Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

by Tony Joseph

‘But have you ever considered how fast you are really moving when it seems you are not moving at all?’ Professor Andrew Fraknoi, astronomer

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.

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.

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

For instance, it is possible for a person to be almost entirely of Chinese ancestry, but to belong to a Y-chromosome haplogroup that is common only in India. All that would have been necessary for this to happen is for an Indian man to have left behind a son in China, say, ten centuries ago and for this son in turn to have founded a lineage with every generation having at least one son, all of whom lived in China and married Chinese women.

The Arabian chapter in the history of the first modern human migration is momentous for quite a different reason too. This is the most likely place where modern humans and Neanderthals first met, mated and left behind a genetic trail in all non-African modern human genomes that is still detectable today. All non-Africans carry about 2 per cent of Neanderthal genome.

when the first migrants, or the aborigines, reached Australia around 65,000 years ago, the Europeans did not exist).

Unlike many other regions – such as Europe, Australia or the Americas – which have seen the lineage of their original inhabitants dwindle to very low levels, the genetic lineage of the First Indians forms the foundation, the bedrock, of the Indian population today.

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.

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.

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.

In essence, instead of stating that today’s Indians are descendants of both the First Indians and west-Eurasian-related populations as the research suggested, the published paper created two new theoretically constructed population groups and said that today’s Indians are the result of a mixture of two highly differentiated groups, ANI and ASI, with the ANI being closely related to west Eurasians.

Not all agricultural societies become civilizations, but no civilization can become one without passing through the stage of agriculture.

Meluhha was the name by which the Harappan Civilization was known to the west Asians and there are many references to it in Mesopotamian records – including an inscription on a cylinder seal that reads ‘Su-ilisu, interpreter of the Meluhhan language’.

The weapons that the Harappans had were spears, knives and arrows, all necessary for hunting animals or even winning a fight with a rival, but perhaps not sufficient for war, says Kenoyer, who also points out that in the 700 years of the Harappan Civilization’s existence – between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE – there is no evidence that any of its cities were attacked or burnt down.

Singh mentions that archaeologists found ‘lotas’ at the bottom of the internal latrines that the homes were provided with, suggesting that the way South Asians wash themselves hasn’t changed all that much – even if many South Asians today do not have the indoor facilities that the Harappans enjoyed.

No contemporary civilization, whether Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Chinese, had anything similar on offer when it came to public conveniences for residents or guests.

If there were an ‘ease of doing business’ ranking in the third millennium BCE, the Harappans would have been front runners, along with the Egyptians perhaps, who also had a similar, standardized weighing system.

We can go on listing an endless variety of things that are unique to the Harappans and are still clearly recognizable as ‘Indian’ by us in the twenty-first century – from seals that show veneration for the peepul tree to the ‘handi’ or the cooking pot ‘with a ridge on the top that deflects the fire so that the ridge doesn’t get hot and you can pick it up’, as Kenoyer explains. The pottery styles differed across Harappan cities, but the ‘handi’ design was so popular that these cooking pots could be found everywhere.

South Asia being the centre of modern human population is not a new phenomenon – it is just an ancient track record that we continue to maintain.

Why do we often proclaim that the Indian civilization is about 5000 years old and not, say, 9000 years old when agriculture began, or, say, about 2300 years old when the Mauryas built the first Indian empire?

the Harappan Civilization had nothing to do with the ‘Aryans’ or Sanskrit or the Vedas, and was pre-‘Aryan’ or pre-Vedic.

The Indus Civilization was mainly urban, while the early Vedic society was rural and pastoral. There were no cities in the Vedic period.

The horse and the chariot with spoked wheels were the defining features of the Aryan-speaking societies. The bronze chariot found at Daimabad in Western Deccan, the Southernmost Indus settlement, has solid wheels and is drawn by a pair of humped bulls, not horses.

‘The Indus heritage is shared by Dravidian as well as Indo-Aryan speakers. The Dravidian heritage is linguistic. The Indo-Aryan heritage is cultural,

The Panti were the commoners who resided in the streets, “pati” of the (lower) city, “pali”.

There are instances when languages are spread more by contact or elite dominance rather than large-scale migrations. The ubiquity of English in India, for example, is not evidence of the Europeans genetically or demographically overwhelming the Indians, but of a period of intense contact between Europeans and Indians, resulting in the continuing popularity of English.

All of south-east Asia, from today’s Vietnam and Cambodia to Burma, Thailand and Indonesia, once fell within the ambit of India’s cultural pre-eminence.

In the language of genetics, the Harappans contributed to the formation of the Ancestral South Indians by moving south and mixing with the First Indians of peninsular India and also to the formation of the Ancestral North Indians by mixing with the incoming ‘Aryans’. Therefore, in many ways, they are the cultural glue that keeps India together – or the sauce on the pizza, to build on a metaphor that we used earlier.

The main gods and goddesses of the Rigveda – Indra, Agni, Varuna and the Asvins – find no representation in the vast repertoire of Harappan imagery.

A vase discovered at the Harappan site of Lothal in Gujarat has a painting that shows a crow standing next to a pitcher with a deer looking back at it, seemingly depicting the tale of the thirsty crow in the Panchatantra. So some of the tales we tell our children may have been the same ones told by the Harappans to their own children.

The difference between the inner and outer traditions might explain why the caste system fell into place when it did – and only when it did. The theory that incoming ‘Aryans’ imposed the caste system on the population when they arrived in the subcontinent has been proved wrong by a genetic study published in 2013 titled ‘Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India’. It was co-authored by Priya Moorjani, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Lalji Singh, David Reich and others. The results of the study that these scientists had conducted, based on genome-wide data from seventy-three population groups in the Indian subcontinent, were stunning. The study showed that between 2200 BCE and 100 CE, there was extensive admixture between the different Indian populations with the result that almost all Indians had acquired First Indian, Harappan and Steppe ancestries, though, of course, to varying degrees. The paper says, ‘India experienced a demographic transformation several thousands of years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy [marrying within the community].’

The genetic study says that this is exactly what happened. It was as if around 100 CE a new ideology, which had gained ground and power, imposed on the society new social restrictions and a new way of life. It was social engineering on a scale never attempted before or after, and it succeeded wildly, going by the results of genetic research.

The study links the sudden downing of the shutters on intermixing to the beginning of the caste system: ‘The four-class (varna) system, comprised of Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras, is mentioned only in the part of the Rigveda that was likely to have been composed later. The caste (jati) system of endogamous groups having specific social or occupational roles is not mentioned in the Rigveda at all and is referred to only in texts composed centuries after the Rigveda.’