Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

by Tony Joseph

Here’s a recap then of how these new findings add greater detail to what we already knew. As we saw earlier, genetic studies based on present-day haplogroups had suggested significant migrations that brought new lineages to India. And studies based on whole genome sequencing of present-day populations had shown that Indians today are a mixture of First Indians and populations that are closely related to present-day west Eurasians. But these studies could not conclusively answer questions involving the direction of migration. What the latest ancient DNA-based study has done is exactly that: given a definitive answer to the question of the direction of migration, while also providing a finer understanding of the multiple migrations that caused the affinity between present-day Indians and west Eurasians. We now know that there was a migration of Iranian agriculturists from the Zagros region to the Indus Valley. From the Swat samples, we also know there was a migration from the Steppe, which we will talk about in detail later.11