Indo-Europeans in India

The people of northern India speak Indo-European languages. The obvious explanation for this fact, long ago advanced by European scholars, is that those languages were introduced to the continent by migrants from central Asia. After all, the history of India over the past thousand years has largely been the tale of one wave of invaders from the north after another -- Persians, Mongols, Turks -- so why not earlier waves?

But many Indian scholars have always hated this notion, and it must be said that there is very little archaeological evidence for any such invasion in the right time period. (1000 to 2000 BCE). But genetic studies of the Indian population are starting to provide the missing evidence:

A recent study by scientists from Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, shows that the people of India today were a very different lot than the Indians who lived several thousand years ago. The research, published in the August 8th issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, provides genetic evidence that very different populations on the Indian subcontinent who lived between 1,900 and 4,200 years ago underwent a major demographic transformation, where their members mixed and shared gene pools much more prolifically than has been the case in more recent history.

"Only a few thousand years ago, the Indian population structure was vastly different from today," said co–senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Which would fit very well with the hypothesis of a major population influx in the second millennium BCE.