to southern India to avoid dominance;
7. formation of populations by fission that resulted in founder and drift effects have left their imprints on the genetic structures of contemporary populations;
8. the upper castes show closer genetic affinities with Central Asian populations, although those of southern India are more distant than those of northern India;
9. historical gene flow into India has contributed to a considerable obliteration of genetic histories of contemporary populations so that there is at present no clear congruence of genetic and geographical or sociocultural affinities."

Caucasoid and Mongoloid migrations

Main article: Peopling of India § Caucasoid and Mongoloid migrations

See also: Peopling of India and Toba catastrophe theory

Subsequent to the Australoids, some anthropologists and geneticists theorize that Caucasoids (including both Elamo-Dravidians and Indo-Aryans) and Mongoloids (Sino-Tibetans) immigrated into India. The Elamo-Dravidians possibly from Iran, the Indo-Aryans possibly from the Central Asian steppes and the Tibeto-Burmans possibly from the Himalayan and north-eastern borders of the subcontinent.

None of these hypotheses is free from debate and disagreement. In particular, the caucasoid feature of Indians have been explained by Disotell. This is the authors conclusion,

The supposed Aryan invasion of India 3,000–4,000 years before present therefore did not make a major splash in the Indian gene pool. This is especially counter-indicated by the presence of equal, though very low, frequencies of the western Eurasian mtDNA types in both southern and northern India. Thus, the ‘caucasoid’ features of south Asians may best be considered ‘pre-caucasoid’— that is, part of a diverse north or north east African gene pool that yielded separate origins for western Eurasian and southern Asian populations over 50,000 years ago.

Darvidians "neolithic farmers"

• Dissecting the influence of Neolithic demic diffusion on Indian Y-chromosome pool through J2-M172 haplogroup "Comparison of our data with worldwide data, including Y-STRs of 1157 individuals and haplogroup frequencies of 6966 individuals, suggested a complex scenario that cannot be explained by a single wave of agricultural expansion from Near East to South Asia."
• Haak et al. (2010) Ancient DNA from European Early Neolithic Farmers Reveals Their Near Eastern Affinities
• Eurogenes blogspot Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) and the Indo-European question "After all, many Dravidian groups that in all likelihood never spoke Indo-Aryan languages carry significant ratios of West Eurasian ancestry. Some of this influence can be explained by admixture with Indo-Aryans, but uniparental markers suggest that much of it was brought from West Asia by the Proto-Dravidians (see here)."
• Eurogenes blogspot West Eurasian mtDNA lineages in India "two autochthonous subhaplogroups-HV14a1 and U1a1a4, which are likely to have originated in the Dravidian-speaking populations approximately 10.5-17.9 thousand years ago (kya). The carriers of these maternal lineages might have settled in South India during the time of the spread of the Dravidian language."
• Aryans displaced Dravidians in north India, but Dravidians displaced Tribals in south India
• Evidence Regarding Dravidian Linguistic Origins "Dravidian may very well predate Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia, but probably only by 1,000 to 1,500 years, and probably predates Indo-Aryan languages by a shorter time in Western India and Sindh."
• Ancestral Echoes in Indian Genes -- II By Prabir Purkayastha :

"In 1981, McAlpin (quoted by Cavelli-Sforza in his book co-authored with Menozzi and Piazza, 1994) deciphered the Elamite language (Elam is the Biblical name for an area in south western Iran with extensive contacts with Mesopotamia) which was written down in the cuneiform script and therefore not difficult to decipher. According to McAlpin, the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian group of languages. This is the basis of Renfrew’s current conjecture (and also independently by Cavelli-Sforza) that the southward thrust of the Neolithic farmers from the Iranian horn of the Fertile Crescent to India was of Proto Dravidian speakers. The Mehargarh site in India, which is the oldest Neolithic site in South Asia (dated as 7,000 BCE), is at the foot of the Bolan-pass and leads into Indian sub-continent from South Iran. This is consistent with Neolithic farmers taking this route into India from the Fertile Crescent. If McAlpin’s linguistic analysis were correct, it would mean that the Dravidian-speaking farmers populated the area from Iran to South India, along with a more ancient Austric speaking people of hunters and food gatherers in India. This would then strengthen the arguments for the Indus Valley civilisation to be Dravidian speaking. There is further corroborative evidence in that a number of signs of Harappan origin seem to appear in the Elamite tablets."

Dravidian Harappan ANI

The ANI-component in the Indian genepool were the Dravidian Harappans, who came from Iran/Levant, bringing with them farming, R1a and lactose-tolerance. Due to farming their population grew rapidly, and they started to colonialise the rest of India. The Indo-Europeans were only a minor addition to this genepool, though a major cultural and linguistic influence.

It's pretty obvious:

• ~50,000 YA split between Asians and Eurasiana (ASI-ANI) (Dolgin on Reich 2009)
• ~45,000 YA split between EGH (European Gather-Hunteres) and EF (Early Farmers)/CGH (Caucasian Gather-Hunterers) (Jones 2015)
• ~25,000 YA split (Jones 2015) between CGH (contributed to IE) and EF (contributed to Dravidians)
• ca. 5,000 YA Dravidians into northern India, bringing with them farming (MacAlpin, Renfrew, Cavalli-Sforza), Dravidian language, R1a (Underhill 2014) and lactose-tolerance (Gallego Romero 2011; according to Allentoft Indo-Europeans were lactose-intolerant)
• 2,600 BCE onset Harappan civilisation; Dravidian speaking (Asko Parpola); rapid growth of population due to farming (Bellwood & Oxenham)
• 2,200 BCE onset colonisation of southern India by Dravidians over land (Deccan plateau) and over sea (westcoast)(sea-farers and traders!); admixture and language shift (Palanichamy 2015)
• 1,900 decline of Harappan cities, c.q. relocation
• ca. 1,800-1,600 BCE onset Indo-European migrations; Dravidian loans into Rig Veda, ergo, they were the ANI, ergo the Dravidians were Eurasian
• ca. 1,200 BCE rise of Kuru Kingdom (Witzel); genetically mix of Harappans and Indo-Aryans; culturally mix of Harappan remains and Indo-European language and religion; start of Sanskritization (Witzel); start of second wave of admixture and language shift (Moorjani 2013: two waves of admixture; Palanichamy 2015: Indo-Europenas contributed to already existing stratification, and mixed with the higher strata)
• ca. 100 CE enforcement of caste endogamy

See also:

• Dravidian languages#Dravidian migrations
• Indo-Aryan migration theory#Genetics
• Talk:Indo-Aryan migration theory#Where are the ANI-loans? further forward.

• Characterizing the genetic differences between two distinct migrant groups from Indo-European and Dravidian speaking populations in India

Recent migrations

• Razib Khan (2015), Agriculture Came with Men to the Indian Subcontinent