Abstract:
The concept of Indo-Aryan group of peoples and their invasion has played a prominent role in explaining the cultural history of the Indian sub-continent. It was propounded that the Aryans, living somewhere outside India, invaded the Indian sub-continent around 1500 B.C. and after supplanting the indigenous powers and cultures settled in India. The Aryans were held responsible for the destruction of the earlier populations (esp. Indus valley civilization) and building of new cultures in the areas they invaded. The subject of this paper is to examine the physical anthropological dimensions of the "Aryan problem", which are two fold: a. "foreign phenotypic element" in the later phases of Harappan culture, and b. the "massacre evidence" at Mohenjo-Daro.Findings of the restudies of Harappan skeletal series and implications thereof for evaluating the 'Aryan Invasion Theory' have been discussed. The findings strongly indicates that the hypothesis of identification of "foreign phenotypic element" or unceremonious slaughter of native Harappans is not supplemented by bone evidence.
Machine summary:
"R. Walimbe* Department of Anthropology, University of Pune, Pune, India (Received: 27 December 2010; Received in Revised form: 2 February 2011; Accepted: 20 February 2011) The concept of Indo-Aryan group of peoples and their invasion has played a prominent role in explaining the cultural history of the Indian sub-continent.
Keywords: Indo-Aryan, Invasion, Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, Physical Anthropology Introduction normous amount of biological and cultural variability manifested in the prehistoric and living Indian populations is only of its kind in the world.
Over the last five decades scholars from diverse disciplines, including social and biological anthropology, archaeology, and molecular biology have attempted to explain the patterns of population movements in the Indian sub-continent, with an ultimate aim of identifying autochthones of the region.
The "Aryan problem" has many dimensions; the linguists have a theory based on the similarities in Sanskrit with Greek and Latin; the scholars of Vedic literature rely on text; the archaeologists look into archaeological evidence; and, the anthropologists depend on the mortuary data and study the burial deposits and the skeletal biology of their contents.
On the basis of recent re-evaluation of the Harappan skeletal collection and new approach of interpretation (Kennedy 1982) it can be concluded that these populations do not exhibit any significant phenotypic diversity.
It would be interesting to note that, human population genetics data corroborates same physical anthropological inferences, concluding that there is no material evidence for any large scale migrations into India over the period of 4500 to 800 BC."