I very much agree.

I wonder if its possible to recreate the pre-Baluchi Brahui(if that makes any sense) by ‘subtracting’ the old Baluch from current Brahui/Baluch?

The Baluch were probably genetically very similar to the current day Kurds a thousand years ago.

I would guess that the pre-Baluchi Brahui already had some indo-aryan admixture from the Jat(Jadgal) inhabitants of Baluchistan, so determining the actual Brahui component would not be that easy…

Relief map

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&biw=1600&bih=703&q=relief+map+afghanistan&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x38d16eb6f8ff026d:0xf3b5460dbe96da78,Afghanistan&gl=uk&t=p&ei=zC0TTuqKIIWYhQfA_sjlDQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ8gEwAA

If you imagined, just for the sake of argument, a Dravidian base across all of now Afghanistan and Pakistan and two flows coming in both following the line of least resistance, a Persian one in the south flowing west to east and then up to Quetta when they hit the mountains and a Turkic one flowing north to south along the lowland in the west of Afghanistan and then east to Kandahar.

You’d end up with a band of terriotory west of somewhere like Chaman where these Turkic and Iranian forces would conflict.

If the outcome of that conflict was a stalemate along that Chaman line then the Turkic influence would spread up to Kabul creating a kind of U shape of influence Herat-Kandahar-Kabul while the Iranian influence would flow through the Quetta pass and down south again making an upside down U shape Mand-Quetta-Hyderabad.

The southern section of mountainous would be surrounded by Iranian influence and sealed from Turkic influences. The large northern bloc would be surrounded by Turkic influence and sealed from Iranian influences. The central bloc of mountains would have influences from all sides but not surrounded by a single one.

Again, not saying this is accurate or anything and you need to know the history and the genetics etc but i think when you’re looking at parahistory via genetics then looking at terrain in a path of least resistance way might provide some early theories which can then by tested against the genetic evidence.

look at the individual bar plots. it’s a relatively consistent different.

no, i don’t mean iranian as in the synonym for persian. i mean iranian languages, which span the north iranian ones of the caucasus to pashto. the persian languages, of which farsi i the modern instantiation, are a specific southwestern branch with roots in fars. they are very distinct from the east iranian languages, of which pashto is the primary representative, or northwestern iranian languages such as kurdish. there are many “persian” dialects. farsi and dari are the two most prominent ones. but these are much much closer than pashto, kurdish, or baloch, are to these dialects.

that helps illustrate my point even better, you’d find the difference between Azeri Turks and the surrounding Iranian population, but you’d probably find the same (or greater differences) between Azeri Turks and Karakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu Turkmans in eastern Anatolia as well as between Azeris and Turkmans in general despite the fact that all of these populations were part of the Oghuz (Saljuk) tribal grouping that entered West Asia en mass after 1041 CE. The reason why Azeris (in Iran in particular) exhibit east Asian traits is not because of they are turks but because of the Ilkhanid Mongol influence and inter-mixing which started in the 13 century.

I think that partly depends on the terrain. The more mountainous the terrain the more (potentially) ancient the genetics. A dozen separate invaders may have taken over the surrounding lowlands while the mountain people are still there simply because the terrain makes it harder to push people out (and possibly the terrain itself creates a type of culture that is hard to defeat).

I just have to ask, how the heck to do you publish such a huge volume of work almost daily? You must have Herculean work ethic.

If you want me to say Iranian rather than Persian, OK. I’ve witnessed too many online battles between the “it’s IRAN” and the “it’s PERSIA” people to be sure of what word to use where, and with whom.

The Wikipedia article on Pashtun media seems to have been written by Pashtuns for Pashtuns; I don’t give it much credibility. I spent too much time on Wikipedia arguing with nationalists and fundies to trust articles on touchy subjects. Pashtun history is one of them.

Amir Kror is mythical. The only evidence for his existence is a text, the Pata Khazana, which the academics regard as a forgery — they only differ as to the date. In any case, it was written well after Ahmad Shah Durrani.

It is completely unbelievable that Pashto could be traced back to the 8th century CE. That’s more than a thousand years ago. During that time, conquests and migrations have spread and mixed languages; isolation in mountain valleys has differentiated them. The result would be a hodgepodge of dialects/languages, with a complex history. I am not a specialist in Iranian or Central Asian languages, but that’s just common sense if you know anything about linguistics.

The Baburnama, the memoirs of Babur, would be one of the primary texts for Central Asian/South Asian history. I proofread a large chunk of the Beveridge translation for Distributed Proofreaders, which will be bringing it out as an ebook. I kept an eye out for mention of Pashtuns. None. There were references to Afghans, but it’s not completely clear that Afghan = Pashtun. There were tribal names there that didn’t match the current list of Pashtun tribes. In any case, Babur mentions the Afghans only in the context of isolated rebellions and conspiracies against his rule, or as villagers whom he raided for horses and provisions. Hill tribes.

As for the claims that the history of Pashto extends back to the 8th century CE — well, that’s a Wikipedia article, it has clearly been written by Pashtuns to glorify Pashtuns, and it has little credibility with me. I spent too dang much time on Wikipedia scrapping with nationalists and fundies of various sorts to regard any articles on touchy subjects as reliable.

Amir Krore is mythical, dangnabit. Whether you believe that Habibi forged the Pata Khazana in 1975, or that Vambery found a copy in 1859, you can’t prove that any of it predates the Durrani empire — the power that gave poets and historians strong motives to invent a glorious past for Pashtuns.

I don’t know as much as I’d like about the linguistic history of the Iranian dialects of central Asia, but what I do know suggests that conquests and migrations spread and mixed languages, isolation in mountain valleys differentiated them, and the two trends would have resulted in a range of dialects and an extremely complex history. Any Iranian dialect from the 8th century would be very different from an 18th century dialect.

I proofread a large chunk of the Baburnama (Babur’s memoirs) for Distributed Proofreaders. Beveridge translation, which is old and odd, but it is out of copyright. (We haven’t finished formatting it, BTW; it has taken years to push this formidable text through the system.) I kept an eye out for mention of Pashtuns. None, unless they are synonymous with Afghan. Perhaps, but there are Afghan tribal names in the Baburnama that don’t seem to match the current divisions. Most of the mentions of Afghans are in connection with isolated rebellions or conspiracies against Babur, or villages raided BY Babur for horses and provisions. Nothing to indicate that they are anything more than hill tribes.

Ghilzais were almost certainly Turkic and adopted Pashtun culture and language fairly late

Were they actually Turkic, or did they subscribe to a Turkic identity? If they were of primarily Turkic descent, then it should be apparent, visually, that they are distinct. If, on the other hand, they that the same (mixed) ethnic makeup as other Pashtuns, and only later adopted a Pashtun identity, then it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference at all.

Cultural entities tend to be endogamous, so it seems like a reasonable null to assume that they are genetically distinct. If they aren’t – well, then you may have learned something interesting…

pashto is not a persian dialect, unless by persian you mean iranian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_languages

I am not sure which mythology is this – definitely not Indian, Afghan or Pashtun

Pashtu literature traces its roots back to close to 2000 years ago – still Pashtu as a “distinct” and “unique” language not a Persian dialect. Even recent ones , the likes of Amir Krore – belong to 8th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashto_media

Why sticking to some mystery myths when wikipedia is there for FREE

i’ll bet you $500 dollars that there is a statistically significant (95% interval) difference between the % east asian in azeri iranians and persian speaking iranians in the same region assuming a sample size of 500 each. what i’m trying to get at is that the identities were fluid, but not arbitrary and 100% socially constructed.

So far as I can differentiate truth from mythology, Pathans/Pashtuns were just another hill tribe speaking a Persian dialect (Pashto) until 1747. A tribesman named Ahmad led a Pashtun contingent in the service of Nader Shah, the Persian conqueror. When Nader Shah was assassinated, Ahmad was in the right place to grab a chunk of the disintegrating empire. Ahmad became Ahmad Shah Durrani, ruling over the Durrani Empire, which at its height controlled large chunks of what are today Iran, Pakistan, and India. Other hill tribes amalgamated with the new aristocracy. Rather than being the first state that united all the Pashtuns (per the probably Pashtun-edited Wikipedia article), I suspect it was the state that created the Pashtuns. The Durrani empire disintegrated almost as rapidly as it had been created, thanks to tribal mores that created cousin competition and feuding. I suspect that Pashtuns would have returned to being just another hill tribe if it hadn’t been for the Raj, which wanted a stable client state on the borders of India. Their interventions were often unsuccessful, but eventually turned an ad-hoc empire into something that looked like a state on the surface.

So, yes, Pashtuns would be a relatively recent group. Hill farmers/raiders with delusions of grandeur and bizarre claims to Jewish or Arab ancestry (probably intended to distance them from their hill farmer/raider neighbors).