Again The Same Old Pseudo-Scientific DNA Claptrap and
Fraudulent Interpretation Incompatible with the Facts
Koenraad Elst sent me one of the latest (23 June 2026) articles on the “DNA-Proves-the-AIT” jokebook circuit for my response. As we see, the writer of this article (his/her name not discernible) has nothing new to say, and simply repeats the stale, old DNA joke without bothering to even take note of certain very basic scientifically proved facts which, at the very start of his story, would have had to be dealt with before expecting to have his joke taken seriously:
https://www.exploreyourdna.com/article/173/r1a-z93-the-indo-iranian-lineage-from-sintashta-to-india
The article gives us what the writer tells us is the story of the “r1a-z93” chromosome. I am not a geneticist, and so I am perfectly willing (of course with due respect to other geneticists than the writer of the above article, if they happen to hold contrary views) to accept his/her genetics-based story as “the story of the “r1a-z93” chromosome from Sintashta to India”. The Indian DNA contains many chromosomes, and I am absolutely willing to accept that many of these different chromosomes will be from different places on earth, at different points of time since the birth/evolution of homo sapiens, “to India”.
The only point on which the whole story ceases to be scientific and becomes a fairy-tale incompatible with the facts is when it directly equates “r1a-z93” with a specific language group “Indo-Iranian” and concludes that the story being told is actually “the story of the Indo-Iranian languages from Sintashta to India”. What the joker (at this point I will stop deferring to woke politically-correct-terminology, and will refer to the unknown, to me, writer as “he/his/him”). “Indo-Iranian” is not the name of a “chromosome” but of a “language-group”, and the story of a chromosome cannot automatically become the story of a language-group unless it fits in with the scientifically provable empirical evidence regarding the geographical and chronological facts about that language group as derived from material records like inscriptions, etc..
See what the article tells us (directly equating “r1a-z93” chromosomes and “Vedic people”) about the chronological and geographical data concerning the travels of the “r1a-z93” chromosome:
1. “Around four thousand years ago, on the dry grassland east of the Ural mountains, a people learned to yoke horses to a light two-wheeled chariot. They buried their dead with those chariots, with horse sacrifices and fire rituals that read like pages torn from the much later Vedic hymns”.
Here we get one fact (that the story of the Sintashta people east of the Ural mountains starts just “four thousand years ago”, i.e. roughly, give or take a century or two, 2000 BCE?) breezily linked up with a speculative chronological guess that the Vedic hymns were “much later” to that date.
2. “Within a few centuries their descendants and their language had crossed Central Asia, climbed the passes into the Iranian plateau, and pushed down through the Swat valley into the Indian subcontinent”.
Here, what exactly is meant by “within a few centuries”? The long migration described above, “crossed Central Asia, climbed the passes into the Iranian plateau, and pushed down through the Swat valley into the Indian subcontinent” cannot surely be condensed into one or two centuries, and if we consider also the (surely subsequent to this migration?) composition of the “Vedic hymns” then another one or two centuries at the very least, this places the composition of the Vedic hymns to after 1600-1500 BCE at the earliest.
In other words, according to the writer, the Vedic hymns are to be dated wholly and solely from “the story of the “r1a-z93” chromosome from Sintashta to India” and not from actual scientific data and analysis pertaining to those hymns and the language of those hymns.
As I said: the same old DNA joke repeated for the nth time with the air of saying something new or presenting some new evidence, while continuing to totally refuse to take into consideration the solidly established actual scientific data and analysis pertaining to the chronology and geography of those hymns and the language of those hymns.
As nothing new is said in the article, there is nothing new to be said in its refutation. But the refutation, already presented again and again and completely ignored and stonewalled by these goons again and again, can only be presented yet again in the faint hope that this time at least it will be able to enter into the thick heads of these jokers.
As per this above article, and the countless similar articles already flooding the information space, the ancestors of the composers of the Vedic hymns (i.e. the ancestral speakers of the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian languages) were still in an area to the east of the Ural mountains around 2000 BCE or so and (later, after centuries-long journeys through “Central Asia….the passes into the Iranian plateau, and ….the Swat valley”) finally entered “into the Indian subcontinent” and subsequently composed the Vedic hymns. The Vedic hymns are therefore post-1500 BCE. Same stale old story, completely disproved by the actual scientific data and analysis pertaining to the chronology and geography of those hymns and the language of those hymns.
So (yawn! and ho-hum!) the data and evidence presented again below (being simply a copy-paste from my article “The Finality of the Mitanni Evidence”), showing that any story (whether true or not) about the migrations of the ““r1a-z93” chromosome from Sintashta to India” has no connection at all to the story of the “Indo-Iranian” languages and the Vedic hymns, in the very vain hope that this time at least the facts may enter the thick skulls of these mutts and morons:
THE EVIDENCE AGAIN:
1. The founders of the Mitanni kingdom (1550/1500 BCE) in Syria-Iraq were already a very long-established local population in that area with their Indo-Aryan identity already constituting the "remnants" of an ancient ancestral part of their identity which had taken place "taken place centuries earlier". The proto-Mitanni presence in West Asia goes back by many centuries (beyond 1800 BCE at the least).
2. The Rigveda consists of two distinct eras, an old period represented by the Old Rigveda and a new period represented by the New Rigveda, the two periods separated from each other by centuries of momentous changes in history, geography, culture, technology and language.
What does the combination of these two facts tell us about the date of the Rigveda and about the geographical location of the PIE Homeland? Let us examine this stage by stage:
A. The Mitanni vis-a-vis the Rigveda:
The Mitanni Indo-Aryan elements (i.e. the ancestral Mitanni elements surviving in the records of the second millennium BCE in West Asia) are naturally connected to the Indo-Aryan elements in the Rigveda. But in which Rigveda: the Old Rigveda or the New Rigveda?
Only a comparison of the Mitanni and Rigvedic data can answer this question. But what is the exact data which can help us to narrow down this search?
The Mitanni data which can be compared with the Rigvedic data to identify whether it is connected to the Old Rigveda or the New Rigveda:
As Witzel points
out, the Indo-Aryan elements in the Mitanni data "cover
the semantic fields of horses, their colors, horse racing, and chariots, some
important 'Vedic' gods, and a large array of personal names adopted by the
ruling class"
(WITZEL 2005:361): the horse racing words include some number words.
The only other important word is the word maini (bead, jewel).
The Rigvedic data which distinguishes the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda from each other, which can be compared to the Mitanni data:
This data consists of a
very large vocabulary of new words, new meters, and
new personal names and name types
found only in the New Rigveda and in subsequent texts but missing
in the Old Rigveda.
The names of Vedic gods and number words, and the words associated with horses, their colors, horse racing, and chariots, found in the meagre Mitanni data are of course few in number and are common words found throughout the Rigveda. Likewise, since no Mitanni hymns have been found, there can be no comparison of meters. Therefore the entire evidence rests on the single word maini and the "large array of personal names".
And this evidence is absolute and sweeping:
1. The Rigvedic word maṇi (Mitanni maini) "bead, jewel", is found just twice (I.33.8; 122.14) in the New Rigveda, 78 times in the Atharvaveda, and countless times throughout the subsequent Vedic and Sanskrit literature; and is an extremely common and popular word in all modern Indo-Aryan languages, and in all non-IE languages influenced by Sanskrit. It is completely missing in the Old Rigveda.
2. The prominent personal names and name types in the Mitanni data which are found in the Rigveda are names with the following elements:
-aśva, -ratha, -atithi, -sena, -bandhu,
-uta, -medha, vasu-, ṛta-, priya-.
The personal names with these elements are found in the Rigveda as follows:
Names of Composers of the hymns (89 hymns):
V. 3-6, 24-26, 47, 52-61, 81-82 (20 hymns).
I. 12-23, 100 (13 hymns).
VIII. 1-5, 23-26, 32-38, 46, 68-69, 87,
89-90, 98-99 (24 hymns).
IX. 2, 27-29, 32, 41-43, 97 (9 hymns).
X. 20-29, 37, 57-60, 65-66, 75, 102-103,
132, 134, 179 (23 hymns).
Names in References (in 82 verses):
IV.30.18 (1 Redacted verse)
V. 27.4-6; 33.9; 36.6; 52.1; 61.5,10; 79.2; 81.5 (10 verses)
I. 36.10,11,17-18; 45.3-4;
100.16-17; 112.10,15,20; 116.6,16; 117.17-18; 122.7,13;
139.9 (18 verses)
VIII. 1.30,32; 2.37,40; 3.16;
4.20; 5.25; 6.45; 8.18,20; 9.10; 23.16,23-24;
24.14,22-23,28-29; 26.9,11; 32.30; 33.4; 34.16;
35.19-21; 36.7; 37.7; 38.8; 46.21,23; 49.9;
51.1; 68.15-16; 69.8,18; 87.3 (39 verses)
IX. 43.3; 65.7 (2 verses)
X. 33.7; 49.6; 59.8;
60.7,10; 61.26; 73.11; 80.3; 98.5-6,8; 132.7
(12 verses)
It will be seen that all these personal names are totally missing in the Old Rigveda, and are found exclusively in the New Rigveda and (in a single verse) in a Redacted Hymn.
[Although I will
not bother to give the details here, since they have already been given
numerous times in my books and articles, the common Rigvedic-Mitanni
data is a sub-set of a much more enormous body of data of personal
names as well as general words: the common Rigvedic-Avestan
data, which is likewise totally missing in the Old Rigveda,
and found exclusively in the New Rigveda and in the Redacted
Hymns.]
B. The
chronology of the Rigveda:
The above evidence clearly shows that the ancestral Mitanni people separated from the main body of "Indo-Aryans" (i.e. Rigvedic people) at some point of time after the period of composition of the Old Rigveda and during the period of composition of the New Rigveda.
But the ancestral Mitanni people were already present in West Asia by 1800 BCE at the very least as a very important and established and local part of the West Asian political-historical landscape, a circumstance which is being confirmed to a greater and greater extent by every new research. So they must have arrived in West Asia at least one or two centuries before that: i.e. at least by 2000 BCE.
As the Vedic "Indo-Aryans", the people who composed the Rigveda, did not live in West Asia − the evidence of the data in the text shows that they lived in Haryana to the east of the Sarasvati river in the earliest recorded period of the Old Rigveda, and expanded westwards only up to Afghanistan by the end of the period of the New Rigveda − it is clear that the ancestors of the Mitanni who arrived in West Asia at least by 2000 BCE must have separated from the main body of Vedic "Indo-Aryans" long before that date. Again, taking a conservative minimum of 200 years for their migration from this ancestral area to West Asia, they must have left this area, Haryana to Afghanistan, at least by 2200 BCE.
When these ancestral proto-Mitanni people left this area, Haryana to Afghanistan, at least by 2200 BCE, the language and culture of the Vedic "Indo-Aryans" which they took with them was already the fully developed culture of the New Rigveda, with its distinctive new words and personal name types, which obviously did not develop within one day, and this culture of the New Rigveda must have taken many centuries to develop these distinctive new words which set it apart from the culture of the Old Rigveda. This places the ending of the period of the Old Rigveda at least a few centuries before the departure of these ancestral proto-Mitanni people from this area: at least 2400 BCE.
The geographic data of the Old Rigveda shows that its composers, in at least 2400 BCE, were residents of Haryana and eastern Uttar Pradesh, with no prior intimate knowledge of areas further west. And this area, Haryana to Uttar Pradesh, in at least 2400 BCE, was a fully "Indo-Aryan" area which the composers regarded as their beloved ancestral land, in which the places and rivers of the area already had fully "Indo-Aryan" names (with no traces of any earlier non-IE names), and there was no trace or even memory of any non-IE people in that area or in the neighbouring areas to the east.
1. As per the linguistic analysis of the common Indo-European vocabulary so far as chronology is concerned, the 12 branches of the family were geographically located in contiguous and mutually interactive areas till at least around 3000 BCE or so, and started separating and losing touch with each other only around that time. As we have shown in detail in our books and articles, every single piece of linguistic evidence which can indicate geographical location points away from the Steppes and towards northwestern India as the area from which these branches started separating from each other.
2. Our analysis of the data and evidence in the dāśarājña battle hymns shows that the last five branches (i.e. Vedic Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian) to remain in the Homeland area after all the others had departed were all present in the Punjab during this battle which took place in the period of the Old Rigveda, and this is confirmed by the rest of the evidence in the Avestan and Vedic (and traditional Indian historical) texts.
3. Any and every analysis of the archaeological evidence in the IE-Homeland debate shows that while there is ample archaeological evidence indicating the external (to their historical areas) origins of all the other branches of IE languages, there is absolutely no such evidence for the Indo-Aryan branch in spite of the strenuous efforts of two centuries of scholarship.
In the face of all this, all the multifarious attempts to concoct migration schedules and histories of Indo-European migrations from the Steppes to India, using mumbo-jumbo terminologies and arguments, and presumptuous identification of non-linguistic criteria (including genetic data) with languages, have absolutely no value if the concocters (whatever their academic status) ignore and refuse to explain how the Rigvedic people in the period of the Old Rigveda could have composed the text in Haryana in or before at least 2400 BCE, in an environment consisting of places and rivers with exclusively Indo-Aryan names and in the total absence of any local non-IE elements in the area.
