The Dravidians who claim about a separate Tamil identity and describe the Hindi-speaking population in North India as Aryans suffered a major setback as an inter- continental team of genome experts and archaeologists conclusively proved beyond any doubt that there was never any Aryan invasion on the subcontinent from across the border.
The scientists were drawn from Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, Pune, Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology under the CSIR (Hyderabad) , Max Planck Institute ,Leipzig, Germany and University of California,USA.
The results of the comprehensive scientific research undertaken by the team has been published in Cell , an internationally reputed science journal that publishes such studies after peer-review. A team of scientists and technologists in the respective fields of study cross examine the findings and approve the same before the results appear in fine print in Cell.
The title of the scientific findings , which is described by genome scientists like Prof Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, Hyderabad and Prof Gyaneshwar Chaubey of Banarese Hindu University as the last nail on the coffin of the Dravidian theory is “Ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers”.
The research which focussed on human genomes as well as archaeological studies found that the Indus Valley population has no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting farming in South Asia arose from local foragers rather than from large-scale migration from the West, Prof Vasant Shinde, director, Deccan College told The Pioneer
He said this was the first ever “synchronised research” involving archaeologists and genome scientists that went into the controversial topic. The Dravidian political parties in Tamil Nadu have been harping on separate Dravidian identity for hundred years. Their argument was that the Aryans who invaded the Indus Valley drove away the Dravidians towards the southern part of the sub continent and annexed the fertile Indus Valley as well as Gangetic Plains.
The Indus Valley Civilization is one of the first large scale urban societies f the ancient world believed to have existed during the period 2600 to 1900 BCE. “But the DNA samples we collected from a Harappan cemetery in Rakhigarhi in Haryana proves that there is no trace of any foreign genetic presence in them which proves that people belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization had distinct genetic lineage,” said Prof Thangaraj of CCMB, Hyderabad.
Prof Shinde explained that had there been traces of genome from other sources like Iran or Steppe region in the samples collected from Rakhigarhi it could have been argued that there was annexation and cross breeding. “But the results negate the theory of Aryan-Dravidian divide and Aryan attacks of any kind,” said Prof Shinde.
Many research studies undertaken after the success of the human genome sequencing have repudiated the Aryan Invasion theory . In early 2011, scientists led by Prof Thangaraj and Prof Chaubey had demolished the claims of the Dravidians through DNA (basic units of life) research.
Prof Chaubey pointed out that the findings further prove that the Harappan population has contributed equally to the dissemination of the population across the sub-continent. “There is no population in any part of the country in which the Indus Valley lineage is absent,” said Prof Chaubey.
Leading Indologists like Nicholas Kazanas of the Omilos Meleton Cultural Institute at Athens has proved the fallacy behind the Dravidian theory. “There is no scientific, cultural or archaeological proofs that say there existed something like Dravidianism. India is the cradle of civilization which gave Vedas and Upanishads to the world. If some people do not want to be proud of that, well, they have some agendas,” Prof Kazanas had told this paper
