Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence

The Indo-Aryan invasion was imagined to have involved hordes of Sanskritic-language speakers entering the subcontinent in horse-drawn carts, through the mountain passes of Afghanistan around 1500 BCE. The discovery of the Indus civilization in the early 1920s turned the dominant invasionist framework on its head. The accepted dates for the Harappan civilization's urban or Mature phase are 2600-1900 BCE, while the conventional date for the arrival of the Aryans is around 1500 BCE. From the 1990s onward, population genetics has been applied to South Asian populations, the history of their migrations, and the Aryan invasion hypothesis. Geneticists have traced markers of mutations in Y-DNA; mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA; and autosomal DNA. Human population geneticists seek to understand the complex patterns of genetic diversity, which are shaped by population movements and gene flow, other aspects of population expansion and demography, mutation, drift, and selective evolution.