Namaste all,
This is a subject I have been studying a little recently. A friend of mine recently showed me this article:
http://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/6/994.full
which basically makes the point that ancient humans from West Eurasia migrated into India and created the caste system and put themselves in the castes of "higher rank". The evidence for it is that the genetic makeup for members of the high castes are more similar to European genetics than other the genetic makeup for other castes do. The article goes into great detail and can explain it better than I can.
On one hand, this sounds like a sort of watered-down AIT, but on another hand it does not seem so absurd. After all, haven't there been numerous different waves of migrations into India since the time the first humans migrated out of Africa? Please note that my friend is not a Christian (he is actually a former Catholic, now atheist) and does not have any sort of "agenda". He is actually against AIT and believes it's false. He just has an interest in anthropology and genealogy and studies it a lot. The point that he is trying to make is basically that each wave of migrations into India "contributed linguistically and culturally in some way or another. The populations mixed with the natives, took on native customs etc."
It was my understanding that the caste system had been around (in it's pure, unadulterated form) since the beginning of Vedic civilization, but I could be wrong as I don't know much about its history. Is it not correct that the Vedas were revealed to the ancient rishis, the Vedic civilization gradually developed and flourished, and during that time there were waves of migrations into India? So where does the caste system play into this? How can the similarity of the genetic makeups of high caste members and Europeans be explained? Another thing to note is that he said these weren't "Europeans" like we think of today, but rather "Eurasians" who came from no farther west than the Balkans.
Any thoughts on this, or can anyone point me to good sources about the historical waves of migration into India?
Jai Sri Ram
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