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The presence o f Indo-European languages in South Asia is a fact. Vedic texts are indisputable sources o f Indian culture history. W hat is not certa… - Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
" "The presence o f Indo-European languages in South Asia is a fact. Vedic texts are indisputable sources o f Indian culture history. W hat is not certain is that: 1) specific prehistoric cultures and their geographical regions are identifiable as Aryan; and 2) that the human skeletal remains discovered from reputed Aryan burial deposits are distinctive in their possession o f a unique phenotypic pattern marking them apart from non-Aryan skeletal series. What the biological data demonstrate is that no exotic races are apparent from laboratory studies of human remains excavated from any archaeological site, including those accorded Aryan status. All prehistoric human remains recovered thus far from the Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable as ancient South Asians. Further more their biological continuity with living peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the border regions is well established across time and space.
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About Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
Kenneth Adrian Raine Kennedy (June 26, 1930 – April 23, 2014) was an anthropologist who studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology and Asian Studies in the Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell University. Among his areas of interest have been forensic anthropology and human skeletal biology. He died in Ithaca, New York on April 23, 2014.
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Kenneth Adrian Raine Kennedy
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Additional quotes by Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
Affirmations as emphatic as those voiced by the Allchins ensure that the search for the Aryan presence in linguistic and archaeological sources will survive for some time to come. However, biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any o f the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity within the contexts o f linguistics and archaeology.
K. Kennedy (1984), however, who was able to examine all three hundred skeletons that had been retrieved from the Indus Valley Civilization, found that the ancient Harappans "are not markedly different in their skeletal biology from the present-day inhabitants of Northwestern India and Pakistan" (102). He considers any physical variations in the skeletal record to be perfectly normal for a metropolitan setting and consistent with any urban population past or present (103). As far as he is concerned, the polytypism in the South Asian record represents an "overlap of relatively homogeneous tribal and outcaste groups and their penetration into villages, then into urban environments of more heterogeneous people." There is no need to defer to intruding aliens for any of this: "This dynamic rather than mass migration and invasions of nomadic and warlike peoples better accounts for the biological constitutions of those earlier urban populations in the Indus valley." Here, again, we encounter the same objections raised repeatedly by South Asian archaeologists: "Of the Aryans, we must defer to literary and linguistic scholars in whose province lies the determination of the arrival and nature of the linguistic phenomenon we call the Aryans. . . . But archaeological evidence of Aryan- speaking peoples is questionable and the skeletal evidence is nil" (104).
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