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March 8 - April 13, 2023
when Vasco da Gama led the Portuguese fleet into the Indian Ocean in 1497–98, it had already been a highly interconnected ecosystem for a very long time.
discovery of the Americas by Columbus was an unintended consequence of the desire to find a trading route to the Indian Ocean.
By the early nineteenth century, the Atlantic was clearly beginning to rival the Indian Ocean.
by the end of the nineteenth century it was the Atlantic that held centre stage.
the pendulum is now gradually swinging back.
given the demographic weight of countries
Cholas of India, the Majapahit of Indonesia and the Omanis are mentioned almost as footnotes. This is the equivalent of telling European history with little reference to Athens, Venice or the Vikings.
Pre Vasco da gama
Ashoka who is often portrayed in conventional histories as a great monarch and a pacifist. However, when seen from the perspective of the coastal state of Odisha, he appears much less benign. The same can be said of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore in the late eighteenth century, who is often lionized in India for his opposition to British colonial expansion. When seen from the perspective of the Kerala coast, he looks like a ruthless marauder.
Even Asoka
Odisha’s Kharavela who probably ended the Mauryan empire, and Marthanda Varma of Travancore who decisively defeated the Dutch and ended their dreams of colonizing India.
maritime history is driven less by monarchs and dynasties and much more by a varied cast of characters including explorers, adventurers, merchants and even pirates.
Who ran maritime history?
previous histories of the Indian Ocean or the maritime Spice Route were written almost exclusively from a Western point of view
as if the people of the Indian Ocean were sitting around lazily growing spices for export until the Europeans turned up and made things exciting.
locals are mentioned only when they threaten colonial expansion in any way.
Local texts, inscriptions and oral histories are routinely discounted as being somehow inferior sources than the testimonies of foreign visitors and travellers who are assumed to have greater credibility.
This is extremely key point
Take, for instance, Ibn Battuta, the famous fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller, who proudly recounts how he threw out an elderly Jewish physician from a dinner party hosted by the Sultan of Birgi for no apparent reason other than his religion.
As historian John Reader puts it, ‘This view of African history compounded a prevailing belief that whatever was commendable in black Africa must have been introduced from somewhere else by lighter-skinned and (by implication) more intelligent people.
outcome of complex interactions that, at every point in time, can lead down many paths.
Indravarman I who was Jayavarman’s queen’s nephew.
This is matrilineal (vs matriarchal which is rare )
Brahmin priests in ancient Cambodia, similarly, passed from uncle to nephew down the maternal line.
Swami Desikan too
This difference is perhaps just another example of how history does not evolve along predetermined paths and the same set of circumstances can lead to different outcomes.
such tsunamis have taken place many times in the past and are remembered in the oral traditions of aboriginal tribes in the region.
tribes had suffered almost no casualties despite being very close to the epicentre.
old oral tradition
the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica). Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.
around 55 million years ago India collided with the Eurasian plate. The collision pushed up and created the Himalayas. As a result, the seabed that had existed between India and Asia was thrust into the sky. This explains why fossils of marine animals can be found high up in the mountain range.
Himalayas and fossils of marine animals in Himalayas
Himalayas are still rising by about 5 mm every year.
The complex interaction between all these factors means that the landscape is alive and constantly changing.
The Neanderthals were well established in Europe and the Middle East. The closely related Denisovans roamed across many parts of Asia. We have only discovered the existence of the Denisovans by chance in 2010 due to the genetic sequencing of an ancient finger bone.
Homo floresiensis that reached a maximum height of one metre and a weight of 25 kgs. Nonetheless, they continued to produce stone tools and seemed to have hunted the island’s dwarf elephants.
Khoi-San people of south-western Africa are the oldest surviving human population as they have the greatest genetic variation.6
hunter–gatherer
The planet was a lot cooler, sea levels were far lower and shorelines extended 50–100 kms further out from today’s contours.
Unless they crossed during the brief periods that the strait was dry land, it does suggest that early Homo sapiens already had the capability to build some sort of raft.
Perhaps the Neanderthals lost their best hunting grounds to the new entrants or perhaps our ancestors brought deadly diseases with them from Africa.
1–4 per cent of the DNA of all non-Africans is derived from Neanderthals.
This means that the Neanderthals did not entirely die out but live on within us.
One possibility is that Neanderthals introduced a variation in skin tone that would later get exacerbated by natural selection as modern humans settled in different climate zones due to factors like vitamin D deficiency, melanin protection from sun and so on.
platypus which is an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet and a duck’s bill.
species weighing over 50 kgs, twenty-three became extinct. It is thought unlikely that natural cycles like climate change would have caused this mass extinction since these creatures had already survived several cycles.
Devastating impact of human migration
male lineage known by geneticists as R1. This lineage emerged somewhere in the Persian Gulf–north India continuum, possibly Iran, before the last Ice Age.
gave rise to a western branch, R1b, and an eastern branch, R1a.
subgroup, R1a1a) would later become an important component of the genetic cocktail that scientists call the ‘Ancestral North Indians
A number of factors decided who died out and who survived and flourished—availability of food, changing climate, disease, tribal wars, the decisions of leaders and pure chance.
What made species to thrive and go extinct?
Wonderful story, but it is mostly untrue.
not quite farms but the active management of a semi-wild ecosystem, distinct from being a nomadic hunter-gatherer.
Blended
In other words, did the need to feed urban hubs lead to farming?
At the very least, we need to stop thinking of history as a smooth, linear transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic, and then from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.
We now know that both crops and animals were domesticated at multiple locations around the world. Sugar cane was domesticated by Melanesians in New Guinea. They may have also tamed banana although a separate species may have been independently domesticated in India or South East Asia. Rice and pigs were domesticated in China. Rice cultivation then spread quite quickly to South East Asia and to India. Sesame and cotton appear to have been first cultivated in India. West Africans learned to cultivate sorghum and African millet. Cows seem to have been domesticated in India and separately in the
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The real question is, why did they bother to switch?
Analysis of human remains from Neolithic farming sites repeatedly shows that farmers were less healthy and had much shorter lifespans than their hunter–gatherer ancestors.
