Source: India Express
HYDERABAD, INDIA, May 15, 2001: According to a study in this month’s Genome Research Journal, scientists said that India’s higher ranking castes are genetically more similar to Europeans, and the lower castes are more similar to Asians. The study, done by an international team, is believed to be the most comprehensive attempt to date, to explore the impact of ancient western migrations on people in India. According to this study, the origins of people living in India are under debate. Some 5,000 years ago, Indo-European speaking people from West Eurasia entered India and purportedly mixed with native Proto-Asian population in the region in an “Aryan Invasion.” This research would appear to support such a scenario, which has been under considerable attack recently. However, Prof. Richard Villems, one of the co-authors of the paper, when contacted by HPI, said, “Europe here may mean anything even slightly west from Indus river” and said it is most likely that the genetic material in question arose in the region of Iran and Afghanistan. He concluded, “a more correct interpretation is that in some upper castes, there is a statistically weakly reliable, but still apparent shift of frequencies towards those variants more frequent west of Indus. Europe as such has, however, nothing to do with that.”