Ethinic India: A Genomic View

A new paper titled Ethnic India: A genomic view with special reference to peopling and structure (via India Archaeology) reports on some interesting facts. The results are based on statistical analysis of DNA data from a large Indian population.

  • There is an underlying unity of female lineages in India indicating that the initial number of female settlers may have been small.
  • The studies support the hypothesis that Austro-Asiatic tribals are the earliest inhabitants of India.
  • In most cases we speak of immigration to India via the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Indus Valley route, the paper says that the Northeastern corridor also served as a passage to India. It suggests prot-Tibeto-Burman people leaving their homeland in the Yellow River basin and crossing the Himalayas to India.
  • The paper also comes up with data supporting the thesis that Dravidian speakers were widespread throughout India and when Indo-European language speaking people entered India and created the caste system, the Dravidian speakers would have retreated southwards.
  • Central Asia is supposed to have contributed in a major way to the Indian gene pool. Populations of North India are genetically closer to Central Asia. South Indians share less similarity and Northeast Indians share the least.

The most important immigration to India is that of the so called Aryans who came via the Pakistan-Afghanistan route. There was another wave of immigration via the northeast border though not much is mentioned about it. It has been proved that some people of Mizoram are related to Jews and belong to one of the Lost Tribes and they entered India via Burma. But that was only 300 years back.
Another point is that if South Indias share less similarity with Central Asians then the assertion that Thiyyas came from Kyrgistan may not be true.

Burrial urns in Palani

In the middle of this year some urns dating to about 800 BC were found in Adichanallur near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. Now some burrial urns from the period 3 BC to 3 AD have been found in Palani in Tamil Nadu.

The mouth of the urns was facing east. When contacted, A. Periasamy, curator, government museum at Palani said such urns, belonging to 3 B.C. and 3 AD, were widely used in Dindigul, Madurai, Thirunelveli and Coimbatore districts. Villagers described the vessel as `Pandu’ kuzhi.

“We excavated a large-size burial urn at Othaiyur in Dindigul taluk and displayed it in the museum”. Sometimes, urn would contain small pots, precious stones, coins and small knives. He would excavate the area after obtaining clearance from the district administration. [Two burial urns unearthed near Palani]

The site also has a picture of the urn

Treat Pakistan like a non-entity

Discarded Lies has a detailed analysis of the whole India, China, Kashmir, Pakistan, Osama scene and wonders why the United States treats a democratic India so badly.

Are we insane? Why are we now the only Security Council member refusing to support an Indian seat? It may be that China is manipulating us very skilfully, by having Pakistan escalate its demands so that we’ll continue to appease them and anger our more natural ally, India-while simultaneously buttering India up and patching over old tensions. Why is China suddenly India’s new best friend? Could it be that they realize Pakistan is a booby prize, to be used to harm our interests and then to be jettisoned?

Maybe it’s time to start treating Pakistan like a nonentity. Not like an enemy, we can’t afford that. But like the Palestinian Authority: a formless, largely fictional entity that is actually in the control of other forces, and not a real partner but the facade of one, deliberately designed to fool us into wasting large amounts of energy on irrelevant sideshows while malevolent forces gather. Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority are to sovereign government what shell corporations are to business. We appear to be taking Musharraf at face value, and it doesn’t seem very wise to me. [Discarded Lies: Pakistani Kashmir Escalation: China Playing Us For Patsies?]

Taking Musharraf at face value is never wise as he has been lying about everything and can betray anyone anytime. Even when it comes to America’s biggest enemy, he has been lying. But then people like Colin Powell are falling over for Musharraf and treating India insensitively. For America, dictators are always more charming than democracies.

The Lakes of Udaipur

Remember the Lake Palace in Udaipur, the place where James Bond met Octopussy. Now if you go there, you will be able to see the palace, but the lake is slowly disappearing.

The people of Udaipur are only now beginning to understand how the lake is more than just a beauty spot. In fact, it is part of a highly sophisticated rainwater catchment system planned in the 16th century. When the then Maharana of Mewar laid out the city as his new capital, he built dams to create Lake Pichola as part of a series of artificial lakes he constructed around the city. They are strategically placed so that if the monsoon fails over one lake, another will catch rainwater from the other side of the watershed that runs near Udaipur, and the lakes are interconnected.

But the state government is now, at last, taking steps in the right direction, say the people of Udaipur. They have started a major programme of reforestation for the denuded hills. Refilling Lake Pichola has been made the top priority, and the authorities have pledged to remove any villagers’ dams that are blocking the flow of water. They have also pledged to stop pumping drinking water out of the lake until it is restored to its former level.

Riding on horseback over the green lake-bed, Mr Joseph, the executive at the Lake Palace, says: “You know, some guests have told me Udaipur doesn’t need its lake. It still has so much to offer.” He points to the wild horses grazing. “You would never see them if the lake was full. They wouldn’t come down from the hills. The palace still has so much to offer.” And he is right. Even as he speaks, a traditional musical troupe is preparing to use the dry lake- bed as a performance area to entertain the guests. [Heat and dust consume India’s City of the Lakes via India Archaeology]

Udaipur was named so in 1572 in the name of Udai Singh who founded the place. From there the house of Mewar defied the might of the Mughal empire and was the base of the Rajputs. Udaipur is also the home of Bagheera, the panther in Jungle Book.

King Solomon's Ship

Last year this time a 1000 year old ship was discovered in Kerala. This year we have another ship discovered, but this one about 3000 years old in Israel and belongs to the era of King David and Solomon.

The remains, which have been carbon-dated to the ninth century B.C., include a huge stone anchor believed to be the largest ever unearthed. The wreckage is lying under a few inches of sand off the Mediterranean coast in shallow waters, and has yet to be examined extensively.

If the remains are indeed 3,000 years old, it would be the first archaeological artifact ever found from the era of the first kings of Israel, with the possible exception of several huge stones at the base of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Named for Dorus, son of the Greek sea god Poseidon, the hillside city was a major port for both conquerors and traders and is mentioned in the first Book of Kings. At its peak, the port had 200,000 residents.

“In King Solomon’s time, this was the major port for the Israelite kingdom,” said ancient boat specialist Yaacov Kahanov of Haifa University. “The island here off the coast is still called Taphath, after Solomon’s daughter.” [Archaeologist hopes 3,000-year-old wood is from ancient ship]

According to oral tradition Jews established trading contacts with Kerala during the time of Solomon. There are other traditions which claim that Jews came to Kerala during the time of King Nebuchadnezar of Babylon in 500 BC, the time of Buddha. But according to Romila Thapar in her book Early India, the Jews came to India in the tenth and eleventh century AD.

What was Hanuman's Speed ?

The mythologies are filled with people of superhuman powers. So in Ramayana we have Ravan with 10 heads and Hanuman who could fly from Lanka to the Himalayas. The fact is if such people existed, how come we don’t have 10 headed people now ? A Berkeley Professor has got interested in finding the truth behind all these symbols.

Ten-headed demon king Ravana of the Hindu epic Ramayana actually had one head and the other nine were its reflection on the nine large polished gems that he wore around his neck, an American scholar of Sanskrit has reasoned.

In a lecture in New Delhi titled, “How fast do monkeys fly? How long do demons sleep?” where he read commentaries on Sanskrit epic poetry, Goldman said ancient scholars like Nagoji Bhatta, Govindaraja, Maheshwara Teertha, Satyateertha and Madhava Yogendra tried to “track down the narrative” and explain through “scientific reasoning” the seeming exaggerations in the works. [Hanuman flew at 660 km per hour]

How will gems around the neck reflect the head ? And the “scientific” explanation is not on how monkeys could fly, but on how fast he could fly. I wonder what this professor teaches.

Buddhist Art

The Buddha did not want people to worship his image and so early representations of him were symbolic like his feet or a tree. But then as his teachings became Buddhism and spread out of India, many forms of art started appearing in various styles.

China’s attraction to the outside world went beyond art. I have shown in several studies that Buddhism spread over much of eastern Iran, as demonstrated by archaeology, place names and the imprint it left on Persian literature – idealized beauty was celebrated by the poets of early Islamic Iran, using explicitly Buddhist images and references to Buddhist shrines.
If the evidence of sculpture is anything to go by, it took three centuries for Buddhism to establish itself. The earliest dated Buddha image cast in bronze, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, is dated 338 A.D. Bronzes of the fourth century are scarce. Comparative abundance in the fifth century suggests a change in pace. Extraordinary bronzes were being cast by the end of the century, particularly in the northeastern provinces of Shaanxi and Hebei, at the heart of the territory long controlled by the Xianbei, Leidy remarks.
It may one day be possible to plot the route followed by Buddhist iconography first defined in present-day Afghanistan through Tajikistan into Chinese Turkistan up to Dunhuang, the Buddhist cave complex that retains to this day its Sogdian name “Throang(a),” adapted to Chinese pronunciation. This resulted in the first truly great works of Chinese Buddhist sculpture. A standing gilt bronze of the Buddha Shakyamuni from Mancheng in Hebei, dated 475, and a seated Buddha from Togeton, Hohhot, cq by Souren in Inner Mongolia, have smiles of radiant certainty, each with a nuance

Osama Hunters

B Raman thinks that besides the Americans, Osama bin Laden has one more enemy who is out to get him – the Shi’ites of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are hunting for bin Laden not because of any love or sympathy for the Americans, but for their own need for revenge.

That might be because they haven’t forgotten what he did to them in 1988. It was then that hundreds of Shi’ites of the Northern Areas (NA – Gilgit and Baltistan) of Pakistan, known before 1947 as the Northern Areas of Jammu and Kashmir, were massacred after a demand raised by them for the creation of an autonomous Shi’ite state called Karakoram, consisting of the Shi’ite majority areas of the NA, Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). Military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq called in bin Laden, then living in Peshawar, and his Sunni tribal hordes to carry out the massacre.

To avenge these deaths, a Shi’ite airman is believed to have caused an explosion on board the aircraft in which Zia was travelling from Bahawalpur to Islamabad in August 1988. This was followed in 1991 by the assassination in Peshawar of Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, a retired army officer, close to Zia and hated by the Shi’ites because of his suspected role in the assassination of a respected Shi’ite leader. [Osama and his Shi’ite nemesis]

Osama mean time is appearing all over the region. He is in Tibet-Laddakh region, Iran, Balochistan all at the same time.