If people like Adolf Hitler and Max Mueller are born again, they may have to bring in another theory to substantiate their racial superiority. The Europeans’ claim for racial and civilisational superiority has been demolished and proved wrong by an international consortium of researchers which included genetic engineers, bio chemists, molecular biologists, archaeologists, historians and scientists.
A five-year-long study by this team have found that modern day Europeans are the descendants of three distinct groups; the indigenous hunter-gatherers in Europe, Middle Eastern farmers that migrated to Europe more than 7,500 years ago and a mysterious population that spanned North Eurasia which genetically connects Europeans and native Americans.
“We examined bone samples of German farmers who lived 7,000 years ago, bone samples of nearly 8500 year old hunter-gatherers who lived in luxembourg and Mottala in Sweden. This was compared with human genome samples collected from 2400 persons of 200 diverse population groups,” Kumarasamy Thangaraj, senior principal scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, one of the lead researchers in the team told The Pioneer over telephone from his laboratory in Hyderabad.
The findings of the research are being published as an article in the latest issue of Nature, a highly venerated international scientific journal. According to Thangaraj, the findings disprove the age old Aryan theory once and for ever. “Initially we had demolished the Aryan-Dravidian divide. We found that there is no scientific basis for the claim of people in south India that they are Dravidians who are distinct from others in the subcontinent. But we found that people all over India has same genetic traits. The new findings demolish the Aryan theory,” said Thangaraj.
Dr David Reich of Harvard Medical School, said that the Europeans are mixture of three ancient population. “Earlier it was believed that the Europeans had only two ancestral descendants,” he said.
Some of the findings by this research are interesting and path-breaking. “It was the Middle East farmers who migrated to Europe some 7,500 years ago who taught the Europeans about farming and animal rearing. The modern day European population learnt consuming milk and dairy products from their Middle East ancestors,” said Thangaraj.
Dr Ch Mohan Rao, director, CCMB, said the study has thrown light into the origin of the contemporary Europeans. Dr lalji Singh, former director CCMB and and one of the scientists said that the next project would focus on establishing the link between the ancestral north Indians and one of the three ancestral European population.