The Imperial

'Dravidians'(south indians is what I mean) were vedic, and not mleccha.

1991sudarshan

This is bad the historians during the colonial era made a Geographical name (Dravida )
into a racial name.

The Imperial

Finally! You realized it! Pappu pass hogaya!

Shaheen

Well basically since no massive "Aryan" migration into the Indus area has been proven, that means that at most there will have been many small migrations into the Punjab and Sindh. In either case the host population will always have outnumbered these migrants and thus the migrants will have merged into the locals rather than the other way around. So since the "causasian features" of the people of the Indus region can not be explained as a result of some grand migration by people from the north west, that can only lead one to state that the native population must have looked like that in the first place and that the migrants would have had a negligible impact on the hosts genetic make up.

A similar example would be that of the Turks of Anatolia. They have a Turkic culture, speak a Turkic language but look Anatolian because the host population must have outnumbered the migrant Turkic population. Similarily these Indo-European peoples coming into the Indus region from the north west Bactria and beyond, brought new languages and cultures to the Indus region but their small numbers if compared to the host populations will have meant that they would have merged with the hosts even if the locals consequently started speaking the language of the conquerors (just like the Anatolians in the case of the Turkic peoples).

I know this is speculation but really the lack of any massive Indo-European caucasian migration into the Indus region means the locals must have looked pretty much like they do today, whilst having adopted the culture and language of their conquerors.

_______

About Mesopotamia, all i know is that they were Semitic peoples. Dont know much more about them...

Frank81

Not the Sumerians, who spoke an isolated language. However, Sumerian have been linked to Caucasian languages. There are some Sumerian myths that tell how they went down from mountains to farm wheat in the plains, the Zagros?


Regarding IVC, the issue is complicated not only because of history but because of politics. It have been argued that genetics of India don't support a migration of conquerors due to the homogenity of genetic distribution. In my opinion this is not clear: Female genetic marks are uniform across the Hindustan, but male marks are not. Males show a higher western asian genetic marks in the northwest. It's the typical pattern of short conquering grops.

However, the genetic distribution can be the result of post IVC migrations. Anyway, as some of you have pointed, modern Punjabi and Shindi people seem to be the inheritors by blood (culture?) of IVC populations.

An interesting hypothesis points to Austro-Asiatic populations as the original inhabitants of India, with Munda people as the remaining group. But genetic studies point to a later arrival of these people, closely related with the introduction and expansion of rice from the northeast. That some Munda words, or para-Munda how they are known, are found in early Vedic texts according to some authors, points to a wider distribution of A-A in the past, maybe in contact with IVC.

1991sudarshan

The Word para is very offensive word in Tamil Nadu. You can prosecuted under law ( In India) if you use that word for addressing people from other or people from lower caste background if they are deeply hurt by it.

Frank81

Well, sorry for the offended ones

The greek prefix "para-", widely used in international scientific language, means "resembling, near". Para-Munda languages means so "resembling Munda languages".

1991sudarshan

Yeah i know the greek prefix para. But when it is used as para-munda(i) turns into a vulgar word in Tamil

Midas

What you said first is true. Sumerian is an isolate. I have a friend who is doing research on Caucasian and has Sumerian merit as well. He doesn't see any link at all.

Illumanation

It is a similar to scientific latin names. Our modern names like hydrogen would have been used by the Roman. In the same case, Dravida means ocean. It can be used for linguistic purposes, but we must remember, these were not a distinct people in ancient India.