Vasant Shinde is an Indian archaeologist and supporter of Indigenous Aryanism, who has done excavations at Rakhigarhi from 2011 to 2016. He gained fame as first author on the long-awaited 2019 paper "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," on DNA-research on a single skeleton from Rakhigarhi which shows that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation had no steppe (Indo-Aryan) genetic ancestry, in line with the Indo-Aryan migration theory. The day after the publication Shinde publicly endorsed the Out of India theory, thereby rejecting the conclusions of his own paper.
In the 1980s-1990s Shinde conducted excavations at the Tapti basin in Maharashtra.
From 2011 to 2016 Shinde conducted excavations at the Indus Valley Civilisation site of Rakhigarhi.[3] According to Shinde, Rakhigarhi was larger than Mohenjo-daro, and the IVC started in the Ghaggar basin, identified by him with the Sarasvati river, and from there extended to the Indus river.[4]
According to Avikunthak, Shinde was the first archaeologist who noticed the value of genetic research in the debate on the origins of Indo-Aryan culture in India. Initially working together with Seoul National University College of Medicine, Shinde gained fame as main author on the long-awaited[5] 2019 paper "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," co-authored by David Reich, and wearing his "unmistakable stamp." The paper concluded that the IVC-people lacked ancestry from Anatolia and the steppes, in line with the Indo-Aryan migration theory, which argues that the Indo-Aryan Vedic people migrated into South Asia after the height of the Indus Valley Civilisation, in the period of ca. 1900-1500 BCE.
Shinde et al. (2019) concluded that the genome of researched individual "fits as a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians (the largest component) and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers." The Iranian component was unrelated to early Iranian farmers, "contradicting the hypothesis that the shared ancestry between early Iranians and South Asians reflects a large-scale spread of western Iranian farmers east," concluding that farming in India began "without being connected by movement of people."
Shinde et al. (2019) states that the presence of Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in South Asians today "is consistent with [it] being entirely derived from Steppe pastoralists who carried it in mixed form and who spread into South Asia from 2000–1500 BCE ." The paper further states that "a natural route for Indo-European languages to have spread into South Asia is from Eastern Europe via Central Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, a chain of transmission that did occur as has been documented in detail with ancient DNA."
A press note was released by Shinde in september 2019, preceding a press conference at 6 september 2019 on the findings.[6] The press note stated that the research
It also stated that the research
Several media outlets followed Shinde's primer, and presented the study as a rebuttal of the established Indo-Aryan migration theory, confusing it with Mortimer Wheeler's outdated proposal, and ignoring the actual contents and conclusions of the study.
At the press conference held at September 6, 2019 to explain the findings, Vasant Shinde and Niraj Rai publicly endorsed the Out of India theory, rejecting the idea that the Vedic people had migrated into South Asia at the time of the decline of the Harappan civilisation. As Shinde stated, "the Vedic era that followed [the IVC] was a fully indigenous period with some external contact."
According to journalist Hartosh Singh Bal, "the claim that the Harappans were the Vedic people "betrays the very research that underlies the two papers. To believe this, the authors would have to discredit their own papers."
During 2020 Shinde further propagated his interpretation of the archaeogenetic data, craniofacial reconstruction of skeletal remains, and material archaeological remains that "the Harappans moved westward - propagating the "Out of India theory"- a return to the Hindutva claim of the Vedic Aryan, now invoking aDNA data as arsenal."
In 2022 Shinde advised Ministry of Culture Secretary Govind Mohan on a project to study the genetic history of India's population.[2] Reported by The New Indian Times as a project "“trace the purity of races in India,”[2] the project drew criticism and condemnation.[7] In response, the Minsitry of culture issued a statement "refuting the report and said that it has no intention of conducting studies of racial purity in the country."[7] According to Shinde, his statement was "twisted and fabricated."[8] In an open letter, "[over] a 100 leading biologists, historians, anthropologists and intellectuals" protested against the plan, warning that the term "race" is a social construct with unwarranted implications.[8] [9] [10]