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The ongoing war between the US and Israel and Iran has sparked much curiosity and interest about the West Asian country in India and abroad. Recent coverage in traditional and social media has hovered around the rich ancient history and culture of Iran, its differentiation from neighbouring Arab cultures, its Shia ethos and (in India) its civilisational links with India.
That last part — the civilisational links with the Indian subcontinent — is especially important since modern genetic and archaeological studies have proved what linguistics first highlighted: That North Indians (and by extension Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) and Iranian peoples (from Kurds in the west to Tajiks in the east) share similar origins, albeit having composite, mixed identities today.
Conventional studies hypothesise that around 2000-1500 Before Common Era, groups of pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe—that great band of grassland stretching from modern Hungary to Manchuria—migrated from what is today’s Central Asia.
These people split into two branches—one migrated towards the Iranian Plateau while the other moved into the northwestern Indian Subcontinent.
Today, the Iranian peoples of Iran and parts of Central and West Asia, as well as the Indo-Aryan peoples of North India, Pakistan and Bangladesh form their modern descendants, though there has been a lot of intermingling with people who resided in the areas they moved into.
In North India, the Jats and Rors of Haryana are especially noted for carrying some of the highest amounts of Steppe ancestry. “A higher level of European ancestry in the Ror and Jat compared to other South Asians makes these two populations outliers within the broader Northwest South Asian land- scape,” notes a 2018 study titled The Genetic Ancestry of Modern Indus Valley Populations from Northwest India published in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
Hundreds of miles from the plains of North India, which are home to the Jats and the Rors, there live in the isolated mountainous valleys of Tajikistan, two other groups who show similar high Steppe DNA. These people—the Yaghnobis and the Pamiris—have even been called ‘living museums’ by scientists who have studied them.
So, who are the Yaghnobis and Pamiris? What is their story? And how do they fit in the jigsaw puzzle that is the story of the Indo-Iranian and Indo-European peoples?
In 2011, Italian scientists Elisabetta Cilli, Paolo Delaini, Birgit Costazza, Laura Giacomello, Antonio Panaino and Giorgio Gruppioni published their study titled Ethno-anthropological and genetic study of the Yaghnobis: An isolated community in Central Asia. A preliminary study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
They had travelled to the isolated and almost inaccessible Yaghnob Valley in northern Tajikistan.
“The aim of the genetic analysis is to study the genetic legacy of Yaghnobis, to establish if they symbolise a genetic, other than a geographic and linguistic, isolation and also to study the relationship between the Yaghnobis and their neighbours,” the study noted.
The Yaghnobis, explained the scientists, have been identified as the descendants of Sogdians. These were an ancient Iranian people like the Medes, Persians, Parthians, Bactrians and Scythians.
According to local tradition, the Sogdians had taken refuge in the Yaghnob Valley after the Arab Muslim conquest of Central Asia in the VIII Century AD and the fall of the cities of Samarkand and Panjikent.
However, the scientists noted that “the Sogdians were most probably were already located in such a remote area since earlier times, as the remarkable archaeological structures found in the close Valley of Matcha demonstrate”.
The Yaghnobi people, unlike the neighbouring Tajiks, speak an Eastern Iranian language, one which is very is closely related to the language of the ancient Sogdians.
“Buccal swabs together with anthropologic and bio-demographic data were collected from 62 unrelated individuals during three expeditions (2007-2008-2009). Information on birthplace, parents and grandparents, and also, informed consent were obtained from all the individuals sampled. In order to include only Yaghnobi people, all samples come from the most isolated villages in the valley,” according to the study.
“The preliminary analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that Yaghnobis have a unique biological identity, distinct from other populations examined in this study. It appears that they show a reduced variability, probably resulting from their prolonged isolation and the reduction of population size as a consequence of deportation,” the researchers concluded. The Yaghnobis had experienced deportations during the Soviet period.
In 2022, Perle Guarino-Vignon, Nina Marchi, Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento, Evelyne Heyer and Céline Bon published Genetic continuity of Indo-Iranian speakers since the Iron Age in southern Central Asia.
They wanted to find out more about the antecedents of the Indo-Iranian population of Central Asia.
“Today, the Central Asian populations are divided into two cultural and linguistic groups: the Indo-Iranian and the Turko-Mongolian groups. Previous genetic studies unveiled that migrations from East Asia contributed to the spread of Turko-Mongolian populations in Central Asia and the partial replacement of the Indo-Iranian populations. However, little is known about the origin of the latters. To shed light on this, we compare the genetic data on two current-day Indo-Iranian populations — Yaghnobis and Tajiks — with genome-wide data from published ancient individuals,” the paper noted.
The researchers concluded that Indo-Iranian speakers had been in Central Asia much before Turko-Mongolic speakers. East Asian ancestry arrived in the region only at the end of the Iron Age (1200 BCE-550 BCE)
“Overall, we demonstrate here a remarkable example of genetic continuity since the Iron Age in Indo-Iranian populations from Central Asia despite the frenzy of population migrations in the area since the Bronze Age. Similar to Zhabagin et al. work, the present study shows no impact of the Arab cultural expansion in Central Asia on the Indo-Iranian speaker’s genetic diversity, despite the first one leading to a shift in language for Tajiks. We also do not see a gene flow from Iran despite the Persian cultural expansion which led to a language shift from an east-Iranian language to a west-Iranian in Tajiks—when Yaghnobis kept their east-Iranian language,” the paper concludes.
In summary, studies indicate that Yaghnobis derive roughly 93 per cent of their ancestry from historical Indo-Iranian sources. Similarly, Pamiris have also been shown to have high steppe-related ancestry.
Jats and Rors themselves have nearly or over 50 per cent Steppe ancestry, which makes them as well as Yaghnobis and Pamiris key ‘living links’ to the Indo-Iranian peoples of old.
As Cilli, Delaini, Costazza, Giacomello, Panaino and Gruppioni wrote in their 2011 paper: “The Yaghnobi people represent a living museum of history, culture, language and genetic heritage and maintaining the ethno-anthropological and ethnographic features of the Yaghnobis is of vital importance.”