On A Recent Meme Of Rishi Sunak

Having seen this meme posted elsewhere, I wound up commenting in reply. That it’s .. oddly enough .. the wrong way around.

How so?

We’ll start with the obvious. And then hit the Surprising.

As applies the former – Sunak is, of course, a Brahmin. I think his Gotra may render him a Bhargava [Descendant of Bhrigu]; and if memory serves, his family’s from NW India.

He is, therefore, ideally placed to have a pretty high quotient of archaic Steppe DNA (and is, needless to say, at the opposite end of the country for “Dravidian” in the present day).

And now for the perhaps ‘surprising’.

Sunak’s height is, per my cursory googling, about 170 cm tall.

This would render him slightly shorter than the average height of his Yamnaya forebears (yes, I know, ‘the’ PIE might be somewhat of a different-but-related contemporaneous population, with the Corded Ware Culture being probably more actually ancestral to him – but for the sake of the meme … we’ll simplify).

To quote from a pretty recent study:

“[…] and displaying a typical Yamnaya culture burial (15, 27). The individual, morphologically male, died at an age of 30 to 40 years. With ~165 cm of height, he was rather short compared to other males of the same population (regional mean of ~172 cm)” [Martin Trautmann et al. ,First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship.Sci. Adv.9,eade2451(2023)]

So, Sunak’s 2 cm shorter than the average Yamnaya of that region, and in fact five cm taller than an actual Yamnaya warrior analyzed therein.

Meanwhile, what of the chap standing to his right (our left), Kawczynski ?

Well, he’s around 205 cm tall … as in six foot eight and a half inches … and, in fact, reportedly the tallest MP ever in the UK’s House of Commons. But let’s leave aside the actual MP – and the fact he’s Polish – for now. Meme, remember?

The Pre-IE population of India was, substantively, what’s known as “AASI” (Ancient Ancestral South Indian), with regional variation from other sources (but let’s not get into that).

Now those guys … appear in various cases to have been really tall.

As in, Mesolithic Indian samples from the Gangetic Plain wind up with a mean male height hovering around the 180cm mark (see chart at fig. 2 in Lukacs & Pal, 2003) … and if I’m reading this correctly, with the prominent AASI as at Sarai Nahar Rai – well:

“The average height of males was between 173.93 and 192.08 cm, and those of females between 174.89 and 187.68 cm (Kennedy et al. 1986).” [Pandey, J. N. “MESOLITHIC IN THE MIDDLE GANGA VALLEY.” Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute 49 (1990): 311–16. ]

And, from another paper – “[…] Sarai Nahar Rai yielded a suspiciously tall mean stature (188.9 ± 1.6 cm; calculated from data presented in Kennedy et al. 1986: 71, […]” [Lukacs, John & Pal, J. (2003). Skeletal Variation among Mesolithic People of the Ganga Plains: New Evidence of Habitual Activity and Adaptation to Climate. Asian Perspectives. 42. ].

Those are Average Heights being spoken about there, I would note [in the Pandey paper].

It’d be a helluva thing, those 188.9 cm “average” men.

Now, to be fair and sure – those AASI samples are Mesolithic, and a fair span of centuries prior to when we’d actually be wishing to look at, were we speaking about the Indus Valley Civilization.

Leaving aside, of course, that i) the “Dasyu” etc. RV conceptry which tends to inform a lot of memes like this … doesn’t appear to be about the IVC, but instead about the BMAC out there on the other side of the Hindu Kush, back on the Steppes (hence why various conceptry for this is also present in Avestan source-material, even down to the naming of individual figure(s) from same) [and c.f. also Witzel etc. setting out the archaeological points in relation to this, as well] ;

ii) that “Dravidian” … well, the idea of the IVC being “Dravidian” is heavily contested, to say the least.

The actual ‘Dravidians’ of the time would, we assume, be rather closer to the AASI end of things than IVC (which has various, Iranian Farmer iirc? admixture), but again, meme, so on with the show.

Now, as applies IVC height …

“The stature of the Rakhigarhi people was estimated from the maximum length of the long bones, as summarized in Table 3. The estimated mean stature was 175.8 cm (range 165.5–179.4 cm) for males (n = 6) and 166.1 cm (range 159.8–172.0 cm) for females (n = 4). ” [ Woo, Eun Jin et al. “Assessing the physical and pathological traits of human skeletal remains from cemetery localities at the Rakhigarhi site of the Harappan Civilization.” Anthropological Science 126 (2018): 111-120. ]

Meanwhile … we said that Kawczynski was (and, assumedly, still is) Polish.

So here’s some height data for Corded Ware Culture skeletons from Poland:

“Adult body height varies in both male and female sets. As far as the Rzeszów Foothills and Lower San River Valley are concerned, adult body height is 161.3- -175 cm for males and 156.7-163.1 cm for females. For most of the males, these values are within the range determined for other CWC individuals of south-east-ern Poland. Body height of two females, one buried at Święte, site 20 (grave 43), and the other buried at Mirocin, site 27 (grave 360), somewhat exceeds the value determined for other CWC females, falling within the male height range.”
[ Szczepanek, Anita. (2018). Anthropological Picture of the Corded Ware Population of the Subcarpathian Region in the Light of Data Obtained from the Sites at Święte, Jarosław District. Baltic-Pontic Studies. 23. 213-228. ]

And, as applies how ancient that suite of skeletal remains is ..

“Absolute dates for human bone samples from both graves at issue have been determined. Both dates are identical and, once generalised, point to the time frame of ca. 2550-2400 BC [Włodarczak 2018]. This time frame corresponds to the older age ranges determined for CWC cemeteries at sites 11 and 15, Święte. It is not unlikely that all graves at Święte, as well as the cemetery at the nearby site 7 at Skołoszów, are dated from roughly the same time period [Rybicka et al. 2017: 128, Table 2].”
[ Dobrakowska, Teresa & Włodarczak, Piotr. (2018). Święte 20: Graves of the Corded Ware Culture. Baltic-Pontic Studies. 23. 140-162. ]

What does all of that mean?

Well, to put it bluntly … i) Sunak is, again, well within the normal range for archaic Indo-European height;

ii) IVC male height actually appears to have been taller than Yamnaya and/or CWC male height

iii) AASI height (which is probably a lot closer to what various … polemically online propagandtastic/tragic people mean when they say “Dravidian” is taller again .

Phrased more succinctly …

If we’re doing ‘meme logic’ – then the image is backwards.

The Polish descended guy on the left of the image towering over the figure to the right who’s about the same height as his more archaic EMBA forebears … is actually standing in for the pre-IE AASI Indian population.

188.9 cm “average” men, indeed.

And meanwhile, the gentleman to the right, of Yamnaya (well, CWC) => Sintashta => Bhargava (meme logic, remember?) heritage aforementioned is presenting a basically accurate height for a “Yamnaya Steppe Warrior”. Indeed, he’s actually a bit taller than some of those we’ve unearthed (although, yes, shorter than some others – but basically, ‘average’).

Although I am now also contemplating some kind of Asterix & Obelix style narrative except featuring these gentlemen’s perhaps actually directly acquainted Early Bronze Age Ancestors of the CWC , whilst basically keeping their respective heights relatively the same as they are today.

Or, running on the presumption (somewhat confirmed) for ‘Scythian / Sarmatian’ genetic contribution to the modern Polish demography … and therefore running that back, accordingly, to the Sintashta [an IE, and assumedly Indo-Iranic – indeed, Proto- Indo-Iranic – group] … well, you see where I’m going with this.  

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