Early Indians

by Tony Joseph

  Now to come back to our topic, the distance from, say, Yemen on the Arabian peninsula to Australia, if you take the coastal route, is not much more than the distance from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. So even if you assume it would take double the time, it is perhaps possible to cover the distance in about 4000 to 5000 years, assuming, of course, that migrants mostly take the coastal route as the first migrants to the Americas did. Now if you start with the middle point of 65,000 years ago for the Australian evidence of modern humans, then the walkathon from Africa should have begun about 70,000 years ago, which is still within the ballpark of the genetic estimates, though it would mean a crossing at the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula during the glacial period.8

  What does genetics say about all this? Is it in line with the idea of a rapid dispersal of beachcombing modern humans out of Africa using the Southern Route and reaching Australia from Yemen in about 5000 years or so? The answer is an emphatic yes. Genetic evidence is not just compatible with such a quick expansion, it actually demands such a rapid spread. The reason is that if the spread was slow with many rests in between, the genetic tree would look ‘nested’, and that is not the case. To take a theoretical example, if haplogroup M spread to India and settled there for a few thousand years, then a few subhaplogroups of M would have emerged because of mutations, and therefore the next migration out of India to, say, Myanmar would have included those subhaplogroups. If those subhaplogroups then spent a few thousand years in Myanmar before moving on to, say, Thailand, we would have seen many more new subhaplogroups emerging and taking part in the migration to the next destination. Thus, successive regions would have received successive subhaplogroups. If you drew the phylogenetic tree of such an expansion, it would look like one subhaplogroup nested under another, and then under another and so on, as we move from one region to another. But what we see in reality is nothing like that. M spread all the way to Australia, before too many mutations could arise. And each region has its own direct subhaplogroups of M. In short, genetics strongly supports a rapid expansion to Australia after the African exodus.

  If such a rapid migration peopled Asia roughly between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago, there aren’t enough modern human fossils from this period in south Asia to confirm it. The fossils that we do have from the region are of a much younger age. The earliest modern human fossil in south Asia was found in Sri Lanka, at the Fa Hien caves in the Kalutara district, dated to about 35,000 years ago. More modern human fossil finds from the Batadombalena caves, also in Sri Lanka, are dated to about 28,000 years ago. These discoveries proved beyond doubt that the migrants from Africa would have been quite at home in coastal India, and even in the tropical island of Sri Lanka. Fossils in both these places were found along with Microlithic (or tiny stone) tools that might have been used to give sharp tips to arrows and spears. Such Microlithic tools are typically associated with modern humans as opposed to archaic or extinct members of the Homo species.

  But if the first modern humans travelled down the western coast of India, and then up the eastern coast, before moving to south-east Asia and then to China and Japan as well as Australia, why have there been no fossil or shell midden or even stone tool findings along the Indian coast? One reason could be that the period between 71,000 and 57,000 years ago was a glacial period (MIS 4), and sea levels would have been lower than they are today. So the first migrants would have been moving through regions that are all below the sea today, thus reducing our chances of finding proof along the coast. Proof would become available only when people moved inland, such as in Fa Hien, and that might have taken time and, therefore, the earliest evidence of modern human presence in south Asia is likely to be of a much younger age than the date of the first migration itself.

  Not all archaeologists or geneticists buy into the coastal migration route, though. Ravi Korisettar of Karnatak University and the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and the archaeologist Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford recently argued in a paper9 that the slope of the coast would determine how much of the continental shelf became visible when the sea level retreated. A continental shelf with a very low slope would reveal a lot of new land, perhaps tens of kilometres wide, while a continental shelf with a steep slope would reveal little new land. According to these scientists, the Indian continental shelf, especially on the western coast, mostly has a steep slope, and so it is unlikely that the First Indians were walking along lands that later went under the sea. The reason why we have not found evidence of the coastal migration route, they say, is that modern humans were opportunistic in the routes they took, sometimes taking the coastal route and sometimes the inland routes. These are arguments that will be settled only when we find older modern human fossils.

  Now that we have dated the first modern human settlers in India to sometime around 65,000 years ago (because they had to have left Africa about 70,000 years ago based on Australian and south-east Asian fossil finds as we discussed earlier), let us tackle some outstanding questions about how the rest of the world was populated before moving ahead with our story. We have so far talked about OoA migrants moving through the Arabian peninsula into south Asia and then going on to populate east Asia and Australia. But what about Europe and central Asia? When did those regions get populated? The earliest evidence for modern human occupation of Europe dates to about 45,000 years ago (the irony of this shouldn’t be missed: when the first migrants, or the aborigines, reached Australia around 65,000 years ago, the Europeans did not exist).

  This delay in populating Europe – a gap of about 25,000 years between the OoA episode and the first evidence of modern humans in Europe – suggests that the route from the Arabian peninsula to Europe was not open until the climate warmed up quite a bit. There would have been two major obstacles on the route from the Arabian peninsula into Europe during the glacial period. One, the Rub’ al Khali or ‘Empty Quarter’, the largest contiguous sand desert in the world which occupies the southern third of the Arabian peninsula, and two, the Zagros and Taurus mountains of Iran, which would have been an equally formidable barrier. So the place that the first migrants went to occupy after south Asia was probably not Europe, but central Asia, conclude Korisettar and the other scientists in the paper mentioned above. They possibly walked from where Pakistan is today, up the Indus banks and into central Asia. And then, after the climate got warmer around 57,000 years ago, some of the people from the OoA migration still living in the Arabian peninsula or somewhere close to south Asia could have moved west across the Zagros mountains into Turkey, Syria, Israel and Europe. That might have been followed later by a second migration from central Asia to Europe around 30,000 years ago.

  Around the same time as some of the central Asian groups were moving into Europe, others might have migrated to the regions around Beringia, which would function as a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia during extreme cold climate, and which would have served as the staging ground for the first migrants into the Americas around 16,000 years ago. Before this migration to the Americas from Asia, some of the early occupants of east Asia had moved into Siberia and the regions around it like Beringia and mixed with the people there. Thus, the migrants moving into the Americas would have had an east Asian genetic heritage as well, not just a central Asian one. So that completes a very skeletal history of OoA and the subsequent migrations that filled up the world.

  The southern petal of Jambudvipa

  The cosmology of most cultures portrays the place they inhabit as the centre of the universe. Our own cosmology, common to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, is similar but only in some ways. (This cosmology was probably brought in or created by one of the later migrants into south Asia, but let us keep that aside for the moment.) In the telling of that cosmology, it is our world, called Jambudvipa, that lies at the centre of seven concentric circles of alternating land and sea. The sea is made up, successively from inward to outward, of salt water, sugarcane juice, wine, ghee, curd, milk and water. And at the raised centre of Jam
budvipa rises Meru, the mountain, the abode of the gods. In some visualizations, Jambudvipa is divided into four vast regions, each one shaped like the four petals of a lotus, with Meru at the centre, like a pericarp, the southern petal being Bharatvarsha.

  When the first group of modern humans walked into India, perhaps no more than a few hundred people in groups of twenty or twenty-five, trekking all the way from the Arabian peninsula over hundreds of years or perhaps even a thousand or more years, did they have a cosmology of their own that tried to explain the inexplicable? And did they have any inkling that they were entering a special place that more than a billion of their descendants would one day call their home? We are unlikely to ever know the answers to such questions, but there are other questions that we can crack with the technology and material evidence that we have. Questions such as: when they entered India, were they walking into a country that they had all to themselves – like the first modern humans in Australia or the Americas – or did they have competition in the form of other members of the Homo species, like in the Levant and Arabia? Did they tangle with each other? Or did they tango? Did our ancestors drive the others to extinction? Did they bring advanced technology – like bows and arrows and spears – or did they come with just a Middle Palaeolithic stone toolkit of scrapers, axes and sharp flakes that could be used as blades? And, of course, what did they look like? Do we have their direct descendants among us today? How big a brood have they left behind? Where can we find them?

  Let us start with the most tangible question first. What did they look like? We know that the Onge in the Andaman Islands are descendants of the original OoA migrants who may have mixed less with other groups. But does that mean the First Indians looked like them? That would be stretching things too far.

  Today’s Onge are as distant chronologically from the first migrants as any of us. This is such an obvious truth that it shouldn’t be necessary to say it. But it is surprising how often our mind plays tricks with us. For example, when we think of the earliest modern humans, say, those who existed 300,000 years ago, our mental picture of them may resemble today’s Africans. But this is an ill-conceived idea. The Africans of today are exactly as removed from the earliest modern humans as we are, and have gone through similar levels of mutation and change as the rest of humanity. They are no closer to the early modern humans than we are. Mutations can change the colour of the skin, the shape of the nose, the texture of the hair, or the slant of the eye – not to speak of such things as the ability to survive at high altitudes (Tibetans) or to stay underwater for long (the Bajau people of Southeast Asia).

  A member of the Onge tribe on India’s Little Andaman Island

  Similarly, in the case of the Onge too, 60,000 or 65,000 years is a long time for mutations to have done their work, and also for drift and selection pressures to have winnowed the genetic field. What is drift and selection? Genetic drift is the phrase geneticists use to describe the tendency of small sequestered populations to have declining genetic diversity over time. The principle is simple. In every generation, there is a chance that the last person carrying a particular genetic variation may die without leaving an heir. In a large population, the chances of any single genetic variation dwindling down to having just one last representative is low and, therefore, the effect of drift will be less too. In other words, small populations are likely to lose enough diversity over time and become more homogeneous – or rather, drift towards a uniform genetic standard. So in a given time, drift alone could make a small population look very different from how they used to look.

  The word ‘selection’, on the other hand, alludes to the essential process of evolution – the physical environment or the social environment or sexual preferences lending greater genetic success to some traits or mutations and less success to others, thus shaping the evolution of a population in a particular way. So it is highly likely that because of all these – mutations, drift and selection – the Onge today look quite different from what the First Indians looked like. (This is precisely the process – mutation, drift and selection – that makes different population groups separated by distance or other geographical barriers grow genetically distinct over time.)

  Until we find a well-preserved skeleton from some 65,000 years ago that we can use to reconstruct the faces of the first migrants, we have only one other, suboptimal, option: look for ancient skeletons of modern humans from other regions. And we do have one from the Skhul cave of Israel, although it is dated much earlier, between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago. It is the skeleton of a female modern human, and the reconstructed face shows a person we can easily identify with, but with some distinct differences. (Search for an image of ‘mitochondrial eve’ on the net.) Of course, we have no idea what level of difference existed among modern humans in different parts of Africa and the Levant over 80,000 years ago. It is possible that the people who moved into the Arabian peninsula (who would eventually reach south Asia) looked quite different from those who broke into the Levant. But this is the best we can do as of now.

  An equally important question, which has implications for the way modern humans settled in different parts of the subcontinent, is this: when they walked into India, did they run smack into archaic members of the Homo species already settled here? Without doubt, yes. This does not mean we have lots of fossil evidence to prove the existence of archaic or extinct members of the Homo species in the subcontinent when the modern humans arrived; we have almost none. (The only archaic human fossil evidence we have is a cranium discovered at Hathnora on the Narmada riverbank dated to around 250,000 years ago, which we will discuss in chapter 2.) What we do have, instead, are lots and lots of stone tools belonging to different styles and ages – from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Middle Palaeolithic and Microlithic – making it clear that India was by no means an inviting, empty land when our ancestors arrived.

  Palaeolithic just means old stones, and Microlithic means tiny stones. Lower Palaeolithic covers the oldest-style stone tools created by modern and archaic humans – essentially choppers, cleavers and axes, all of them big and heavy and made by chipping away at large stones, often in a style called Acheulian. In Middle Palaeolithic, the style of the tools changes, with humans learning how to prepare a ‘core’ from a big stone in such a way that many, many different flakes can be struck off to make scrapers and points and so on, thus reducing the time and effort needed to make tools and also improving their quality.10

  Middle Palaeolithic tools are smaller in comparison to Lower Palaeolithic tools, and Microlithic tools are smaller still, with some measuring less than a centimetre. These were often blades or points or variations of them and were often attached to bones or sticks and used as knives or arrows or spear tips.

  Microlithic tools are closely associated with modern humans, but not so the Palaeolithic or Middle Palaeolithic tools. Any modern or archaic human could have made them and so just by looking at these tools we cannot say with certainty which member of the Homo species was responsible for them. In other words, through much of their history, modern humans and archaic humans made much the same kinds of tools, though there could have been some regional variations. Broadly, the categorization of tools as Lower and Middle Palaeolithic or Microlithic refers to their type, not their age.

  The earliest evidence of Palaeolithic tools in India is from Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu, sixty-nine kilometres from Chennai, and dated to around 1.5 million years ago (that is, 1.2 million years before modern humans emerged). The Hunsgi–Baichbal valley in northern Karnataka (around 1.2 million years ago), the Middle Son valley in Madhya Pradesh, the Shivalik Hills in the outer Himalaya – the subcontinent is littered with evidence of the widespread presence of archaic humans much before modern humans set foot in the region or even evolved. Did all of them belong to the same species as the Narmada discovery, perhaps Homo heidelbergensis or Homo erectus? Or were there Neanderthals as well? Or another archaic human, as yet undiscovered? That is not entirely unlikely. We may not have
yet identified all the varieties of archaic humans – not even those that were contemporaneous with our own ancestors when they were spreading around the world.

  The Denisovans, for example, were discovered only about a decade ago when an ancient juvenile finger bone and a few teeth were retrieved from the Denisova caves in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia and the finger bone was later DNA sequenced. The DNA analysis made it clear, to everyone’s surprise, that this was a species quite different from both modern humans and Neanderthals. The fossil assemblage was dated to between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. Until this discovery, there was never any suggestion that such a species existed; in fact, the Denisovans are yet to be given a proper species name.

  So, in short, we know south Asia had abundant presence of archaic humans but we do not know precisely who they were. We know, though, that they were smart enough to be among the first in the world to upgrade their tool technology from the traditional to the state of the art. At Attirampakkam, we have evidence that they moved up from making Lower Palaeolithic tools to Middle Palaeolithic tools around 385,000 years ago. This came to light only because of the outstanding and long-term work of the archaeologist Shanti Pappu and her team at Attirampakkam, and their findings about the emergence of Middle Palaeolithic tools in this region around 385,000 years ago were published as late as in January 2018.

  The transition from Lower to Middle Palaeolithic toolmaking was a huge conceptual jump. This is because to start making Middle- Palaeolithic-style tools, you need to think many, many steps ahead, keeping in mind the final shape of the tool you want, and then shaping the core in such a manner that you can knock off precisely the kind of sharp tools you want, with very few strokes. If a Middle Palaeolithic toolmaker wanted to put down an Acheulian-style toolmaker, he could honestly say: any idiot can do that. (Any idiot doesn’t include us, of course, because stone knapping is a specialized skill today, and we would need a lot of practice to become an expert knapper.)