Where did the Indo-Aryan languages come from?
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Did the speakers of early Sanskrit come into India from Central Asia, or did the Indo-European languages spread out of India? New ancient-DNA studies have changed this old debate.
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Indian claim
The 'Indigenous Aryans' or 'Out of India' view: Vedic culture grew in India itself, possibly from the Harappan civilisation, and there was no Aryan invasion or migration.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- The old 'Aryan invasion' story, of conquerors who destroyed Harappan cities, has been abandoned by archaeologists; there is no evidence of such a conquest.
- The Rakhigarhi study (Shinde et al., Cell, 2019) found that the Harappan individual had no detectable steppe ancestry, and that the Harappan-related population is the largest source of ancestry for people in South Asia today.
- There is strong cultural continuity from Harappan times into later India in crafts, farming and settlement, as supporters of the indigenous view stress.
Commonly credited to
The migration view: people with ancestry from the Central Asian steppe moved into South Asia in the second millennium BCE and brought early Indo-Aryan speech, which mixed with the existing population.
Evidence for the other claim
- Narasimhan et al. (Science, 2019), with 523 ancient genomes, found that steppe ancestry entered South Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE, and today makes up a part (up to about 30%) of the ancestry of some groups.
- The same Rakhigarhi finding (no steppe ancestry in the Harappan) fits the view that steppe ancestry arrived after the Harappan period.
- Linguists note that Indo-Aryan is closest to Iranian languages, and that Indo-Aryan names of gods appear in a treaty of the Mitanni kingdom in Syria (about 1380 BCE), outside India.
What historians and scientists say
Most geneticists and linguists today accept a gradual migration and mixing in the second millennium BCE, not a violent invasion. People in India descend mainly from Harappan-related and older South Asian populations, with a smaller steppe-related share. Supporters of the indigenous view continue to contest how much this tells us about language and culture.