Aryan peoples supposedly invaded India many centuries ago and pushed
the native peoples to the south.  Furthermore, Aryan people are
usually thought of as having blond hair and blue eyes.  If both of
these suppositions are true, why is it that today's people of India
are normally thought of as having dark skin and dark eyes and NEVER
associated with blond hair and blue eyes?  I need to have the answer
substantiated (book titles, authors, and page numbers).

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Clarification of Question by curiousperson-ga on 26 May 2004 12:33 PDT

If the answer is that Indian peoples and blond, blue-eyed European
peoples are ancestrally distinct from each other (which seems
logical), then I would hope that the answer to my question would also
include an explanation as to why there are close affinities between
the Indian and European languages.

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Clarification of Question by curiousperson-ga on 26 May 2004 17:18 PDT

I am still looking for someone to answer my question.  That is, how is
it that the languages of these two distinct lines (Nordic and Indian)
have close affinities?  Is it thought that an ancient people split
into two groups, one evolving light eyes and skin and the other dark
eyes and skin?  It would seem as though this would take so long that
any language affinities would be lost.  What am I missing?

"The skeletal record confirms that same data as archaeology as Kenneth
Kennedy notes in 'Have Aryans Been Identified in the Prehistoric
Skeletal Record from South Asia' appearing in The Indo-Aryans of South
Asia (Walter de Gruyter 1995). No such Aryan skeletons have ever been
found as different from indigenous ethnic groups. 'All prehistoric
human remains recovered from the Indian subcontinent are
phenotypically identifiable as south Asians. Furthermore their
biological continuity with living peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri
Lanka and the border regions is well established across time and
space. Assumptions that blondism, blue-grey eyes and light skin
pigmentation are physical hallmarks of either ancient Aryans or of
members of brahmin and other social groups in modern south Asia, find
their origins in the improper marriage of excerpts from Vedic texts
with nineteenth century Germanic nationalistic writings."

http://www.geocities.com/dipalsarvesh/articleAryan.html

If you really want antient people to be blond and blue eyed, these
traits disappear rather quickly in intermarrage as the dark eyes, dark
hair are dominent genes.  Neil

The extant similarities between many languages, indigenous to both the
East and the west, has been linguistically attributed to a "Mother
Tounge", academically styled Proto-Indo-European, which is perhaps
more productively construed as an assemblage of ancient, interrelated
lexicons from which the nascent forebears of our modern languages
emerged. With respect to lingustic variation, the Ethnologue is likely
the most valuable source availible online,
(http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp) as it catalouges the
myriad non-standard forms of most major languages. Hopefully this
helps!

(Apologies for the abysmal punctuation!;)
Best Regards,
Brendan