NEW DELHI: The first study of the DNA samples of the skeletal remains excavated from Rakhigarhi , an Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) site in Haryana, has found no traces of Iranian farmer or steppe pastoralist ancestry, which according to the lead archaeologist in the team raises doubt over the long-held theory of Aryan invasion or migration into South Asia “The paper indicates that there was no Aryan invasion and no Aryan migration and that all the developments right from the hunting-gathering stage to modern times in South Asia were done by indigenous people,” Prof Vasant Shinde, lead author of the paper, told ET.The findings of the study, which took over three years to complete, authored by a team of Indian archaeologists and DNA experts from Harvard Medical School was published on Thursday in the scientific journal ‘Cell’ under the title: ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers’. The paper concludes Indians came from a genetic pool predominantly belonging to an indigenous ancient civilisation. The findings are based on the study of the ancient genome in the skeletons excavated from a burial site at Rakhigarhi, which is among the biggest Indus Valley locations, spread across 300 hectares near Hisar. It belongs to the mature phase of the Harappan period, dating back to about 2800-2300 BC.The paper makes three key points: The skeletal remains from the Rakhigarhi individual was from a population that is “the largest source of ancestry for South Asians”; the “Iranian related ancestry in South Asia split from Iranian plateau lineage over 12,000 years ago”; the “first farmers of the fertile crescents contributed little to no ancestry to later south Asians”.The paper is authored by Vasant Shinde of Deccan College of Pune, Vageesh Narasimhan and David Reich of Harvard Medical School and Niraj Rai of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences among others. The paper claims Iranian genetic traits in the Indus Valley period and in present day South Asians come from ancient Iranian and South East Asian hunter-gatherers, much before the advent of large-scale farming. “The Iranian related ancestry in IVC derives from a lineage leading to early Iranian farmers, herders and hunter-gatherers before their ancestors separated, contradicting the hypothesis that the shared ancestry between early Iranians and South Asians reflects a large-scale spread of western Iranian farmers east. Instead, sampled ancient genomes from the Iranian plateau and IVC descend from different groups of hunter gatherers who began farming without being connected by substantial movement of people,” the paper states.The study suggests farming skills have been developed indigenously contrary to prevalent theories that these came with migrants from the Steppes and Anatolian farmers. As the paper states: “(These findings) in South Asia as in Europe, the advent of farming was not mediated directly by descendants of the world’s first farmers who lived in the fertile crescent. Instead populations of hunter-gatherers — in Eastern Anatolia in the case of Europe and in a yet unsampled location in the case of South Asia — began farming without large-scale movement of people into these regions.”The paper claims: “Multiple lines of evidence suggest the genetic similarity of I6113 (the Rakhigarhi burial DNA) to the Indus Periphery Cline individuals is due to gene flow from South Asia rather than in the reverse direction.”