R1a-Z93

We traveled recently, and my wife booked the flights, as normal. She has an anxiety reaction to being in the middle seat, but after having sat next to her in one too many times, I told that I didn't like sitting in the middle seat any more than she did, so stop putting me there. So now she sticks me next to the window and she takes the aisle (I'll have to tell her that I actually greatly prefer the aisle too, I suppose, or she'll keep doing that forever.)

I actually hate flying in every way whatsoever, and would greatly prefer never to be on an airplane or in an airport ever again in my life. But sometimes it's not too bad, when nobody else is in the middle seat. We took a there and back again flight, both were two legs each, and both had one leg with a blank seat and one leg where someone sat between us. The last leg of the last flight, late last night, I had a smelly Indian guy jammed in between us. Luckily, it was a rather short leg, but it gave me a new topic to think about. I've thought about it before, of course, but not that often. And with the recent disaster in Afghanistan, and our leaders threatening to flood our communities (unasked for by us) with a bunch of Afghan Quislings and traitors who collaborated and colluded with the invasion of Afghanistan some twenty odd years ago, it's worth reflecting on the origins of the Indo-Iranian peoples. Because some people run around saying that they're close cousins of ours. This isn't really true, but it's not entirely untrue either. The Indians and other "Iranian" peoples that exist today are a kind of "failed" white people; their ancestors were from what is today central Russia, and they spread eastward and southward deep into what is today China, India and the Middle East. There, they met demographic disaster; lacking sufficient manpower to overwhelm the locals, and in particular, having a number of single men who took local women as slaves or wives or concubines, or otherwise had issue with them. Today, we can see that legacy in particular in the male haplogroup R1a-Z93 and its related subclades, which is a European haplogroup, although it is most heavily present today in Iran, Central Asia and northern India. However, nobody will look at your typical Paki, Indian or Afghan and think that they look like close relatives of the Slavs, because their genetic profile is ~80% native rather than white. (This is more true the further south and east you get; into what is today India and China respectively) But their language, some lingering elements of their culture, and their paternal haplogroup yet reveal their ultimate origin as being closely related to the Bronze Age of Europe.

It's worth noting that before the Turkic incursions in the area, the lands to the north of the current distribution of Indo-Iranian languages were also full of Indo-Iranian speakers, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Sakae, etc. These are the descendants of the Andronovo horizon who continued to live in a more traditional ancestral fashion than those who went through the "membrane" of the Bactria-Margiana urban centers, or ended up as far south as Pakistan and India, or as far east as the Ordos Basin in China. How are these barbarians described by the Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese who knew them first-hand?

• Herodotus called them red-haired and gray-eyed.
• Hippocrates called them light-skinned
• Callimachus called them fair-haired
• Zhang Qian said that they had yellow and blue eyes (probably hazel or green in the case of the first one there)
• Pliny the Elder says that they were red-haired, blue-eyed and unusually tall.
• Clement of Alexandria said that they had long, auburn hair
• Polemon says that they had red hair and blue-gray eyes
• Galen says that they had reddish hair like the Illyrians, Germans and other northern peoples
• Ammianus Marcellinus says that they were tall, blond and light-eyed.
• Gregory of Nyssa calls them fair-skinned and blond-haired
• Adamantius called them fair-haired

That's an interesting survey, because it starts in the 5th century BC and the last one to comment was a thousand years later in the 5th century AD. Ultimately, the Sarmatians and Scythians are believed to have been assimilated by Goths and later more thoroughly by the Slavs, and the Cossacks may well have been maintaining Scythian-like traditions and lifestyle, as well as maintaining a pretty Scythian-like genetic profile. Many of the varied peoples of what is today "Turkestan" have assimilated Indo-Iranian DNA, and many of them also have physical features that are relicts of this past. Heck, Genghis Khan himself is rather reliably said to have had green eyes and red hair, although of course this is considered "controversial." Given that we already know that Scythians of various tribal names like the Wu-sun, Yuezhi, and others, as well as the iconically Scythian archaeological culture from the Ordos Loop and the supposed multi-ethnic status of the Hsiung-Nu confederation certainly makes it likely that if the Dong-Hu were practicing a very Scythian like mobile economy immediately adjacent to them, that they may well have had a Scythian strata in their make-up before emerging later as the Mongols.

Anyway, regardless of that, I think it's clear that the ancestral condition for the Indo-Iranians was that they looked, dressed, and behaved much like the proto-Slavs would have at the same period. You can still look up peoples in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or even Pakistan today, especially if they're from a somewhat isolated mountain-dwelling subset, that look extremely white and European in their features, not unlike the Russians themselves. So, what happened? Why are they nothing like the rest of the European peoples now, then?

The answer is that they were both physically and culturally dispossessed of the majority of their heritage, or willingly gave it up by marrying locals. There's strong evidence that the original Aryan invaders of Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and northern India would have looked just like the Scythians did, being, in essence, Scythians warbands that were on the move. But after passing through Central Asian urban cultures—the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or Oxus civilization, they lost some of their uniquely northern European physical traits. After then diving into more densely populated areas, like the Near Eastern kingdom of Mitanni, or the remnants of the Harappan civilization in northern India, the Elamites of the Persian Gulf eastern shores, etc. they lost their genetics. Curiously, in India, in some ways they maintained more of their culture—their language, at least, and the names of some of the deities in their religion—although it became increasingly bastardized with local "Dasyan" (as opposed to Aryan) concepts. In Persia and the rest of the "-stans" they suffered Islamic conquest, which saddled them with a significant cultural handicap and deference to the wild barbarism of the Arabs, and further to the north, they were either encroached upon by east Asian barbarians, ultimately being destroyed by the Mongols or the Turks or both, or even the Chinese themselves. 

While it's tempting therefore, because they're kind of gone now as a recognizable force, to see these peoples are merely failed white people, with a failed white people culture that could and should have been equivalent to a further eastern and southern extension of white Europe, with civilizations that would have been no more exotic than that of the Russians, its important to remember that they were successful for many generations; thousands of years, in some cases, before their genetic and/or cultural influences were eventually swamped by Third World hordes. Rather than look at them as pitiable remnants of the failure of our distant cousins, we should see in them an object lesson for what happens when you allow the Third World to overpower the First World demographically.

EDIT: Arguably, a similar case could be made for the Iberian peninsula, the Italian peninsula, Anatolia, and Greece, and even to some degree the Balkans prior to the arrival of the Slavs. But because they remained closer to the heartland of "Indo-European culture" and because they're more familiar to us, it doesn't feel that way. In fact, arguably all Indo-Europeans went through the same or similar processes. In Scandinavia, for instance, which is ultimately the homeland of all Germanic peoples, including the English and their offshoot cousins, us Americans, they just assimilated a physically similar people in the form of lingering Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers, like the Pit-Comb culture. And the Sintashta people, who were ancestral to the Andronovo people, who in turn were ancestral to the various Indo-Iranian peoples like the Scythians, the Persians or the Aryans of northern India, were hardly some monolithic people without any admixture or influence from their neighbors. There is some degree of subjectivity in terms of when does a people undergo too much admixture, both genetic and cultural, to be considered a white people, Indo-European culture anymore. But regardless of whether you think the Sicilians or Portuguese qualify, it's very obvious that the Hindis and Persians do not. The degree of genetic (and cultural) admixture was just an order of magnitude different than it was across much of Europe, except the southern Mediterranean fringe.