Early Indians

by Tony Joseph

10In the Acheulian style of toolmaking, a fist-sized or larger-sized stone is worked on, usually with another stone, to knock off several flakes and create a core with a jagged edge that can then be used as a tool for hacking, pounding or cutting. Acheulian tools are often called ‘bifaces’, meaning they have been worked symmetrically on both sides. Here, the core itself is the tool and the flakes are the discarded waste. In the Middle Palaeolithic style of toolmaking, first a core is prepared in such a manner that multiple flakes with sharp edges can be struck off easily from it. In this case, it is these flakes which are then used as tools, while the core from which all the flakes were made is ultimately discarded.

  11Marina Silva, et al., ‘A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals’, BMC Evolutionary Biology (2017).

  12Michael Petraglia, et al., ‘Population Increase and Environmental Deterioration Correspond with Microlithic Innovations in South Asia ca. 35,000 Years Ago’, PNAS (July 2009).

  2

  The First Farmers

  How the First Indians and Zagrosian herders from Iran planted the first seeds of an agricultural revolution that spread like wildfire across India’s north-western region, creating the necessary conditions for the birth of the world’s largest early civilization.

  One way to understand the population structure of today’s India is to think of it as a pizza, with the First Indians forming its base. Some parts of the pizza are thin crust, some parts thick crust, but all parts need to have the base – the pizza doesn’t exist without it. Then comes the sauce that is spread all over the pizza. And then the cheese and the toppings – the people who came into the subcontinent later, at various periods. The cheese and the toppings are not uniform across the different slices. Some slices have an extra topping of tomato, some have more of capsicum and others a lot of mushroom. The sauce, the cheese or the toppings that you find on this Indian pizza are not unique; these are found in other parts of the world too – some in West Asia, some in Southeast Asia and some in Europe and central Asia. But the base of the pizza is unique to India – you will not find another one like it anywhere else in the world. And neither will you find a pizza with this level of diversity in any place other than Africa.

  What accounts for this level of diversity, this distinction, of India? In a sense, this is the story of this book. A large part of the genetic diversity is due to South Asia perhaps being second only to Africa in having been occupied for the longest time by a large population of modern humans. This itself generates diversity because with each generation and each replication of an individual’s genome, mutations can occur and over time these differences accumulate. And the larger the population, the larger the number of new mutations. As we saw in the last chapter, India has had one of the largest modern human populations in the world for tens of thousands of years. But that is only part of the reason for the diversity. The other major reason is migrations.

  So let us try to understand how we ended up where we are today from the ground up. This chapter will look at the first major migration that reshaped India’s demography after the First Indians reached the subcontinent some 65,000 years ago.

  Masters of all they see

  When we left the previous chapter, the First Indians had finally become masters of the land they had migrated to, having driven the archaic humans to extinction. Or at least having outlasted them. When exactly did the archaic humans in India go extinct? We have no real, fact-based understanding of this. In fact, we do not even know for sure what species they belonged to – Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis or a species that is yet to be identified.

  There has only been one discovery of an archaic human fossil in South Asia – a partially complete cranium dated to around 250,000 years ago, recovered from Hathnora in Madhya Pradesh’s Narmada valley in 1982. It was first classified as a Homo erectus, then as an ‘archaic’ version of Homo sapiens itself, then as Homo heidelbergensis, and as of now the debate is still unsettled. It is not surprising then that we do not know when these archaic humans went extinct in the subcontinent either.

  We do know, though, that Neanderthals went extinct in Europe around 40,000 years ago, with the Iberian peninsula in south-western Europe being their last stand and refuge. Modern humans reached Europe around 45,000 years ago, so they had a few thousand years of coexistence with Neanderthals. The nature of modern human interaction with Neanderthals in Europe is a matter of debate, but it is safe to say that soon after modern humans reached the continent, Neanderthals had to retreat from everywhere because of conflict with the new arrivals or because of new diseases spread by them or because of a number of other factors.

  In India the extinction of the archaic Homo species may have happened around 35,000 years ago, as we saw in chapter 1, and Homo sapiens would have then become for the first time master of all they surveyed. So modern humans in India have had a very long time to spread themselves out and make their presence felt all over the habitable regions of the subcontinent in the north, east, south and west. This explains why the ‘Indian pizza’ has a base that is present throughout South Asia.

  But why is this base unique? It is unique because the ancestry of the First Indians forms the base, or 50 to 65 per cent of the ancestry of Indian population groups. And this First Indian ancestry has no close relatives outside the subcontinent today. Its closest relatives once left India to migrate to south-east Asia and then the rest of east Asia and Australia, but that separation happened around 65,000 years ago and it would be a stretch to call any of them close relatives any more – deep time makes separated populations evolve differently along different paths. That is why the base of the Indian pizza is both unique and omnipresent in the region – almost all regions, all linguistic groups and all castes and tribes of the country carry the genetic imprint of the First Indians, as scientific studies have shown repeatedly. This is also why it is accurate to describe them as the foundation or the base of the Indian population.

  Why then is the base thin in some regions, such as the north-west, and thick in some other regions, such as the south? This can be put down to subsequent migrations into India from the outside which, to varying degrees, replaced, displaced or subsumed the First Indians. Broadly, areas such as the north-west or the north-east, the regions through which newer migrants arrived, have a thinner base of First Indians than central or peninsular India.

  Who are these later migrants and when did they arrive? To answer this, we need to turn to palaeoclimate, or the climate during ancient times. As we saw earlier, the earliest evidence for microliths in the subcontinent dates to about 45,000 years ago, and by 35,000 years ago or so they had become widespread. The climate had already started deteriorating as the world began its descent towards a long glacial period that would last from around 29,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago. But the ending of the glacial age wasn’t quite neat and dramatic: the gradual warming that began near the end of the glacial age was interrupted by another cold twitch that lasted about 1300 years, between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago, when the world climate turned dry and arid once more, during the phase called Younger Dryas. It is only when the Younger Dryas too ended that the world really entered a long-lasting warm, wetter and greener period called Holocene 11,700 years ago. We are still in the Holocene.

  It is often during periods of climatic upheaval such as these that we see new dramatic developments taking place in human history, proving once again that our species needs either fear (lack of resources) or greed (promise of plenty) to propel it forward. For example, around 16,000 years ago when the glacial period was slowly coming to an end, the Americas were being occupied for the first time by Asians coming in through Beringia, the land bridge that connected the two continents where modern-day Russia and Alaska are.

  Thus in the early Holocene we see on–off experiments in the Fertile Crescent in west Asia (today’s Iraq, Iran and the Levant), south Asia, Egypt and later China. These experiments would ultimately lead to h
umankind taking to agriculture almost everywhere. Not all these experiments were successful; not all those successful were sustainable; and many experiments that did not succeed or sustain for long may not be traceable in the archaeological records today. But when agriculture finally took off for certain in the Fertile Crescent and in India, Egypt and China over a transitionary period of 4000 or 5000 years between 9700 BCE and 5000 BCE, the human population started exploding in a manner never seen before, leading to massive migrations that changed world demography in Europe, central Asia, south Asia, China and east Asia.

  Miracle in Mehrgarh

  The hotspot of the earliest experiments in agriculture in south Asia is a village today called Mehrgarh, located at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan in modern-day Pakistan. The site was inhabited for a period of about 4400 years between, roughly, 7000 BCE and 2600 BCE. At its peak, it covered an area of about 200 hectares, which would make it one of the largest habitations of the period between the Indus and the Mediterranean.

  Mehrgarh was discovered as a historical site in 1976 by a French archaeological mission working in collaboration with Pakistan’s department of archaeology, and it dramatically changed our understanding of how agriculture began and spread in south Asia. Mehrgarh laid the foundations for the Harappan Civilization that was to follow. The excavated mound at Mehrgarh had cultural deposits (material remains that had been used, made or changed by humans) that were nine metres thick, covering the period from around 7000 BCE. When people live in a settlement for hundreds or thousands of years, the accumulated refuse and debris – especially bricks – cause the ground level to rise, forming mounds. The thickness of the deposits, therefore, can be a rough indication of how long a settlement was occupied, in comparison with other sites in similar circumstances.

  At the bottom-most layer the researchers found small, rectangular, multiroomed mud-brick houses, some of which may have been used for storage; sickles made of microliths attached originally to wooden handles that may have been used for harvesting grains; remains of barley and wheat grains in the soil and in the mud bricks; remains of meals, suggesting consumption of hunted animals such as gazelle, nilgai, blackbuck, wild pig and water buffalo; and evidence of domestication of the local humped cattle, zebu (Bos indicus), and perhaps goat as well.

  Jean-François Jarrige, the leader of the French team, described their finds at the earliest levels, which were ‘aceramic’, or without pottery, thus: ‘All the excavated buildings are multi-roomed structures. Four different plan-types have been recorded: two-roomed, four-roomed, six-roomed and ten-roomed buildings. Most of the walls of these buildings are composed of two rows of hand-moulded mudbricks longitudinally arranged. These long and narrow bricks measured 62 x 12 x 8 cm with generally on their upper faces a herringbone pattern of impressions of the brickmakers’ thumbs to provide a keying for the mudmortar in which they were set.’1 (Mudmortar refers to a paste used to bind together building blocks – in this case, bricks. The brickmaker’s thumb impressions create a non-smooth surface which helps the mortar to hold the building blocks together.) Elsewhere Jarrige describes the bricks as being ‘cigar-shaped’. Jarrige’s team noted that the six-roomed buildings revealed no fireplace or significant remains of domestic activities, unlike what was found in some of the other buildings, thus suggesting that these bigger structures were probably used as granaries or storage facilities.

  ‘The walls of the clay houses were plastered inside and outside with a 2 cm thick clay mortar. There are evidences that the coatings of the external walls of several houses were coloured in red or even adorned with paintings. A portion of a collapsed wall from level 1 [the earliest level of excavation, dated to around 7000 BCE] was coloured in plain red ochre. In the upper levels, similar traces of red paint were found on several walls. Quite sizeable fragmentary impressions of external plaster fallen on the ground show red V-shaped motifs and in one case, a complex geometrical pattern of red lines and red and black dots. Some floors made of packed and rammed earth were also covered with red ochre. Some roofing fragments have also been discovered in the building debris. They consisted of fragments of chaff-tempered mud with several impressions of fibrous stems of reeds.’

  Many rooms in the smaller buildings had traces of fireplaces, and in the open spaces between houses many circular firepits were discovered, their diameters ranging between forty and sixty centimetres and with a maximum depth of about forty-five centimetres. Interestingly, most firepits had heavily burnt, cracked pebbles and one had oval-shaped clay balls. Their use wasn’t difficult to decipher, since in Balochistan bread is cooked on heated stones even today.

  The plant assemblage of Mehrgarh (or the selection of plants that were being used by the residents, as revealed by the remains excavated from the site) was dominated by a particular variety of barley, the naked six-row barley (naked means hull-less, and six-row refers to the number of spikelets with grains on them). It accounted for more than 90 per cent of the recorded seeds and imprints on the site. But were the residents of Mehrgarh just gathering wild barley or were they actively cultivating it? There’s a way to find out.

  All domesticated plants and animals differ from their wild ancestors in fairly predictable ways, because of the selection pressures that domestication puts on their evolution over time. Many domesticated animals, for example, become smaller in size, show less aggression, develop smaller brains and lose the more extravagant horns. Also, sexual dimorphism – where the male and female sizes differ significantly – slowly disappears. It is easy to see why. On the one hand, humans select their animals for their ease of taming and lack of aggression, which reflects in such changes as a smaller head or horns, less visibly dangerous teeth and smaller brains. On the other hand, many of the usual selection pressures on animals are taken away because they no longer have to compete with other animals of their species either for food or for mates.

  Domestication causes many changes in plants too. For example, their seeds no longer shatter when ripe, and they germinate far more easily and are larger. It is easy to see why this happens too. When humans harvest their crop, the seeds that are already shattered are lost and dispersed in the soil while those that are still on the stem are collected. Some of them are used for consumption, and the rest kept for sowing in the next period. This acts as a strong selection pressure for seeds that do not shatter immediately on ripening. To look at it from the other side, since plants that are domesticated no longer have to worry about spreading their seeds – a job that is now taken over by humans – the usual selection pressures that make seedpods self-shatter cease to operate. Similar pressures explain how domesticated seeds of plants are often larger and why they germinate more easily too.

  Because of these differences, scientists while looking at ancient fossils of animals or plants can figure out whether these were domesticated or wild. This is important because even if a settlement has, say, sickles and evidence of granaries and of consumption of cereals, this need not mean that the people were agriculturists – they could merely have been hunter-gatherers harvesting wild crops rather than cultivating them. The presence of domesticated animals and plants, on the other hand, is a clear indication that the people are indeed agriculturists, not hunter-gatherers. In the case of the barley found at the earliest levels at Mehrgarh, the anthropologist and agricultural scientist Lorenzo Constantini found it to be ‘cultivated but not perhaps fully domesticated’, meaning that the process of domestication was still under way.

  What about the animals? Were they domesticated too? The residents of Mehrgarh were avid hunters, but there is also evidence of animal domestication, at first limited to goat. A few graves at the earliest excavation levels for young women had up to five complete skeletons of kids or young goats placed around their legs in a semicircle. The presence of bones of relatively small subadult and adult animals in the trash deposits at the earliest excavation levels also suggests the domesticated status of goats, according to the archaeologist and zoologist R.H
. Meadow, who was part of excavations at both Mehrgarh and Harappa. This is because while hunters usually target bigger animals in a herd to maximize their gains, herders are likely to cull younger males. So the size of the animals consumed as evidenced by the trash deposits is a signal of the domestication process as well.

  Meadow also showed that during Period 1 at Mehrgarh (that is, from around 7000 BCE to around 6000 BCE), sheep and cattle came to increasingly dominate the animal remains of the settlement, as opposed to the remains of hunted animals such as nilgai and gazelles – another indication of domestication. By the end of Period 1, cattle bones accounted for over half of the animal remains, with the indigenous humped cattle zebu becoming the dominant presence. According to Meadow, the animals in Mehrgarh grew smaller in body size over time, as is expected when the domestication process is on.

  In the middle of all this – domesticating plants and animals, building houses, hunting – the residents of Mehrgarh also found time to indulge their creative side. Archaeologists found remains of workshops of beadmakers, who were using calcite or steatite (both are types of mineral rocks) as raw material. Grave goods – or things that are buried along with the dead – gave an even clearer picture of craft production in Mehrgarh. These included ornaments made of seashells, lapis lazuli, turquoise, black steatite and many other such stones. Note that since Mehrgarh is nowhere near the sea, the seashells indicate long-range trading or exchange networks that probably reached up to the Makran coast of today’s Pakistan. The ornaments were created with an unexpected level of sophistication, says Jarrige.

  He describes a particularly striking burial thus: ‘Exceptional grave deposits are dentalium [a kind of long, thin shell] headbands found on the heads of several females . . . In Burial 274, the headband was made of woven rows of small dentalium segments and closed by two straps used as a clasp. Each of them was ornamented with four perforated natural shells. Around the neck was a thin necklace made of shell beads and at the waist, a belt-like ornament was made up of cylindrical shell beads and one flattened polyhedral shell head. Hanging on the belt, an interlacing of numerous threaded dentalium beads was found in front of the pelvis of the individual.’