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

by Tony Joseph

~ 300,000 years: The age of the earliest remains of a modern human, Homo sapiens, ever found – in a cave in Jebel Irhoud, about fifty kilometres from the city of Safi in Morocco.

~ 300,000 years: The age of the earliest remains of a modern human, Homo sapiens, ever found – in a cave in Jebel Irhoud, about fifty kilometres from the city of Safi in Morocco.

180,000 years: The age of the earliest modern human fossil found outside of Africa – at a rock shelter in Misliya in north Israel.

180,000 years: The age of the earliest modern human fossil found outside of Africa – at a rock shelter in Misliya in north Israel.

~ 70,000 years ago: Geneticists calculate that the earliest successful Out of Africa (OoA) migrati...

~ 70,000 years ago: Geneticists calculate that the earliest successful Out of Africa (OoA) migrati...

~ 65,000 years ago: The OoA migrants reach India and are faced with a robust population of archaic humans.

~ 65,000 years ago: The OoA migrants reach India and are faced with a robust population of archaic humans.

60,000–40,000 years ago: The descendants of the OoA migrants populate central Asia and Europe over this period.

60,000–40,000 years ago: The descendants of the OoA migrants populate central Asia and Europe over this period.

~ 40,000 years ago: Neanderthals go extinct in Europe, with the Iberian peninsula in south-western Europe (modern-day Portugal and Spain) being their last refuge and stand.

~ 40,000 years ago: Neanderthals go extinct in Europe, with the Iberian peninsula in south-western Europe (modern-day Portugal and Spain) being their last refuge and stand.

45,000–20,000 years ago: The First Indians, the descendants of the OoA migrants in the subcontinent, start using Microlithic technology, and their population increas...

45,000–20,000 years ago: The First Indians, the descendants of the OoA migrants in the subcontinent, start using Microlithic technology, and their population increas...

~ 16,000 years ago (14,000 BCE): Modern humans reach the Americas, the last major continent to be settled in by modern humans, after crossing Beringia, the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

~ 16,000 years ago (14,000 BCE): Modern humans reach the Americas, the last major continent to be settled in by modern humans, after crossing Beringia, the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

~ 7000 BCE: In a village that is today called Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Hills in Balochistan, a new agricultural settlement begins that would ultimately become one of the largest habitations of its period between the Indus and the Mediterranean.

7000–3000 BCE: Migration of Iranian agriculturists from the Zagros region to south Asia leads to their mixing with the descendants of the First Indians sometime during this period. Geneticists estimate the mix...

7000–2600 BCE: The Mehrgarh site shows evidence for cultivation of barley and wheat, and increasing consumption of domesticated animals. The site was abandoned somewhere between 2600 BCE and 2000 BCE. By then agricultural settlements had spread all across north-weste...

7000 BCE: From around this period there is evidence for rice harvesting and sedentary settlement at Lahuradewa in the Sant Kabir Nagar district o...

5500–2600 BCE: The Early Harappan era, which witnesses early agricultural settlements growing into towns with their own unique styles, such as Kalibangan and Rakhigarhi in India and Banawali and Rahman Dheri in Pakistan.

3700–1500 BCE: Evidence of early agriculture starts to appear in different parts of India – eastern Rajasthan, southern India, the Vindhya region of central India, eastern India and the Swat valley of Kashmir.

2600–1900 BCE: The Mature Harappan period, which sees many sites being newly built or rebuilt, and many e...

2300–1700 BCE: The period of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), a civilization centred on the Oxus river (also called Amu Darya) and covering today’s northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and western Tajikistan. The BMAC had close trade and cultural relations with the Harappan Civilization.

2100 BCE: A southward migration of pastoralists from the Kazakh Steppe, towards the southern central Asian regions that would today be called Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

2000 BCE: Two major waves of migrations with their origin in China – after it had gone through the farming revolution and the resultant population surge – reshape south-east Asia. The first one brings Austroasiatic languages, new plants and a new variety of rice to India after 2000 BCE.

2000–1000 BCE: Multiple waves of Steppe pastoralist migrants from central Asia into south Asia, bringing Indo-European languages and new religious and cultural practices.

1900–1300 BCE: The Late Harappan period that sees the decline and eventual disappearance of the Harappan Civilization, primarily due to the effects of a long drought that affected ci...

The story of our ancestors, the early Indians, who came from Africa, west Asia, east Asia and central Asia and made this land theirs over the last 65,000 years.

In the rather short history of Homo sapiens (just around 300,000 years, compared to the 3.8 billion years that there has been life on earth), each of our tribes, clans, kingdoms, empires and nations have considered themselves to be of superior status. Some thought that they were the children of a special God, others that they were the chosen people, and still others that they were divinely ordained to rule over everyone else.

People also thought that the spot of earth they occupied was at the very centre of it all – for example, the Middle Kingdom of the Chinese or the ‘Midgard’ (Middle Enclosure) of Norse mythology.

No human community is of exceptional status relative to others. None are children of God, or chosen people, unless all are. And none of us live upon the centre of the earth any more than we live on its periphery, since we live on the surface of a globe. Nations as we understand them today are no older than a few centuries, and we are all interconnected – genetically, culturally and historically – far more than we imagine. And even ‘time immemorial’, it turns out, can increasingly be pinned down, dated, analysed and grasped.

prehistory is about the period that comes before history. History begins when writing begins and places and individuals come alive before us, with their own names and, sometimes, recognizable stories.

Modern 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.

‘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.

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.

Almost all the genetic code that humans need is packed into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that we all carry inside the nuclei of our cells. There is one exception and that is the mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which stays outside the cell nuclei. Each person inherits his or her mtDNA exclusively from his or her mother (the father also carries mtDNA passed on by his own mother, but he doesn’t pass it on to any of his children, male or female). The twenty-three chromosomes together with the mtDNA comprise a person’s genome.

You could look at a genome as a genetic code written using an ‘alphabet’ of just four chemicals – A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine) and T (thymine) – and if you do that, then each genome is made up of about three billion individual letters.3 A 0.1 per cent difference between the genomes of two people translates to about three million differences between the two genomes. If the two genomes came from people who shared a recent ancestor, then the differences would be smaller (which also means that genetic differences can be used as a measure of how close or distant two individuals are genetically).

Within every cell, mtDNA performs an extremely critical function – it has the code to convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use.

climate changed around 57,000 years ago, making for a warmer, wetter world when the deserts of north Africa and the Arabian peninsula were transformed into lush green grasslands, inviting both herbivores and carnivores, including our own ancestors, from the refuges of sub-Saharan Africa.

There were four possible paths for ancient modern humans out of Africa and into Eurasia – from Morocco in north-western Africa to Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar; from Tunisia into Sicily; from Egypt into the Sinai peninsula and on to the Levant;

and from Eritrea in eastern Africa to Yemen and Saudi Arabia across the Bab el Mandeb at the southern tip of the Red Sea.