Direction (1 - 4) Read the following passage and answer the given questions

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow them.

When the paper ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’ was released online, in March 2018, it created a sensation in India. The paper, co-authored by 92 scientists, all doyens of different disciplines, said that between 2000 and 1000 BCE, there were significant migrations from the Central Asian Steppe that most likely brought Indo-European languages into India. The paper supported the long-held idea of an ‘Arya’ migration.Many did not like that finding, and the counter-argument they made was that the paper was not peer-reviewed and was merely released in a pre-print server, not in a scientific journal.

The paper has now been peer-reviewed and published in the reputed journal, Science. It has 117 scientists as co-authors and is titled ‘The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia’. And it says the same thing with more evidence. Here is a quote from it:

“By sequencing 523 ancient humans, we show that the primary source of ancestry in modern South Asians is a prehistoric genetic gradient between people related to early hunter gatherers of Iran and Southeast Asia. After the Indus Valley Civilization’s decline, its people mixed with individuals in the southeast [i.e, southeast of northwestern India where the Indus Valley Civilization flourished] to form one of the two main ancestral populations of South Asia [called Ancestral South Indians], whose direct descendants live in southern India. Simultaneously, they mixed with descendants of Steppe pastoralists who, starting around 4000 years ago, spread via Central Asia to form the other main ancestral population [or Ancestral North Indians]. The Steppe ancestry in South Asia has the same profile as that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe….”

The reference to the early hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia is a reference to the Andamanese Hunter-Gatherers. This is the same as the Ancient Ancestral South Indians that the earlier paper talked about. They all refer to the descendants of the Out of Africa migrants who reached India around 65,000 years ago. The paper states: “Between around 2000 and 1000 BCE, people of largely Central Steppe (Middle to Late Bronze Age) ancestry expanded toward South Asia, mixing with people along the Indus Periphery Cline to form the Steppe Cline.”

If these quotes surprise you because you thought the recent genetic studies had disproved Arya migration, then you have a bone to pick with Indian mass media for misleading you. The Science study substantiated its earlier findings about Steppe migrations into India with even more evidence, but many newspapers chose to go to town with headlines like: ‘New genetic studies dent Arya migration theory.’

How did Indian media twist a straight story into something diametrically opposite? To answer that, we have to look at a second study released at the same time. This study, ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers’, based on the ancient DNA of a woman who lived in the Harappan site 4,600 years ago, was published in Cell. The title seemed straightforward, but this made many journalists jump to the conclusion that it meant there was no Arya migration either.

The journalists would not have reached this hasty conclusion had they read at least the summary of the Cell paper. Here is a quote from the summary: “These individuals had little if any Steppe pastoralist related ancestry, showing that it was not ubiquitous in northwest South Asia during the Indus Valley Civilization as it is today.” If they paid particular attention to the last four words: “as it is today”, the meaning would be clear.