I spent a little time looking on google for the answer to this question and I ran into a million competing views. I've come to the conclusion that Aryans probably didn't look like white people as we know today. Did they look Indian? Did they look like something in-between? Thanks a lot for any help.
Hello everyone,
Unfortunately, we have already had to remove a number of poor quality responses in this thread, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compound the issue. In this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, and as such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed.
Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!
Linguistic evidence combined with relatively tenuous archaeological evidence shows that the peoples referred to as the 'Indo-Aryans', ie those that correspond roughly to the peoples of the Vedas, migrated into Northern India from around Central Asia/northern Afghanistan, and it has been shown that present-day inhabitants of Northern India show genetic affinity with Central Asians and people from the Middle East/Iran. Note that the present-day Turkic inhabitants of most of Central Asia arrived there more recently, and the original inhabitants of Central Asia would have been more Caucasian/Europoid than the Kazakhs/Uzbeks etc who tend to be more mixed-race. It's likely therefore that the 'Indo-Aryans' would have looked more like Iranians or Pashtuns, or Dardic/Nuristani peoples, and while they don't exactly resemble the Nordic 'Aryan Race' as the Nazis would have imagined them, many of them do look astonishingly European and would not look out of place in Greece or the Balkans.
Who the actual 'Aryans' were I can't tell you, and I imagine they are probably a semi-mythological people anyway. The Shah of Iran for instance called himself the 'King of the Aryans'.
This previous post on the origins of the word 'Aryan' may answer your question