Steppe Ancestry definitely arrived in India post 1000 BCE - The Final Blow

कर्ण (karNa), by @zdrava

In my first post on this topic - 'The True source of steppe ancestry in modern Indians' - I laid out the genetic claim that the best source for steppe in Indians seems to be a sample from the Yaz II Iron Age culture site at Takhirbai 3, Turkmenistan (short name of the sample - TKM_IA), dated to approximately 850 BCE. Based on other archaeological, anthropological, epigraphic and literary evidence which also supported this claim, I proposed that only a post-1000 BCE movement of these 'proto-Śāka' people could explain the steppe ancestry present in modern Indians. The main reason to reject the view that steppe folks came to the core Vedic region (of Punjab, Haryana and East UP) around ~1500 BCE, and gave Indians the Vedic culture and Indo-European languages is the fact that absolutely no archaeological evidence exists to support such a big claim. This difference is important - a post-1000 BCE movement of Iranian-speaking proto-Śāka into India cannot bring the Vedic culture and language. Neither does it match the evidence from Rig Veda, which describes a pre-Iron Age life. Do read that article to understand all the evidence in support of my claim. 

Steppe ancestry entered modern Indian Populations post 900 BCE

In this post, I analyze the date of steppe admixture with local ancestry in Swat Valley Iron age samples (avg 910 BCE) and RoopkundA (avg 850 CE) samples from Uttarakhand, India. These are the only 2 sets of good quality ancient DNA samples from the Indian subcontinent, and therefore extremely important to study the genetic changes in the subcontinent. 

 In one of my earlier posts, I analyzed all 23 RoopkundA samples and show that in that set of 13 male samples, the steppe component is not correlated with Y-HG R1a1a, instead, it is correlated with Y-hg J2.