A paper of considerable importance for the origin of the Indo-Europeans of India from the Estonian group: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.02.184507v1
Unfortunately, most on H pakSha won't get it due to their self-inflicted blinders. It supports a contention we have long held. About 4 years back when

the Reich & Willerslev teams published works relevant to the expansion of the IEans it became clear that the Sintashta culture was very important for the origin of the Indo-Aryan for they seemed to share specific ancestry with the IAs. 1 key finding from those studies was that

Sintashta were not the successors of the Yamnaya as is but had some Anatolian/Early European farmer admixture that was typical of the Corded Ware culture that advanced westwards from the core Yamnaya zone by at least around 3000 BCE. There was a similar eastward push of Yamnaya

in the form of the Afanasievo that might have be the progenitors of the earliest Tocharian speakers. However, in the next couple of years there was some confusion among the archaeogeneticists about whether the Indo-Iranians were indeed an offshoot of those CWC derived Sintashta

or another Eastern wave like the Afanasievo. However, the Narasimhan et al paper & parallel work from the Willerslev team emphatically established that the Indo-Aryans did specifically have that Anatolian farmer ancestry and were derived from the Sintashta who advanced towards

India, reaching the subcontinent sometime between 2000-1500 BCE. Did that mean that the Sintashta only separate from the CWC around 2300-2100 BCE when they first appear. It has been our contention based on certain philological consideration that the separation of the I-Irians

from their closest European branches, i.e. Balto-Slavic, was earlier than that & that it involved an initial passage through a high latitude route before turning south towards India, Iran and West Asia. Archaeology had suggested that the north-eastern Fatyanovo–Balanovo in what's

today Russia might be a key player in this regard. In this work they obtain aDNA from the Fatyanova sites and with new C14 dates. This shows that: 1) The Fatyanova founders had branched from the rest of CWC by 2900 BCE; 2) they moved north from the rest of the CWC; 3) The males

predominantly bear R1a2-Z93, the Indian branch, rather than the Slavic branch. Thus, the Fatyanova were the or close to the ancestors of the Indo-Iranians. This suggests that Balto-Slavic and I-Ir had split by around 3000 BCE. This supports our contention that the I-Ir emerged

from a very early branch of the CWC and gives us a baseline for chronology of early I-Ir tradition. We have noted before that we now have fairly tight constraints. If the RV was composed in India the earliest it can be is in time window of 1900-1700 BCE. However, we acknowledge

the RV has some markers of very early tradition and shows no hints of being in a place where cities matter at all. This means if one were to propose an Early RV it had to be on the steppes. Notably, it mostly does not acknowledge the I-Ir polarization of daiva & ahura religions

associated with the Zarathushtran schism among the Iranians. This also supports it being closer to the undivided period. Moreover as Tilak noted long ago it has memories of a northern latitude with long dawns. Thus, if 1 were to propose an early RV we're seeing the first glimpses

of these early I-Ir people in these sites which can account for astronomical allusions close to 3000 BCE. Another interesting proposal by the authors is that while pastoralist these people brought some agriculture with them. Again compatible with some agriculture among early I-Ir

Finally they note something which has been suggested for sometime now: the IEans converted many forest regions into steppes suitable for their lifestyle. This parallels the much later Mongol maintenance of steppes (a man-made ecology) also encoded in the Yasa of the great Khan

This tendency might have continued into India and finds echoes in the tales like that of videgha mAthava moving east or arjuna and kR^iShNa's khANDava-dahana.