India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says - National Geographic -

.
National Geographic

India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

January 10, 2006

Some excerpts :

Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports.

The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages—but it absorbed few genes—from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida.

The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years.

That theory is bolstered by the presence of Indo-European languages in India, the archaeological record, and historic sources such as the Rig Veda, an early Indian religious text.

Some previous genetic studies have also supported the concept.

But Kashyap's findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, stand at odds with those results.
.