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Dravidian : Sanjeev Sanyal: The theory of Aryan invasion had to be drastically revised when the remains of the sophisticated Harappan civilisation was discovered. They proved that Indian civilisation clearly predated 1500 BC. Oddly, the ‘Aryan invasion theory’ was not thrown away. It was now argued that a people called the Dravidians (supposed ancestors of modern-day Tamils) created the Indus cities & that these cities were destroyed by the invading Aryans. This theory too ran into trouble. There is virtually no archaeological or literary evidence of such a large scale invasion. The Harappan cities did not suddenly collapse but suffered a slow decline as a key river [the Saraswati] dried up & environmental conditions deteriorated…. The first thing that should be clear is that there are no ‘pure’ races in India. With the possible exception of some tiny isolated groups, the vast majority of Indian tribes, castes & communities are a mixture of many genetic streams.... A 2006 study showed that India’s population mix has been broadly stable for a very long time & there has been no major injection of Central Asian genes for over 10,000 years. It also showed that the population of Dravidian speakers has lived for a long time in southern India & the so-called Dravidian genetic pool may even have originated there. A study of 2009 suggests that the bulk of the Indian population can be explained by the mixture of two ancestral groups an older south Indian & a somewhat more recent north Indian but the latter have a 40-50% share even in the south India & among tribal groups of central India. Indeed, there is no ‘pure’ population of ancestral south Indian strand.” [Land of the Seven Rivers – A Brief history of India’s geography, 2012]