Dear list members,
In a discussion elsewhere lately, we considered the impression that Indian civilization has suffered a decline over the centuries. One reason for this was the Muslim conquest, of which eyewitness and beneficiary Albiruni testifies that it destroyed the sciences in India. But the qualitative decline had set in earlier and also continued well after the shock of the conquest had been absorbed, even after it had been reversed in large parts of India. So, other culprits have been named for roughly the millennium preceding the Muslim conquests: the rise of devotional religion, replacing schools with temples; and the temporary dominance of Buddhism, whose sharp intellectual prowess was exclusively directed to matters of salvation rather than worldly science.
In this context, I drew attention to another contending explanation, the AIT:
>
> > Dayananda and Aurobindo already lamented the decline of Hindu
> > civilization since the Vedic age. The AIT has an explanation for
> > this acknowledged phenomenon: the old Rishis [= seers], Dirghatamas and
> > Kapila and Lagadha and Yajnavalkya and Krishna and the Buddha, they
> > were full-blooded Aryans of intelligent stock. But then they were
> > seduced by all these native Gopis [= cowherd-girls] and begat a half-breed of lesser
> > intelligence. So the progeny of the magnificent Aryan seers, who
> > trusted their own eyes and their own brains, became the less-gifted
> > Hindus who quoted scripture without understanding it.
>
To this, someone retorted:
> Which *contemporary* Indologists among those accepting the Aryan migration paradigm -- i.e., the greater part of them -- describes the difference in the "intelligence quotient" of, respectively, the Vedic Indians and the later "Brahmanical Hindu" Indians in the terms you state above?
> Do you live in the 21st or the 19th century, Koenraad?
>
Here is my reply, for your consideration:
Indologists? Not too many that I know of, but there is a pretty trendy school of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who espouse the AIT and link it with racial-differential explanations of historical trends. In particular, AIT-espousing Indologists like M. Witzel find it hard to explain convincingly how a band of mere "immigrants" (not even "invaders" who made up for their lower numbers with higher military prowess) managed to impose or impart their language on a more advanced and far more numerous native population, to the extent that the latter completely forgot its own language.
So, one Dr. Michael H. Hart, described as a BA in maths, MA in physics, MA in computer science and PhD in astronomy from Princeton, gives an explanation for this enigma in ch.26, esp. p.187, of his book "Understanding Human History" (2007). In answering the question of why IE was so wildly successful in so many different circumstances, he reminds us that IE originated in the north, among "the Kurgan builders who lived on the Russian steppes", and that cold climates mould intelligent races.
As illustration of the latter "law", he compares the state of technology in Central America and Africa. The absence in African cultures of numerous technologies developed in parts of Eurasia has been explained by Jared Diamond as a consequence of geographical circumstances, e.g. the lack of domesticable animals in Africa. Hart argues that each of Diamond's explanations for Africa's backwardness equally applies to Central America, and yet there the Mayas and others developed complex stone architecture with cities, a sophisticated astronomical calendar, maths and a script. The difference, he says, is that Africans never left their easy-going climate zone, whereas the Amerindians had been selected for organizational skills, far-sightedness (planning ahead to get through the winter) and intelligence during their millennia-long stay in NE Asia. The IEs were similarly moulded by the cold of NE Europe into an intelligent race.
So: "What then does account for the remarkable conquests of the IEs? Since these conquests occurred over a period of millennia, they cannot be due to the attributes of any single leader; nor are they due to some particular political system (...) nor some particular terrain. The IEs triumphed in the forests of Germany, the steppes of C Asia, the mountains of Afghanistan, and the islands of the Aegean. Nor (...) their possession of superior technology. Quite a few peoples they conquered -- including the Minoans, the Etruscans, the Elamites, and the Dravidian-speakers of the Indus Valley -- had more advanced civilizations than the IE invaders did. [And likewise for their much-touted horses] (...) The simplest explanation is that the original speakers of PIE possessed, on average, considerably higher intelligence than most of the people they defeated (including the Egyptians,... and Dravidian-speaking peoples), all of whom had evolved in milder climates than had the ancestors of the IEs."
To sum up, the AIT has a gaping hole, viz. the anomaly of a relatively small and less civilized population "immigrating" into a vast and urbanized demographic heavyweight and then managing to get the native language replaced with its own. The Goths never did that in the Roman Empire, nor the Mongols in Iran or China, though they at least managed to become the rulers, not mere immigrants but conquerors. While AIT proponents intensely ignore this anomaly, it is crying out for an explanation. So, the sociobiologists step in with their explanation, viz. that the IEs belonged to a superior race. That's not their terminology today, but it's that idea though now in the language of genetics and Darwinism.
Regards,
Koenraad Elst