The Rigveda is not 5000yrs old, but rather is closer to 3900 years old, at most. This is based on linguistic evidence, as well as geographic and biological names in the Rigveda
No, it is based on both linguistic and archaeological evidence. For example, read The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, which corroborates these two kinds of evidence
I don't know why Indian nationalists take a root at pontic Caspian steppes as an attack against antiquity of our culture. It doesn't take anything away from us. They were not Europeans or something. They didn't attack and invade the indigenous mostly mixed with them. Before them there were migrations from zagros mountains etc..
> Central Asia/European roots.
They are not the same.
> But really what kind of evidence do we have for the existence of a sophisticated culture in Germany that predates Harappa.
You clearly have not read the book. It's not Germany, it's Pontic Caspian steppes, approximately in modern day Ukraine if I recall correctly.
Ha! If you go by one of the revered figures, eminent scholar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the pure Hindu people come from the land of the North pole.
Fly in the ointment, there hasn't been any land at the North pole for quite some time. Why the choice ? perhaps to help themselves to some notion of exceptionalism, uniqueness, so on and so forth.
I get it, everyone wants to feel a little special, it gets dangerous when that becomes a sizeable political force. More so, if they feel they have not been given their rightful due and/or humiliated. Wish there was a moral analogue of "now now dont be hurt, yes baby you are so very special, have a candy bar" in the international arena.
I am ethnically Hindu but an athiest (which, by the way, does not disqualify me from being a Hindu)
Out of India theory is not fringe at all in fact a pretty dominant theory in India which actually matters. It gained even more importance after the marxist scholars like Romila Thapar basically changed their stance from Aryan Invasion Theory to Aryan Migration Theory.
As I have said earlier the racial contours of USA/West in general have vested interest in polluting research in this field.
The current theory is neither out of India nor Aryan Invasion. It's almost universally agreed that IndoAryan migrations were slow defusion of Indo Aryan tribes into today's India, and mixed with native people.
Everything including genetic evidence supports that.
You seem to be highly convinced by nationalistic pseudoscience. Open your mind and apply some logic.
The 3900 number is mostly spread by a single researcher at Harvard who is quoted and self-quoted and cited by his own students somehow making his shoddy research some kind of "fact". Anyone trying to question this basically gets shunned from any conference this gentleman will be involved in and labelled as "revisionist".
It is incredible that Wikipedia too just quotes this single individual on hundreds of pages somehow giving him and his claims credibility. His claims have been refuted by many using plethora of evidence but his citation cartel will simply dismiss it by attacking the authors instead of their research.
I do not want to start a flamewar but Indians should most certainly come out of the shoddy colonial scholarship and their control over Indology.
Horse,
Early British researchers claimed Harrapans (aroun 3500 BC) did not know horses and since Vedas rely so much on horses, clearly Vedas were much later inventions. This theory was repeated so many times that a lot of people assume this to be true. It gets quoted again and again. In reality this is as false as Trump's claim of re-election victory. The oldest domesticated horse bones in India were found in Rajasthan around 4500 BCE. However the white researchers have not bothered at all to revise any of their theories despite new evidence. There are over 15 different instances of domesticated horse bones ranging from 2500 BCE to 3000 BCE have been found. Please read Srikant Talegari's paper on the topic.
Linguistic evidence:
This is actually pretty lame evidence to begin with and can very easily be repudiated. Early white christian researchers believed that Aryans invaded India killing native people (to justify why British rule of India) and they claimed these Aryans came from Russia 3000 BCE. How did they arrive at this conclusion ? Linguistics shows that all 12 branches of Indo-European languages were together sometime around 3000 BCE. It was not clear when, but the "south russia" claim is completely random and unsubstantiated. During these times Avesta, the holy book of Zorostrasians was the only non Hindu text that would talk about Vedic culture but it was orally transmitted and hence had not physical artifacts. Much much later, Mittani treaty was discovered in Syria which was around 1500 BCE old which clearly indentified itself as Indo-Iranian. So many western scholars took this as contemporary of Rigveda without analyzing both books in details.
Rigveda which has 10 books is generally classified as core and non-core. It is unanimous opinion that core is much older than non-core. It turns out Mittani shares a lot of words and linguistic traits with the non-core where as nearly none with the old core. Mittani's own languages is a "residue" of old vedic languages which they picked up centuries earlier. Hence some of the researchers think that Rigveda predates Mittani by significant amount of time.
Note: I am not emotionally involved in any of the dates, other that pure academic curiosity I think it is irrelevant if it s 3900 years old or 5000 years old. The only point I am trying to make is that Rigveda dating is not a "settled" matter as some claim and we will see more interesting research in future.
I'm not going to respond point-by-point to this nonsense. There's enough genetic evidence now to refute your claims, alongside the linguistic and archaeological claims. Read primary sources and the latest research instead of quoting people who have done absolutely zero peer-reviewed research.
HN is not the forum for the flame war but not providing any evidence and attacking some researcher has "he is not approved by white people" is not a valid defense.
I am not entirely sure how genetic claims could even play role in dating rigveda.
Genetic claims play a role in that you can see in which direction certain genes flowed, and how old they are, and how they’re distributed. See eg: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QoGmPJJS3X8
Also peer review is not just “approval by white people”. There’s plenty of non-white scientists (eg: me)
> Genetic claims play a role in that you can see in which direction certain genes flowed, and how old they are, and how they’re distributed.
I am not very familiar with Genetic theories to be honest and only work I have read on this topic is from Manu Joseph's not very scientific summary of research on this topic but it is barely conclusive in any direction.
> There’s plenty of non-white scientists
That is besides the point, they will let in those who tow their lines and keep out those who disagree claiming them to be either "they haven't published anything in journals reviewed by us". Afterall british controlled India not through white soldiers but brown soliders handpicked from Indians.
It basically is a citation cartel to begin with very little concern for actual research or truth. Also this is not specific to Indology either. In this day and age it matters very little though as better quality research by such as likes of Talegari or Elst or Danino et al. stands on its own even after decades.
They refused to accept any civilizational could be older than 4000 years because of the great flood.
So often they tried to fit the evidence into their narrative. As we know today very many civilizations can be dated to much further in time.