by Tony Joseph
Early Indians
Early Indians
The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From
Tony Joseph
Advance praise for the book
‘If you really want to know who we are, and how we got here, this is the book for you. A thrilling account of our extraordinary past – I couldn’t put it down.’ Gurcharan Das
‘An amazing book, written in an engaging style . . . It grabs your interest from the first sentence.’ Bibek Debroy
‘At a time when the issue of the peopling of the planet by anatomically modern humans is becoming hotter and hotter, Tony Joseph has admirably cooled it down. He goes deep into recent developments in ancient DNA studies on human remains and delves into the issue of the “Aryan Migration”. This is a vexing issue and not so easy to conclude. However, Joseph has marshalled multidisciplinary data from archaeology, linguistics, genetics and literature to support his stand on the issue. This is perhaps the most scientific way of presenting the Aryan debate. Lucidity is the hallmark of this book.’ Ravi Korisettar
‘Intellectual omnivore Tony Joseph offers an enjoyable meander through a minefield of how our ancestors got here.’ Pranay Lal
‘Masterful and unbiased reconstruction of human presence in India using evidence from archaeology, ancient and modern history, linguistics, geography and genetics, with a tilt on genetic evidence.’ Partha P. Majumder
‘Joseph deftly and brilliantly summarizes new findings of genetics that definitively solve old problems in South Asian history, and show we are all migrants and, ultimately, kin. A timely, fascinating and courageous book.’ Sheldon Pollock
‘There has been a lot of controversy about the origins of various populations, and in India, much of this is driven by a quasi-religious ideology. It is therefore refreshing to see how recent advances in DNA sequencing from people of various ethnicities as well as remains of ancient people is shedding light on the origins, migration and intermixing of people throughout history. In this very readable account, Tony Joseph has distilled the results of recent research and his book should be of interest to anyone curious about the waves of migration and intermixing that resulted in the rich tapestry that makes up the people of today’s India.’ Venki Ramakrishnan
‘DNA studies of Indians dating to the millennia BCE confirm that they were a mixed population, and at a particular time included migrants from Central Asia. Given that these are initial studies their readings require circumspection when equating DNA identities with those from other sources. Tony Joseph’s perceptive summary suggests how this new information might help clarify some of our understanding of the early past.’ Romila Thapar
‘Tony Joseph’s book provides a remarkably accessible overview of the early stages of ancient Indian history, starting with the immigration from Africa of current humans to the age of the Vedas. He provides evidence from several fields of scientific enquiry, notably archaeology, linguistics, ancient texts and the very recent study of ancient genes (aDNA). The latter is currently revolutionizing ancient history not just of India but also of Europe, Africa and South America.
Accordingly, T. Joseph lays to rest the question about the origins of the so-called (Indo-)Aryans and their settlement in ancient India – which has basically been politically motivated, especially for the past 40 years. As common in scholarship, not all individual scholars may agree on all questions and conclusions (such as the nature of the Indus civilization and its relation with the origin of the Dravidian speakers). However, finally, a firm basis for writing the history of ancient India is laid. The various sciences, in the end, lead us from darkness to the light of insight.’ Michael Witzel
JUGGERNAUT BOOKS
KS House, 118 Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110049, India
First published by Juggernaut Books 2018
Copyright © Tony Joseph 2018
The international boundaries on the maps of India are neither purported to be correct nor authentic by Survey of India directives.
Passages quoted from Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018) by David Reich are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Passages quoted from Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (2007) by Johannes Bronkhorst are reprinted by permission of the author.
While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own. The facts contained herein were reported to be true as on the date of publication by the author to the publishers of the book, and the publishers are not in any way liable for their accuracy or veracity.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 9789386228987
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Printed at Manipal Technologies Ltd
To
My parents, for everything
My wife, who made this book possible
My daughter, who is the reason I wrote it
Contents
A Short Chronology of the Modern Human in Indian Prehistory
Introduction: How We, the Indians, Came to Be
1. The First Indians
2. The First Farmers
3. The First Urbanites: The Harappans
4. The Last Migrants: The ‘Aryans’
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
A Short Chronology of the Modern Human in Indian Prehistory
~ 300,000 years: The age of the earliest remains of a modern human, Homo sapiens, ever found – in a cave in Jebel Irhoud, about fifty kilometres from the city of Safi in Morocco.
~ 180,000 years: The age of the earliest modern human fossil found outside of Africa – at a rock shelter in Misliya in north Israel.
~ 70,000 years ago: Geneticists calculate that the earliest successful Out of Africa (OoA) migration happened around this time. This migration was termed ‘successful’ because these migrants are the ancestors of all of today’s non-African populations. (Earlier modern humans outside of Africa have not left a lineage that is detectable today.) The OoA migrants 70,000 years ago are likely to have taken the Southern Route that would have brought them from Africa (specifically, from modern-day Eritrea and Djibouti) into Asia (modern-day Yemen) through Bab el Mandeb at the southern tip of the Red Sea.
~ 65,000 years ago: The OoA migrants reach India and are faced with a robust population of archaic humans. They perhaps take both an inland sub-Himalayan route and a coastal route, to keep themselves out of the way of other Homo species in the subcontinent who dominated central and southern India, and then move across the Indian subcontinent into south-east Asia, east Asia and Australia.
60,000–40,000 years ago: The descendants of the OoA migrants populate central Asia and Europe over this period.
~ 40,000 years ago: Neanderthals go extinct in Europe, with the Iberian peninsula in south-western Europe (modern-day Portugal and Spain) being their last refuge and stand.
45,000–20,000 years ago: The First Indians, the descendants of the OoA migrants in the subcontinent, start using Microlithic technology, and their population increases dramatically in central and eastern India. South Asia becomes the place where ‘most of humanity’ lives. Modern humans move into what would have been long-established refuges of other Homo species in southern and central India.
~ 16,000 years ago (14,000 BCE):
Modern humans reach the Americas, the last major continent to be settled in by modern humans, after crossing Beringia, the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.
~ 7000 BCE: In a village that is today called Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Hills in Balochistan, a new agricultural settlement begins that would ultimately become one of the largest habitations of its period between the Indus and the Mediterranean.
7000–3000 BCE: Migration of Iranian agriculturists from the Zagros region to south Asia leads to their mixing with the descendants of the First Indians sometime during this period. Geneticists estimate the mixing to have taken place at least by 4700 BCE to 3000 BCE.
7000–2600 BCE: The Mehrgarh site shows evidence for cultivation of barley and wheat, and increasing consumption of domesticated animals. The site was abandoned somewhere between 2600 BCE and 2000 BCE. By then agricultural settlements had spread all across north-western India – in the Indus and Ghaggar–Hakra river valleys and in Gujarat.
7000 BCE: From around this period there is evidence for rice harvesting and sedentary settlement at Lahuradewa in the Sant Kabir Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh in the Upper Ganga plain. The chronology of transition from harvesting wild rice to cultivating domesticated rice is not yet certain, but there is no doubt that Lahuradewa indicates experiments in agriculture were taking place at several places in south Asia around the same time and that Mehrgarh was not an isolated case.
5500–2600 BCE: The Early Harappan era, which witnesses early agricultural settlements growing into towns with their own unique styles, such as Kalibangan and Rakhigarhi in India and Banawali and Rahman Dheri in Pakistan.
3700–1500 BCE: Evidence of early agriculture starts to appear in different parts of India – eastern Rajasthan, southern India, the Vindhya region of central India, eastern India and the Swat valley of Kashmir.
2600–1900 BCE: The Mature Harappan period, which sees many sites being newly built or rebuilt, and many existing sites being abandoned. There is also a visible and higher level of standardization across the region, with a common script, seals, motifs and weights. The transition from the Early Harappan to the Mature Harappan phase happened over four or five generations, or 100 to 150 years.
2300–1700 BCE: The period of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), a civilization centred on the Oxus river (also called Amu Darya) and covering today’s northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and western Tajikistan. The BMAC had close trade and cultural relations with the Harappan Civilization.
2100 BCE: A southward migration of pastoralists from the Kazakh Steppe, towards the southern central Asian regions that would today be called Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The migrants make an impact on the BMAC, but mostly bypass it and move towards south Asia throughout the second millennium BCE, as listed below (2000–1000 BCE).
2000 BCE: Two major waves of migrations with their origin in China – after it had gone through the farming revolution and the resultant population surge – reshape south-east Asia. The first one brings Austroasiatic languages, new plants and a new variety of rice to India after 2000 BCE.
2000–1000 BCE: Multiple waves of Steppe pastoralist migrants from central Asia into south Asia, bringing Indo-European languages and new religious and cultural practices.
1900–1300 BCE: The Late Harappan period that sees the decline and eventual disappearance of the Harappan Civilization, primarily due to the effects of a long drought that affected civilizations in west Asia, Egypt and China as well.
Introduction
How We, the Indians, Came to Be
The story of our ancestors, the early Indians, who came from Africa, west Asia, east Asia and central Asia and made this land theirs over the last 65,000 years.
‘But have you ever considered how fast you are really moving when it seems you are not moving at all?’
Professor Andrew Fraknoi, astronomer
Things are often not what they seem. As you read this sentence, perhaps sitting in a comfortable chair in your study, you would probably consider yourself at rest. But you are really not, because the Milky Way galaxy of which you are a part is moving through space at 2.1 million kilometres an hour. And that is without taking into account the effects of the earth’s rotation on its own axis (1600 kilometres an hour at the equator and zero at the poles), its orbiting around the sun (107,000 kilometres an hour) and the sun’s journey around the Milky Way (792,000 kilometres an hour).1
So in the roughly twenty seconds that it would have taken you to read the paragraph above, you have already moved thousands of kilometres without even knowing it!
Each successive discovery that led to the calculations above – that the earth is just one of many planets circling the sun; that the sun is just an average, middle-aged star in the Milky Way galaxy; that the galaxy itself is just one of at least a hundred billion galaxies – made some humans feel a little smaller while the wiser ones felt a new sense of awe at the size and majesty of what we are all a part of.
And this is true not just in a cosmic sense, but in a biological sense as well. Ever since Darwin shocked humanity a century and a half ago by formulating the theory of evolution and suggesting that our closest living relatives could be chimpanzees, every subsequent discovery has gone on to destroy the special status we had generously given ourselves previously. First, we thought that when we, the modern humans or Homo sapiens,2 arrived on the scene, there was a sudden and appreciable difference in the kind of tools that were being made, as well as an efflorescence of artistry and abstract thought. Now we know that all that was conceit, and that the tools made by us and those made by our closest evolutionary cousins – Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Denisovans – were often indistinguishable from each other and that there was no watershed moment. All these extinct members of the Homo species (Homo sapiens being the only surviving member of the Homo family today) also had large brains like us.
In the past decade, we even learned that they were close enough to Homo sapiens genetically for us to have mated with them and produced children who grew up to be fertile. We know this because all non-African Homo sapiens today carry about 2 per cent Neanderthal genes in their DNA. Some of us – like the Melanesians, Papuans and Aboriginal Australians – also carry 3 to 6 per cent Denisovan DNA. Because of this genetic inheritance, we may call them our ancestors, but it is perhaps more reasonable to see them as our evolutionary cousins with whom Homo sapiens did dally. Biologically, we are just a part of a gradual continuum of evolution, with chimpanzees sharing 96 per cent of Homo sapiens DNA. And the emergence of Homo sapiens itself was not a single, dramatic episode. It was a slow process, involving several beginnings and intermixing of various members of the Homo species, all of them now extinct. For the small-minded among us, this would be a forgettable, if not an unacceptable, fact. For the rest, this would be yet another reason to appreciate the life around us, and wonder at the unity that binds all life together so tightly.
Homo erectus (lived approximately 1.89 million to 143,000 years ago in parts of Africa and Asia)
Homo heidelbergensis (lived approximately 700,000 to 200,000 years ago in parts of Africa, Asia and Europe)
Homo neanderthalensis (lived approximately 400,000 to 40,000 years ago in Europe and south-western and central Asia)
What applies to cosmology and biology applies to our history as well. In the rather short history of Homo sapiens (just around 300,000 years, compared to the 3.8 billion years that there has been life on earth), each of our tribes, clans, kingdoms, empires and nations have considered themselves to be of superior status. Some thought that they were the children of a special God, others that they were the chosen people, and still others that they were divinely ordained to rule over everyone else. People also thought that the spot of earth they occupied was at the very centre of it all – for example, the Middle Kingdom of the Chinese or the ‘Midgard’ (Middle Enclosure) of Norse mythology. The new nationalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built on all th
ese ideas to make everyone believe that the newly created ‘nations’ they belonged to were infinitely superior to all other nations, and that they had always existed, from ‘time immemorial’! In fact, ‘time immemorial’ is the phrase we hear most often when we try to grasp our deep history.
None of these beliefs are true, of course. No human community is of exceptional status relative to others. None are children of God, or chosen people, unless all are. And none of us live upon the centre of the earth any more than we live on its periphery, since we live on the surface of a globe. Nations as we understand them today are no older than a few centuries, and we are all interconnected – genetically, culturally and historically – far more than we imagine. And even ‘time immemorial’, it turns out, can increasingly be pinned down, dated, analysed and grasped. And when we do that, we get a far better understanding of our society and culture, and what went into their making.
Would this be upsetting to some? You bet. It is like being told the secrets of the magician who held you spellbound in your childhood. When you learn his secrets, you can either bemoan your lost innocence and the ruined charm of the magic, or you can revel in your new knowledge, the clarity it brings to many things and the possibilities of what you could do with it. This book is betting that you, dear reader, are of the second kind.
In the chapters that follow, we will be looking at how and when modern humans, or Homo sapiens, first arrived in India; what evidence they left behind for us to see; who their descendants are today; who else followed them as migrants to this land of ours; how and when we started farming and building the world’s largest civilization of its time; when and why this civilization declined; and what happened next.
This book is about prehistory, and prehistory is about the period that comes before history. History begins when writing begins and places and individuals come alive before us, with their own names and, sometimes, recognizable stories. In prehistory there are no written records and hence we cannot know for sure the names of people and places or the stories of individuals. But, to some extent, we can work out what the life of people might have been like back then, using other kinds of evidence. The evidence in prehistory comes from fossils, archaeological excavations of ancient human settlements, various objects made by humans, like tools, and, increasingly importantly, the DNA of both ancient and present-day individuals.