From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 9211
Date: 2001-09-08
----- Original Message -----From: VAgarwalV@...Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 7:28 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Sarasvati[Vishal:] The scenario of AMT and acculturation, which is now said to have replaced swift, rapid and tumultous invasions, would in fact seem to argue against a name transfer from Helmand to Ghaggar. Migrations and Acculturations are very slow and the distance between Helmand and Ghaggar is great. 'Aryans' would have taken several generations and even centuries to reach Ghaggar from Helmand. The proposed Acculturation models all indicate that the 'Aryans' would have got submerged in the population of the Sapta Sindhavah region. Therefore, it is quite illogical to think that they would retain the memory of a river in S Afghanistan and transfer it to Ghaggar when they could easily coin another name.Just how slow are migrations in you opinion? The way I see it, the early Indo-Aryans were transhumant, semi-nomadic pastoralists, with perhaps the most advanced means of transport available _anywhere_ at that time. They were not sedentary farmers whose settlement areas may expand at a rate of, say, 1-5 km a year. You wouldn't propose that it took the Mitanni Indo-Aryans thousands of years to reach NW Mesopotamia, would you? The Helmand system and Haryana are not on different continents. If the source area of Indo-Aryan movements was the historical Haraxvaiti region, pastoralist groups had to cover the distance approximately from the Kandahar area to the Gomal Pass, then enter the largely abandoned Indus plains and move on towards the areas of denser post-Harappan settlement in the east. The total length of such a route would have been about 1200 km. Even assuming that the migrating groups had no clear destination in mind, often changed direction at random and did not always take the best route, _some_ of them could arrive in the Ghaggar Valley within a few years' time rather than in "several generations or even centuries".[Vishal:] There is no archaeological evidence from the region also to suggest any migration from S Afghanistan to greater Punjab. On the contrary, genetic evidence indicates a net migration from Punjab towards Afghanistan around 2300 BCE.Do you happen to have any references on that? How do the geneticists indicate the date so precisely?Regards,Piotr