Nicole Boivin

Nicole Lise Boivin is an archaeologist and former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Quotes

• In reading the genetics literature on South Asia, it is very clear that many of the studies actually start out with some assumptions that are clearly problematic, if not in some cases completely untenable. Perhaps the single most serious problem concerns the assumption, which many studies actually start with as a basic premise, that the Indo-Aryan invasions are a well-established (pre)historical reality. The studies confirm such invasions in large part because they actually assume them to begin with... Part of the reason that many geneticists prove Indo-Aryan invasions so frequently is that they give little if any consideration to other populations that have or may have entered South Asia in prehistoric and historic times.... Another problematic assumption in_ the genetics literature is that caste is unchanging.
  • Boivin N. 2007. Anthropological, historical, archaeological and genetic perspectives on the origins of caste in South Asia. In: Petraglia MD, Allchin B, editors. The evolution and history of human populations in South Asia: inter‐disciplinary studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, lin- guistics and genetics. Dordrecht: Springer. pp 341–361.
  • quoted in M. Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence

• Over the course of the past half century, the model of an Indo-Aryan population invasion have been thoroughly problematized, and largely discredited within archaeology .. What the accumulation of archaeological evidence over the course of the twentieth century has inevitably demonstrated is that the major transitions in South Asian pre- and proto-history are gradual and often show little evidence for any outside origin… Archaeologists in particular have thus very much moved away from migrationist models, including the idea of Indo-Aryan invasions, as an explanation for cultural change in South Asia. And those scholars, both archaeological and otherwise, who continue to embrace an Indo-Aryan migration paradigm now generally present a very different model that sees the language change as resulting more from social processes than any substantial population movements.
  • Boivin, Nicole . 2007. “Anthropological, Historical, Archaeological and Genetic Perspectives on the Origins of Caste in South Asia.” In The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia: Inter-Disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics. Springer Science & Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5562-5_15.
  • Boivin N 2007 Anthropological, historical, archaeological and genetic perspectives on the origins of caste in south Asia; in The evolution and history of human populations in south Asia: inter- disciplinary studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and genetics (eds) MD Petraglia and B Allchin (Dordrecht: Springer) pp 341–361 (Boivin 2007: 349).
  • in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.