Who were the Aryans?

We hear the term, but most know little. Nazi ideology pops up. Then Iran. Iran, the home of the Aryans. But who were the Aryans, what was their origin and what exactly did they look like?

Animated map of Indo-European migrations.

Iran means “land of the Aryans” and in Old Irish, aire derives from it meaning “freeman” and “noble”. Now I am also learning, that in India, many believe the Yamnaya to be the original Aryans who have once invaded parts of India.

Sara comments:

The Yamnayas ‘invaded’ India around 1500 BCE. They were known as Aryans. In general, they were tall and fair-skinned, with light brown hair. They displaced the local inhabitants in the North-East (present day Pakistan) and the northern regions of India. The original inhabitants were Dravidians, generally shorter and dark-skinned, who moved further down south. The Yamnayas introduced the Sanskrit language to India, which is considered to be an Indo-Iranian language. According to Wikipedia, 6 – 20% of the DNA of Indians comes from the Yamnaya.

and:

The Scythians ‘invaded’ India during the 1st century BCE. They also settled mainly in the North-West and northern regions of India. They were known as Sakas.

We know that the Scythians and Saka were Iranian and that Iron Age Scythians include a mixture of Yamnaya people, from the Russian Steppe, and East Asian populations, similar to the Han and the Nganasan (a Samoyedic people from northern Siberia).

The look of Yamnaya as a whole is still somewhat uncertain, but we do know that Modern Irish, Scots and Welsh have the highest percentage of Gedrosian admixture in Europe today and, although Haak et al. only analysed Scots, apparently also the highest percentage of Yamna-like admixture with Norwegians (and presumably Icelanders, who, like the Norwegians, have a relatively high percentage of ancestry from Ireland and Scotland from the Viking Age, especially on the maternal side). The Scots and Irish also happen to have the highest percentage of combined Celto-Germanic R1a (L664 and Z283 subclades) and R1b (P312 and U106), and therefore the highest percentage of patrilineal Yamna ancestry.

Gedrosia was located between Persia and India.

The original Iranians/Aryans are usually being associated with light skin, so this association would make sense.

India may hold many answers and recently I have written about not just its genetic diversity, but also rh negative frequencies varying between 0.5% and 10% based on region and I wouldn’t be surprised if in parts of Kerala, so far measured highest in rh negative percentages, the number exceeds 10% by far.

What did Yamnayans look like physically?

According Kurts (1984, p.90), people of the Yamna culture consisted of three distinct phenotypes corresponding to the relatively recent blend between three populations. The dominant type was tall, dolichocephalic, with broad faces of medium height. The second type was more robust with high and wide Proto-Europoid faces. The third type was more gracile, with narrow and high faces of the East Mediterranean type.

The average height for Yamnayan men was 175.5cm (5 ft 9 in), approximately the same as the modern average for American and French men, and slightly taller than the average Mesolithic EHG men, who stood at 173.2 cm.

Yamnayan DNA tested by Haak (2015), Wilde (2014), Mathieson (2015) showed that Yamna people (or at least the few elite samples concerned) had predominantly brown eyes, dark hair, and had a skin colour that was moderately light, lighter than Mesolithic Europeans, but somewhat darker than that of the modern North Europeans. This is not unexpected considering that these samples had about 25% of recent admixture from the Iranian Plateau (before the Indo-European migrations brought Northeast European genes to the region), which would have darkened their pigmentation. Other tests have confirmed that the vast majority of Mesolithic Europeans had blue eyes, and the high incidence of red hair among Northwest Europeans (who have the highest percentage of Yamna ancestry) as well as in the Volga-Ural region and in ancient Chinese depictions of the Tocharians from the Tarim Basin strongly suggest that red hair was found among Yamnayans, and that the genes for red hair (which also include some mutations for fair hair) were spread by R1b Indo-Europeans.

Red hair presence makes sense as it keeps popping up in that region. While of course it was mainly spread towards the region now the British isles and Ireland, red haired Yamnayans also went towards East and South. It isn’t surprising that they are responsible for many of the traits within us and that their genes often get carried on recessive in areas where predominant dominant traits overshadow them just to leave us with glimpses in smaller percentages of the population.

Saddam Hussein’s military commander, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

A Uyghur girl in Kashgar, China’s Xinjiang region, with auburn hair.

In Irish Central, Pooja Gantra was described as “looking Irish”. I have news for you: Irish people look Yamnayan. At least like some Yamnayans. It’s called common ancestry without offspring taking ownership of a trait much wider spread genetically.

As always, I look for two things:

1) Recessive traits showing (often “out of nowhere”)
2) Common ancestry among those with common recessive genes showing in phenotype

What catches my curiosity is always when rhesus negatives all over the world do have other recessive genes showing in phenotype even when out of the norm in their location. Even if it is eyes showing as slightly hazel or a reddish shimmer in the black hair when in the sunlight.

So who were and are the Aryans?

I am less interested in anybody considering himself to be something, but much more interested in the origin of traits. Iranian ancestors may have labeled themselves and were labeled partially based on a unique look for their surrounding region.

But whether the Yamnaya or the Iranians were the Aryans leads me to look for a common ancestry which seems to lie in a fraction of the Yamnayas. This is where likely the look Aryans are associated with, originates. And this may include red hair, blue eyes (originated around the Black Sea where Yamnaya later lived) and rhesus negative blood. And even there may not be the original origin. It just means we have a place to look and go further back in time. And whenever we look for recessive genes present, it will lead us towards an ancestral group where these recessive traits have been the norm.