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The steppe
Five thousand years ago people from the grassland north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea moved into Europe, and the ancestry of Europe changed. They herded cattle on open land, they had wheeled wagons and horses, and they buried their dead under earth mounds. Archaeologists call them the Yamnaya.
Two laboratories published this in the same week of 2015, David Reich's at Harvard and Eske Willerslev's in Copenhagen, working from different bones and arriving at the same answer. The Corded Ware people of Germany, who follow immediately after, carry about three quarters of their ancestry from the steppe. The farmers who had lived on that land for four thousand years remain in the genome as the smaller share.
Britain shows the same thing more strongly. Around 4,500 years ago the Beaker people arrive, and within a few centuries over ninety percent of British ancestry comes from them. The people who built Stonehenge have almost no descendants among the people who live where it stands.
The men
The question is whether whole families came west, or the men came.
The steppe is the belt of open grassland that runs from Hungary across to Mongolia, and the people in question are the Yamnaya and their descendants, who lived on its western end, north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Here is how the question is answered. Skeletons are excavated in Iberia, the peninsula that is now Spain and Portugal, dated by radiocarbon, and sequenced. Several hundred of them cover the centuries before the arrival and the centuries after it. Skeletons from graves on the steppe itself are sequenced in the same way, so each stretch of DNA in an Iberian skeleton can be assigned a steppe origin or a local one.
Then four parts of the genome are read, and each one reports a different line of descent. The Y chromosome travels from father to son alone, so it reports the male line. The mitochondrial DNA travels from mother to child alone, so it reports the female line. The autosomes, which are the remaining chromosomes, come from both parents, so they report the population as a whole. And a man carries one X chromosome and passes it to his daughters alone, while a woman carries two, so ancestry arriving through men is thinned on the X while it stands at full strength on the autosomes. The ratio between those two is the measurement of sex.
Now the results. Beginning about 4.5 KY (thousands of years) ago, and completed within some 400 years, the skeletons buried in Iberia change in three ways at once.
Every Y chromosome in them comes from the steppe. The Y chromosome lineages the local men had carried reach that point and end.
Every one of their mitochondrial lineages belongs to the women who were living in Iberia already, and those same lineages continue there for thousands of years afterward.
And steppe ancestry accounts for about 40 percent of their autosomes while accounting for about 17 percent of their X chromosomes, which is under half as much.
The three measurements say one thing. The people who came from the steppe were men, and they had children with the women who were already living there.
So was it a conquest?
The Iberian measurements show men arriving from the steppe and fathering the generations after them. What produced that is a separate question, and two different histories produce it. Each one can be watched in a place where people wrote the events down, so I will take them one at a time and then come back to Iberia.
The first history is killing, and it is the history that written records report most often. Wherever a written account and genetic data both survive, the two stand in close concordance. In Antioquia in Colombia, settled by Spanish men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 94 percent of Y chromosomes today are European and about 1 percent are Native, while about 90 percent of mitochondrial lineages are Native. In Puerto Rico, where the Spanish conquered the Taino in the same century, about 61 percent of mitochondrial lineages are Native while most Y chromosomes are European. The Mongol conquests, covered earlier in this book, left one Y chromosome lineage carried today by a large share of the men across Asia. The familiar cultural version is the Hebrew Bible, where the stories of Jericho, Midian and Shechem repeat one procedure: the men are killed and the women are kept.
The second history is rank, and it requires a state strong enough to keep peace and enforce law across many generations, which the first history can proceed without. The same Spanish colonies show it once the fighting was over. In Mexico over the past five hundred years, the casta system, which was the legal ranking of people by descent, made a father's rank the rank of his children, so a Native woman's children by a Spaniard gained access to land, trade, office and the church. The Spanish who crossed the ocean were mostly men, and epidemic disease had already removed a large part of the resident population of both sexes. Held in place by the courts and garrisons of an empire for ten generations, that arrangement went on producing the same genetic pattern with far less killing. About 93 percent of mitochondrial lineages in Mexico today are Native American, while Native American ancestry across the whole genome runs between a third and a half.
Now back to Iberia 4.5 KY (thousands of years) ago, where the people involved wrote nothing down. I think the steppe men took the peninsula by force, for two reasons. Killing is the history the written record reports most often. And rank, held in place for centuries, needs an empire, and an empire leaves cities, writing and roads behind it, while the Iberia of that time was a land of fortified villages and preliterate people. Rank built on wealth alone, such as bride payments in cattle, stays possible.
The bones can be asked. Violent death marks a skeleton, and the skeletons of those 400 years are already excavated and dated.
Where the esoteric sources put the Aryans
Did anyone describe this migration before the genomes?
Three esoteric sources did, each at its own level of detail.
Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, wrote in 1888 that the present humanity, which she called the Fifth Root Race or the Aryan race, arose in Central Asia and spread outward, west into Europe and south into India. She took the word Aryan from the language scholars of her century, who had found that Sanskrit and the languages of Europe descend from one common ancestor. Linguists still call the branch that reached India Indo-Aryan.
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, gave the route in more detail in a lecture of 1908. After the great flood the Atlanteans moved from west to east. Part of them settled in Europe, and the most advanced group went on into Asia and founded a colony in Central Asia under a leader Steiner calls the Manu. From there the first mission went south to India. Steiner places the first culture of India that followed at about 9 KY (thousands of years) ago.
Edgar Cayce, the American psychic, adds the western end. In one reading he describes Atlanteans who set out for Egypt and landed instead in the Pyrenees, in what is now Spain, Portugal and France.
The genomes trace a route of the same shape. The steppe people moved west from about 5 KY (thousands of years) ago and reached Iberia by about 4.5 KY ago, where their men had children with the women already living there. Part of their descendants then turned back east. The Sintashta people of the southern Ural Mountains, about 4 KY ago, carry ancestry from the Corded Ware people of Europe, and their successors spread across the steppe of Kazakhstan and then south into India. Vagheesh Narasimhan and David Reich, publishing in 2019, found steppe ancestry in Indians today, highest in the north and in the traditional priestly groups, and strongest on the Y chromosome. A third branch reached the Near East, where the Mitanni kingdom in Syria, about 3.4 KY ago, left a horse-training manual with Indo-Aryan words in it.
Steiner's route and the genetic route share a stage that Blavatsky's outline covers in general terms: both pass through Europe before reaching Central Asia and India.
And Cayce's reading, set beside the Iberian genomes, gives the two parents different origins. I propose that the Iberian mothers, whose lineages survived, descend from the Atlanteans Cayce describes, and that the fathers came from the steppe.
A living source adds the link to Atlantis. Marina Seren, a contactee, told me in a recorded conversation that the Aryans are the Fifth Root Race, built from the inherited lineages of Atlantis and of Hyperborea, the northern land of Greek myth.
The esoteric sources and the genomes agree on the direction, and they differ on the date. Blavatsky places the origin of the Aryans about a million years ago, Steiner places their arrival in India about 9 KY ago, and the ancient DNA places it about 3.5 KY ago.
Where did the Aryans come from?
The steppe migration is one event among many. People moved across Eurasia again and again, in different directions and at different times, and fitting every account of the Aryans onto a single event would lose most of them.
One part of the question the genomes settle directly: were the steppe people who reached Europe the same people who reached India? Vagheesh Narasimhan and David Reich compared them in 2019. The steppe ancestry in India matches the ancestry of the steppe people of eastern Europe of about 4 KY (thousands of years) ago, and in India it is highest among the Brahmins, the traditional priestly caste. So the Aryans of Europe and the Aryans of India share one genetic source.
The date is where I hesitate. Five thousand years seems recent for a people the esoteric sources place far deeper in time. I think the steppe migration is the latest of many. Hyperborea, the polar land around the North Pole, was the base of the Orion Aryans, and from there they kept spreading and taking over, wave after wave, across a very long history. Ancient DNA reaches back only as far as bones keep it, so the older waves show up only as ancestry the later people already carried.
A view common across the esoteric literature, and one I side with, runs as follows. The Aryans were one people spread across three places: Earth, the Pleiades and Orion. Stargates joined the three, and the people moved back and forth through them across a very long history, from time to time occupying Earth. On Earth they began as an Atlantean subrace, which is why their bodies fit this planet so well. Their culture was the culture of Orion, where the empire was a military one, and so they arrived here as warriors. The Pleiades held a smaller branch of them. Most Pleiadians belong to a separate and largely peaceful culture, and the branch tied to the Aryans is the Nordic one, the Pleiadians closest to Orion in character. Lakesh, a Pleiadian channeled by James E. Charles in 2020, said the Aryans looked exactly like the Nordics.
Why they left, and why they came back
If the Aryans could return to Earth, why did they leave it? I think the answer is comfort. They were a city people, used to a luxurious life, and once the Atlantean cities were gone the wild country was harsh and dull. Life on Earth offered them little.
They came back when that changed. Once the local tribes had grown settled and organized enough to be governed, a ruler from outside could live well among them, with comfort, adventure, and local women who took an interest in the newcomers. So the nobles returned, and the ancestry they left is the ancestry the Iberian genomes show: incoming men, and local women.
They may have returned to the north first. Russian alternative researchers have documented megaliths in the Arctic, blocks so large that they point to advanced technology and possibly to larger builders, perhaps outside the human form, possibly even reptilian. Marina Seren, quoted above, gives the Aryans a Hyperborean lineage alongside the Atlantean one, and esoteric Hyperborea stood at the North Pole itself. For the last few million years the pole has been open ocean. Before that it was different. A ridge of continental crust, the Lomonosov Ridge, crosses the pole beneath the Arctic Ocean, and drilling on it in 2004 showed that about 50 million years ago the Arctic was warm and the top of the ridge lay shallow, possibly above the sea. In the time of the dinosaurs the Arctic carried forests and no permanent ice, and dinosaur bones are found in northern Alaska. I consider it possible that the northern civilizations date back as far as the time of the dinosaurs, over 66 million years ago, and that the returning Aryans rebuilt cities on those old sites.
Aryan and Orion
The two words sound almost the same, Aryan and Orion, and in the channeled material the two are closely tied.
Orion culture and Pleiadian culture differ in kind. Orion culture is built on hierarchy, empire and control, and Pleiadian culture is the one Earth is gradually moving toward. Tekkrr, a Lyran being channeled by James E. Charles in 2015, said the Nordics were warriors in the beginning and conquered other species before turning to trade.
Lakesh, the same Pleiadian, channeled by James E. Charles in 2017, described Orion factions on Earth that commanded humans, were worshipped by them and kept slaves, and said the battles between those factions were fought in Siberia, in Russia and all through Europe, about 3.2 KY (thousands of years) ago. A being channeled through James E. Charles in 2024 described high Orion officials who came to Earth to escape the wars in their own region, and temples on Earth destroyed in those wars.
The steppe expansion matches that description: an armed elite of men arriving from the east, taking land and women, and ruling. I think the Aryan conquest was carried out by the Orions themselves: extraterrestrials who arrived, seeded their genes into the local population, raised armies from their descendants, and conquered and ruled.
Two ancestries of India
Where do the people of India come from?
In 2009 David Reich and his Indian colleagues Kumarasamy Thangaraj and Lalji Singh compared the genomes of 25 Indian groups from every region of the country, castes and tribes alike. Every group is a mixture of two ancestries. One is the older population of India. The other arrived from outside, and part of it is the steppe ancestry of the previous item, carried by the Aryans.
The paper named the two the Ancestral North Indians and the Ancestral South Indians. Reich explains in his 2018 book that these neutral names came out of long negotiation with his Indian co-authors, who objected to any wording that described a people entering India from outside. So the geographic names cover the actual finding: an old population, and a later conquest.
The older population, the one the paper calls Ancestral South Indian, survives today only inside India. Its closest relatives are the Andaman Islanders, and its more distant relatives are the Aboriginal Australians and the people of New Guinea. The Andaman Islands are a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Burma, and they belong to India. Their original peoples, among them the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, are hunter-gatherers who have lived there in near isolation for tens of thousands of years. Blavatsky, in 1888, named the Andaman Islanders and the Aboriginal Australians as remnants of the Lemurians, and the people of New Guinea carry the highest Denisovan ancestry on Earth, which this book identifies as Lemurian. The incoming population carries the Aryans, whom the previous item places in the Atlantean line. So India holds Lemurians and Atlanteans within one population.
The proportions differ by group. The north and the higher traditional castes carry more of the incoming ancestry, and the south and the tribal groups carry more of the older one.
Older than the conquest
The steppe Aryans were the most recent arrival, and the genomes show at least one wave before them. The 2019 study by Vagheesh Narasimhan and Reich found that the people of the Indus Valley civilization, about 5 KY (thousands of years) ago, were themselves a mixture of the old Indian hunter-gatherer line and a line related to the early farmers of Iran. I think there were many such waves, and the steppe wave is the latest one the bones can show.
The land is older still. India was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, joined to Africa and Madagascar. It broke away from Madagascar about 90 million years ago, moved north across the Indian Ocean, and collided with Asia about 50 million years ago, raising the Himalayas. Mainstream archaeology is confident that India was empty of people during that journey. That journey falls in the time the esoteric sources give to early Lemuria and early Atlantis, after the dinosaurs and long before the seven parahumans. I think Atlantean and Lemurian people might have been there.
People reached India after it joined Asia, and they reached it early. Stone tools at Attirampakkam in southern India are about 1.5 million years old, so a people was living and working there that long ago. Mainstream archaeology assigns those toolmakers to Homo erectus; for this book it matters that a people was there. They were one of the early populations of India, and many followed them. The Lemurian line may have arrived by sea, along the coasts of the Indian Ocean, the route that connects India with the Andaman Islands, New Guinea and Australia.
Why archaeology finds no older people
Why has archaeology found no trace of people of any kind, human or parahuman, in India 50 million years ago? The simplest answer is that nobody lived there. If people did live there, three reasons explain why archaeology would still have found no trace of them.
The first is the ground. Much of western and central India lies under the Deccan Traps, lava flows up to two kilometres thick that poured out about 66 million years ago, at the time the dinosaurs died out. Whatever stood on that land before the lava lies underneath it. And little land surface of that age survives anywhere, since erosion removes it or later sediment buries it deep.
The second is survival. Stone survives this long. Dinosaur bones survive 66 million years, and flint buried in sediment survives as well. So preservation is possible, and the question becomes whether a find would be recognised.
The third is interpretation, and it is the strongest of the three. Stone tools are never dated directly; the layer of sediment around them is. A tool found in a layer 50 million years old is classified as intrusive, meaning it fell or washed into that layer later. The rule was made to protect against misdating, and it works as a filter that keeps every such anomaly out of orthodox science. A tool of impossible age receives, automatically, a possible one.
The filter has a documented history. In the 1880s the geologist Josiah Whitney, head of the California Geological Survey, reported stone mortars, pestles and spear points from gold-bearing gravels under Table Mountain, sealed beneath lava flows about 9 million years old, in gravels older still. Archaeology set them aside because the age was judged impossible. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson collected such cases in Forbidden Archeology in 1993. In the 1970s the geologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre dated tools at Hueyatlaco in Mexico to about 250 KY (thousands of years) ago by several methods that agreed, and her career suffered for it, as she said publicly.
Whoever lived in India 50 or 60 million years ago left no tools that mainstream science would date to that age.
India absorbs its conquerors
India was conquered many times, and after each conquest Indian culture continued.
Alexander the Great reached the Indus in 326 BC, and Greek kings later ruled parts of the northwest for about two centuries. They turned to Indian religions. The Greek king Menander became a Buddhist, and the Greek ambassador Heliodorus set up a pillar to the god Vishnu about 2.1 KY (thousands of years) ago. The Scythians and the Kushans came next, and the Kushan emperor Kanishka became a great patron of Buddhism. The Muslim conquests followed, from the Arab conquest of Sindh in the eighth century through the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire, and Islam in India took Indian forms: its own shrines of saints, its own castes, and the Urdu language, built from Persian and Hindi. The British ruled for nearly two centuries and left India the English language, and India remained Indian.
Genetically, India resembles other conquered lands. The steppe men who arrived about 3.5 KY ago left their Y chromosomes, most of all in the north and in the priestly groups, as steppe men did in Iberia. The difference is in the culture. The conquerors changed the genomes and the rulers, and Indian culture continued through all of them.
Where that continuity comes from is unclear to me. It may come from the culture itself. It may come from a magical property of the land, a mysterious force coming from the Earth in that place, which defines the character of the place whoever lives there. I see both as possible.
Population Y
How did ancestry from Australia and New Guinea reach the Amazon?
In 2015 Pontus Skoglund, David Reich and colleagues compared the genomes of Native Americans with the genomes of peoples around the world. Most Native Americans descend from one population that crossed from Siberia into the Americas, and the comparison confirmed that for most groups. A few groups in the Amazon basin of Brazil, among them the Surui and the Karitiana, carry something more: a small share of ancestry, about 2 percent, related to the peoples of Australia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands. That is the same line the previous item traced from southern India.
Skoglund and Reich named the source of that ancestry Population Y, after Ypykuera, the word for ancestor in the Tupi language. The route by which it reached the Amazon is unknown. One clue lies in China: a man who lived about 40 KY (thousands of years) ago near Beijing, in Tianyuan Cave, shares the same affinity, which places a population carrying it in East Asia.
Another possibility is a route across the ocean. The Lemurian line of the previous item is a coastal line, running from India through the Andaman Islands to New Guinea and Australia, and a people able to reach Australia across open water could also cross the Pacific. The esoteric sources place Lemuria on land masses in the Indian and Pacific oceans and along their coasts, the region that joins the two ends of this signal.
Another possibility is that extraterrestrials arrived in flying saucers and carried out genetic hybridization with the people living in the Amazon. And another is that the Lemurians themselves returned from space to the surface of the Earth, there. Each of these would leave the same signal in the genome.
Blavatsky also counted the Native Americans among the descendants of the Atlanteans, so in these Amazonian groups the Lemurian and Atlantean lines might have met again, as they met in India.
Orthodox population genetics treats the crossing as a puzzle because it assumes that the people of the distant past were primitive and could cross an ocean only with great difficulty. If they were more advanced than we are, with technologies of their own, the puzzle reverses: the surprising thing is how little crossing the genomes show.