10/22/2025
OUT OF INDIA - BY LAND AND BY SEA
A Paradigm Shift in Ancient Migration Theories
Note:
What follows is a revised, expanded and more copiously illustrated post previously published on "Indus Valley Culture", a page that I run and moderate. If interested please access https://www.facebook.com/WBorsboom/
In 3 years this page generated 14,000 followers and more than 61,000 likes, shares and click-throughs.
- PART ONE -
Prehistoric by Sea and by Land Migrations from the Indus Valley
This hypothesis proposes that between 8,000 and 3,300 years ago, multiple group migrations took place from the Indus Valley along routes that went BY SEA - more so than just over land.
Based on genetic data and linguistic evidence, it is shown that seafaring Indus Valley people migrated in wave-like fashion to a vast number of coastal lands and islands THROUGHOUT the entire world.
To read my paper on this OIT, please access: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4YT9_fTsOiGcTViVVVNU2wzRzRQMmowZ25RZ2ZOSVhWcW80/view?usp=drivesdk
While they settled and mixed with local populations, the migrants not only introduced their culture and skills, they also introduced their native Sanskrit tongue.
That the language these migrants spoke was Sanskrit, is based on the discovery of numerous narrative, cartoon-like depictions engraved on dozens of Indus Valley seals that show story themes that appear in the earliest Sanskrit literature: the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas.
To access my IVC seal interpretations, tap: https://www.academia.edu/7346093/Skanda_-_An_Ancient_God_Rediscovered
Over time, the migrants' Sanskrit and the local tongues intermixed and formed various dialects. These dialects eventually developed into a variety of Indo-European languages.
[As per Uschi Ringleb], the Malayo-Polynesian languages in the Pacific Ocean also acquired Sanskrit words and characteristics.
THE VOYAGES
These multiple group migrations took three main directions, following three distinct routes:
ROUTE 1
Seafaring Migrations along the Western Coastlines
From the Indus Valley delta to what is now Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, then through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean lands (including northern Africa), and subsequently via the Strait of Gibraltar to the North Sea’s coastal lands, and from there to the Scandinavian and Baltic Sea coastal regions.
ROUTE 2
Land Migrations within India
Land crossing migrations into north, north-east, central and southern Indian regions where the migrants merged with existing populations and cultures. At the same time also, coast hugging seafaring migrations took place around India’s mainland coasts reaching up to what is now Chenai.
ROUTE 3
Further East Overseas
Seefaring, ocean crossing voyages to Sri Lanka, Central Asia, the Pacific Ocean's archipelagos and the Americas, AND according to the latest findings, even to Australia as shown on the chart by the red line in Australia. (To access a recently published article that expands on this hypothesis, tap: https://m.phys.org/news/2013-01-gene-india-australia-years.html)
- PART TWO -
My Eureka
Already, when I was a 13 year old boy living in the Netherlands, the seed of this hypothesis formed in my fertile boyish mind, but it took of course many decades to germinate, mature and bloom. Eventually, in 2013, I published the first draft of this hypothesis on Academia dot edu.
Thus, in 1957, "Out of India - By Land or By Sea? A Paradigm Shift in Ancient Migration Theories" began in the inquisitive mind of a teenager who, among other things, was also studying German.
You might wonder, "Hm... Why mentioning German?" Well, German played a pivotal role in what I was soon to discover.
That year in 1957, it so happened, that I sweetly fell in love - a teenager fling really - with a German girl, Frederika, who was, like me, also 13 years old. Her family had come to visit my birth-town Delft, the picturesque princely city of "Delft Blue Ware", and the home of illustrious people like the painter Jan Vermeer and Newton's scientific competitor Antony van Leeuwenhoeck. But that was not the reason why they had come to visit, they had come specifically to visit Delft because at the end of the Second World War Frederika's father had been stationed in Delft as a supervising hospital doctor. This was just after his wife had given birth to their daughter Frederika.
Curiously, for one reason or another, he needed to meet my mother, and he was hoping, as I was to find out, to meet me as well.
You see, he had first encountered my mother 13 years before, in 1944, when my mom had dramatically rescued me from his hospital (I was in there close to death from diphtheria and dysentery), telling him, while she rushed off with me in her pram, "I would rather have Wimmy die in my arms at home than here in the hospital!"
I obviously and luckily survived long enough to meet his daughter Frederika who just like me was - you guessed it - 13 years old.
Does it surprise you that the two of us went for daily walks into town, me practicing my German and she hesitantly trying to avoid holding my hand?
It was on one of those meanderings through Delft - which like Amsterdam is also a city of canals and bridges, but much smaller - that I noticed something peculiar about her German speech, specifically that her pronunciation and articulation was quite different from the college German that I was studying. Dutch, my native language, is supposed to be a German language offspring, a dialect that had turned into a language. Hearing Frederika speak though, and noticing how her parents so, eh... "sloppily" (I thought) articulated their native German, I felt that the opposite was more likely... that German was actually a dialect derived from Dutch. In fact, I, the snotty nose whizkid that I must have been, concluded and decided at that point that the German language WAS in fact a Dutch dialect.
Over time, this "German is a Dutch dialect" became my usual joke every time I met a German or when the topic came up - one time even in class to an astonished German language teacher who lacked a sense of humor. (I had to make it a joke, because I could not expect that anyone would take my observation seriously.)
In the years following, while learning Latin, Greek, English and French, I discovered that most - if not all - coastal European language and dialect pronunciations (e.g. Scottish and the French Bretagne dialect) were quite distinct, they were more sharply articulated in their pronunciations than inland continental European language and dialect articulations... they tended to have softer consonants.
This deep-inland peculiarity, in general characterized by their softer consonants and umlauted vowels, made me conclude that the coastal, more sharply pronounced versions of INDO-European languages had much in common - also etymologically - with Sanskrit. (I was at the time, in 1971, studying Sri Aurobindo's writings and had learned to read the Bhagavat Gita in its native Sanskrit and its Devanāgarī script.)
Around the year 2000, while thinking about coastal European languages and certain local coastal dialects (e.g. Scottish), I had an "Aha Erlebnis".
This sudden insight happened at the same time I had become interested in the Indus Valley Civilization and came to know about the attempts to interpret its seals' depictions and the decipherment and translation attempts of the script characters that were engraved on the seals.
At that time, I was already quite aware of how reed boats could make trans-oceanic voyages (Thor Heyerdahl). So, when I found that two Indus Valley Culture tablets featured reed boat engravings (see the illustrations), I concluded that my intuition about ancient seafaring, coast-hugging reed boat migrations from the Sapta Sindhu delta westward to Mediterranean and European coastal areas (and, as I found out later, also southward and subsequently eastward) must have been possible.
"Eureka"
It must have been through coast-hugging sea voyages and coastal migrations - rather than the consensus theory of a Eurasian A***n origin due to overland migrations - that I figured that an early version of Sanskrit must have been 'seeded' along a number Europe's coastal areas, in locations where there must have been Sanskrit speaking migrant settlements.
I speculated that over time a rudimentary early form of Sanskrit had gradually developed into a variety of dialects - dialects that eventually turned into the various current Western languages.
Of course I went deeper into the then - and still - current, but in my opinion flawed migration theories: the Kurgan or Steppes theory, as well as the Anatolian and Armenian theories. I found them lacking enough convincing linguistic and genetic evidence that they were solely responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages from Central Asia, Anatolia or Caucasian regions into western Europe.
Fortunately, by about 2010, more genetic data became available which enabled me to trace a number of mtDNA haplogroups. Lo and behold, I found that certain Indus Valley region mtDNA haplogroups also appeared in ancient mtDNA found in large numbers of ancient skeletons from locations in Mediterranean and Northern Europe's coastal locations.
It was then that I seriously started writing about my inklings, and in 2013 I published them on Academia . edu.
In 2017 my first academic paper on this radically new "Holocene Indus Valley Coastal Migrations Hypothesis" was published in Varanasi and officially presented at Kolkata's Indian Indian Museum to a standing room audience.
By the end of 2018, the organizers of the first "Inaugural Conference on Indic Chronology" invited me to come to New Delhi, and February 2019 I officially presented my paper to an academic audience.
Thus, in a nutshell, the history of my Holocene Indus Valley Migration Hypothesis...
- PART THREE -
Why and When
Over an extended period of time, the Indus Valley - the Sapta Sindhava Delta - underwent many challenging periods which in the end, about 3,300 years ago, caused the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Migratory movements were caused by:
1. River floodings,
2. Rising and lowering sea-levels,
3. Earthquakes and tsunamis,
4. Adventure and natural human curiosity,
5. Population explosion,
6. Tribal feuds and wars,
7. Disease,
8. Trade,
9. Matrimonial relationship across borders,
Where To
I. Coastal Voyages
The migrants initially started out with reed vessels and over time sailed to:
1. Mesopotamian coastal areas,
2. Oman, Eritrea, the Horn of Africa,
3. Via the Red Sea Coasts' wadis into Egypt,
4. Through the then navigable Suez region to the Levant. (Up to at times 10 meters higher sea-levels enabled easy passage.)
5. Anatolia,
6. The Black Sea areas,
7. Eurasia (up- and down-stream rivers).
8. Egypt (up the Nile)
9. ALL Mediterranean coast lands from what is now Kroatia (etc.), to North African Berber lands and Greece, Macedonia, Italy, Crete, Southern France in between,
10. Through the Straight of Gibraltar to parts of Portugal, Spain, Basque Country,
11. Britanny, Scotland and French Bretagne,
12. Denmark, Northern Germany (also ancient Batavia) , Poland,
13. Baltic Sea countries, e.g. what is now Scandinavia, Lithuania, etc.
II. Land Voyages
Landlocked migrants traveled on foot to:
1. The Himalayan foothills,
2. Ghandhara and Baluchistan (where the Harappan Culture ancestors originally came from),
3. Through the Khyber Pass into Bactrian regions,
4. Into Eurasia,
5. North East India (down the Yamuna and Ganga),
6. South and East India,
7. South East Asia.
III. Sea Voyages
Other migrants also used their seaworthy reed vessels to sail to:
1. Southern and Eastern Indian coastal areas,
2. The Chinese and Pacific Ocean archipelagos (Indonesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, Melanesia), Australia.
3. North and South American coast lands (California, Mexico, Peru, Chile).
