by Tony Joseph
So where does India’s prehistory end and history begin? This is a tricky question because we have written records on seals and tablets from the Harappan Civilization that thrived between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE, so in a sense we can say that is when our history begins and prehistory ends. But we have not yet deciphered the Harappan script and, therefore, have no knowledge of what is written in those records, so that period falls outside of history and within prehistory. But then, we do have some references to the Harappan Civilization in the contemporary records of the Mesopotamian Civilization in west Asia, so that makes it part of history again.
It is this ambiguity that prompted some historians to use the label ‘proto-history’ to describe the period between prehistory and history. In this book, we will come right up to the tail end of the Harappan Civilization and a few centuries after that, leaving the rest for another book, perhaps!
Why this book now
There is a reason why this book could have been written only now, and not earlier. It is because our understanding of deep history has changed dramatically in the last five years or so. Large stretches of our prehistory are being rewritten as we speak, based on analysis of DNA extracted from individuals who lived thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Many ‘facts’ that we took for granted have been proved wrong, and many questions left dangling in the air as historians, archaeologists and anthropologists argued it out among themselves have been given convincing new answers – thanks to the recently acquired ability of genetic scientists to successfully extract DNA from ancient fossils and then sequence it to understand all that bound people together, or distinguished them from each other. If technology had not matured to the level it has, scientists would not have been able to make the discoveries they are making today. And if it were not for their latest findings, our prehistory would have remained as vague and contentious as earlier and this book would not have been written.
Just to get a sense of the speed at which things have moved, consider this: when work on this book began six years ago, we did not know who were the people of the Harappan Civilization or where their descendants had gone, but now we do. Six years ago, we did not know how much of our ancestry we owed to the original Out of Africa migrants who reached India about 65,000 years ago, but now we do. Six years ago, we did not know when the caste system began, but now we can zero in on the period with a fair degree of genetic accuracy. These are just a few examples that demonstrate our rapidly improving understanding of prehistory, and not only with regard to India.
Here’s a short list of things that have changed about human prehistory in other parts of the world because of ancient DNA: we now know that large portions of European populations were replaced not once but twice within the last 10,000 years. First, a mass migration of farmers from west Asia around 9000 years ago mixed with or replaced already established hunter-gatherers in Europe. And then a mass migration from the Eurasian Steppes about 5000 years ago mixed with or replaced the then existing population of European farmers. In the Americas, we now know that native American populations, before the arrival of Europeans, owed their ancestry to not one but at least three migrations from Asia. In east Asia, we know that much of the ancestry of people in the region derives from two or more major expansions of populations from the Chinese agricultural heartland. In 2010 we learned that modern humans had interbred with Neanderthals and in 2014 we learned that our ancestors had interbred with Denisovans (a member of the Homo species that was identified only because of ancient DNA sequencing) as well.
When this journey began six years ago, though, I did not know that the field I was getting into, prehistory, was just about to experience an explosion of new knowledge. That is something that happened serendipitously. When I started, I was fascinated by the Harappan Civilization and the questions that were still unsettled: who were the people who built the largest civilization of their time, and where did they go? I visited Harappan sites from Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat to Rakhigarhi in Haryana, which led me on to many meetings and email discussions with leading historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, linguists and geneticists both in India and from around the world – Romila Thapar and B.B. Lal in New Delhi; Sheldon Pollock in New York; Michael Witzel, David Reich and Vagheesh Narasimhan in Harvard; Iravatham Mahadevan in Chennai; Martin B. Richards in Huddersfield, UK; Peter Underhill in Stanford; M.K. Dhavalikar, V.N. Misra, Vasant Shinde and K. Paddayya in Pune; Shereen Ratnagar in Mumbai; Ravi Korisettar in Dharwad; Partha Majumder in Kolkata; K. Thangaraj in Hyderabad; Lalji Singh in Varanasi; Niraj Rai in Lucknow; Michael Petraglia in Jena, Germany . . . the list is long.
Not all of them agreed with each other, and while every discussion answered some of my questions, it left me with even more questions, not just about the Harappan Civilization but also about the periods preceding it. Before I knew it, the question I was dealing with had morphed from who were the Harappans to how we, the Indians, came to be.
Somewhere along this route, it became clear that the most important revelations were coming from the new field of population genetics. This led me on a search for population genetics papers dealing with the peopling of south Asia – and there were dozens of them – often followed by meetings or discussions with the authors. I met K. Thangaraj, principal scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, and Lalji Singh, former head of CCMB and, later, vice chancellor of the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. This was in 2015 and I was hoping to publish my first story about the Harappan Civilization and the issue of ‘Aryan migrations’3 based on these conversations and the research. But there was a problem. I could not complete my article because what Singh and Thangaraj told me did not match up with what I read in the paper they had authored along with other scientists from around the world in 2009.4 I, therefore, decided to put the story on hold and gain a better understanding of population genetics before writing anything on it. Then, two years later, in 2017, I came across a paper titled ‘A Genetic Chronology of the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals’, co-authored by Professor Martin B. Richards of the University of Huddersfield in the UK along with his team.5 I read this paper again and again till things started slowly falling in place. I finally got a grip on the issue and could zero in on what was causing the disconnect.
The confusion arose because when I met the scientists in 2015, they had put forward a new hypothesis to me that did not figure in their 2009 paper. This hypothesis was that there were no large-scale migrations to India during the last 40,000 years or so. They also said that there were two very ancient populations, one located in north India and the other in south India and that all of today’s populations had descended from the mixing of these two groups, technically given the tags Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI).
But the paper that Lalji Singh and Thangaraj had co-authored with scientists from the Harvard Medical School in 2009 (titled ‘Reconstructing Indian Population History’) had made no claims about there having been no large migrations to India in the last 40,000 years.The paper had clearly stated that ANI, unlike ASI, were related to west Eurasians (west Asians, Europeans, central Asians and people of the Caucasus region). This would have given strong support to the theory that Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves Aryans had migrated to India within the last 4000 years or so, after the Harappan Civilization started declining. The issue of ‘Aryan migration’ has been a political hot button for decades, with many opposing the suggestion that ‘Aryans’ were late migrants to the country, not part of the earliest Indian population. There was the additional problem of the Harappan Civilization: if this mighty civilization which has left an indelible imprint on India preceded ‘Aryan migrations’, then that cuts at the root of the right-wing position that the ‘Aryans’, Sanskrit and the Vedas are the fundamental wellspring of Indian culture. (See also the section ‘The second method: Whole genome data’ in chapter 2, p. 87.)
The paper co-authored by Martin
B. Richards was published on 23 March 2017 and I found it a week later. I spent the following two months reading and rereading tough-to-understand genetics papers from different time periods dealing with the formation of the Indian population; trying to correlate their often contradictory findings with the state of development of population genetics when each of these papers was written; getting in touch with the authors of these papers, many of them doyens of their field with many path-breaking discoveries to their credit; and checking and double-checking the conclusions I was arriving at; and reading more and more papers.
On 17 June 2017, The Hindu published my article ‘How Genetics Is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate’. Here, I explained how DNA evidence supported the theory that Indo-European-language speakers who called themselves Aryans had migrated to India from central Asia around 4000 years ago. The statements made in that story were reconfirmed in March 2018 by a path-breaking paper written by ninety-two scientists from around the world, ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’, and posted in the preprint server for biology, bioRxiv. Reich and Thangaraj were among the co-directors of the study. The scale of the study and the fact that it was based on ancient DNA made the findings far more robust and the chronology of migrations far more accurate.
My experiences during the writing of this book have taught me that even in the most professional of settings, personal preferences can play a part in how research findings are interpreted. And often it may not be a question of bias, but a genuine belief that the truth might cause harmful side effects and, therefore, needs to be treated cautiously. For instance, there could be a fear that the fact of Steppe migrations may reinvigorate old divisions of language and region, just as there might have been a fear among some Indian historians over half a century ago that details of medieval atrocities might cause enmity between different religions. But in reality, holding back the truth cannot heal divisions. It can only cause them to fester underground with even more vigour. Also, no scientist or writer can accurately predict the consequences of a particular truth being withheld: history is made up almost entirely of unintended consequences. So the only reasonable position for any scientist, or any writer for that matter, to take is to let the facts speak, but make sure that no unsupported conclusions are drawn from them.
In this case, it is true that there was large-scale migration of Indo-European-language speakers to south Asia in the second millennium BCE (you will read more about this in chapter 4), but it is also true that all of today’s population groups in India draw their genes from several migrations to India: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ group, race or caste that has existed since ‘time immemorial’. Of course, the degree to which the mixing between different populations has occurred differs across regions and communities. So the fact of Indo-European migrations has to be told along with the truth of multiple migrations and large-scale population mixing that happened over millennia. We are today a uniquely Indian civilization that has drawn together many population groups with different migration histories, and its impulses, culture, traditions and practices come from multiple sources, not just one singular source.
In the pages that follow, we will use the new findings made possible by ancient DNA as well as the latest fascinating discoveries made by archaeologists, anthropologists, epigraphists (people who study ancient inscriptions), linguists, palaeoscientists (scholars of the geologic past) and historians to peel the layers of our ancient past one by one. It is a fascinating story and one that is rarely told. Come along.
1Andrew Fraknoi, ‘How Fast Are You Moving When Sitting Still’, in Universe in the Classroom (Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2007).
2Modern humans and Homo sapiens are used synonymously throughout this book. Humans, by contrast, could mean any member of the Homo species, such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens. Archaic humans refers to those members of the Homo species that are extinct – such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalensis. However, in the Holocene (from ~9700 BCE onward), ‘humans’ will mean modern humans since archaic humans are believed to have gone extinct by then.
3‘Aryan migration’ refers to the theory that Indo-European languages, including an early version of Sanskrit, were brought to India by migrants from the Eurasian Steppes, who called themselves Aryans, sometime after 2000 BCE. ‘Aryan’ is the self-description of a group of people speaking the same family of languages. Wherever the phrase ‘Aryan migration’ is used in this book, it has to be read as the short version of ‘migration of Indo-European-language-speaking people who called themselves Aryans’. And wherever the word ‘Aryan’ is used, it has to be read as ‘people who called themselves Aryans’.
4David Reich, et al., ‘Reconstructing Indian Population History’, Nature 461: 489–94 (September 2009).
5Marina Silva, et al., ‘A Genetic Chronology . . .’, BMC Evolutionary Biology (2017).
1
The First Indians
How a band of Out of Africa migrants found their way to India, dealt with their evolutionary cousins and a range of environmental challenges, mastered new technology, made this land their own and became the largest modern human population on earth.
If you want to get as close as possible to the lives of the first modern humans in India, one of the best places to go to is Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district, about forty-five kilometres from the state capital, Bhopal. It is an enchanting place spread over seven hills and full of naturally occurring rock shelters that are perhaps more imposing and majestic than most man-made residences of the twenty-first century. There are perennial springs, creeks and streams filled with fish; plenty of fruits, tubers and roots; deer, boar and hare; and, of course, as many quartzite rocks as you need to make all the tools you want. Moreover, the elevation of the hills makes it possible for the residents to keep track of who is approaching them: food or predator, nilgai or leopard!
In the world of early humans, this must have been the equivalent of a much sought-after luxury resort. Ever since it was first occupied some 100,000 years ago, it has never lain vacant for too long, and it is easy to imagine there having been a long waiting list to get in. A place so well liked that millennia after millennia, one or the other Homo species, including our own ancestors, the Homo sapiens, lived and hunted and painted and partied there. Yes, the rock shelters are full of paintings, including some that depict people dancing to drumbeats. The paintings are not well-dated, so it is quite likely that most of them, though not all, were made within the last few thousand years, rather than many tens of thousands of years ago. But there are a few petroglyphs, or rock carvings or markings, that could be the earliest evidence of art created by members of the Homo species anywhere in the world – a few perfect cupules (small cup-like depressions) with lines beside them.
A rock shelter in Bhimbetka
Perfect cup-like depressions made on the walls of a rock shelter in Bhimbetka. This is perhaps the earliest evidence of art made by members of the Homo species anywhere in the world.
But do we know exactly when the first modern humans set foot in Bhimbetka or, for that matter, in India? The answer to that is a bit complex. First we need to define what we mean when we say ‘first modern humans in India’. The technical meaning of the phrase would be any individual belonging to the Homo sapiens species who set foot in India first. However, when we say ‘first modern humans in India’ we also often mean to say the earliest direct ancestors of people living in India today. It is important to know that there is a difference between the two.
For example, let us say the first Homo sapiens in India were a group of thirty people in Bhimbetka 80,000 years ago. Let us also say that some calamity – like the huge Toba supervolcanic eruption that occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia, 74,000 years ago and impacted the entire region from east Asia to east Africa – directly or indirectly killed off every one of this first group of modern humans, leaving behind no one to populate the subcontinent.1 Let us then imagi
ne a second group of modern humans in Bhimbetka around 50,000 years ago, who successfully settle down and leave behind a lineage of people still found in India. Are we referring to the second group when we say the ‘first modern humans in India’? This may look like a matter of semantics and it is so, in a way, but it has meaningful implications for us when we interpret archaeological or other evidence to understand the history of early Indians.
Paintings on the wall of a rock shelter in Bhimbetka, perhaps a few thousand years old
If you ask Indian archaeologists when the first modern humans arrived in India, at least some of them are likely to put a date that is perhaps as early as 120,000 years ago. But if you ask a population geneticist, that is, a geneticist studying genetic variations within and between population groups, the answer is likely to be around 65,000 years or so ago. This seemingly irreconcilable difference between the two sciences is not necessarily contradictory. When geneticists talk about the first modern humans in India, they mean the first group of modern humans who have successfully left behind a lineage that is still around. But when archaeologists talk about the first modern humans in India, they are talking about the first group of modern humans who could have left behind archaeological evidence that can be examined today, irrespective of whether or not they have a surviving lineage.2