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.

~ 70,000 years ago: Geneticists calculate that the earliest successful Out of Africa (OoA) migration happened around this time.

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

~ 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.

We know this because all non-African Homo sapiens today carry about 2 per cent Neanderthal genes in their DNA. Some of us – like the Melanesians, Papuans and Aboriginal Australians – also carry 3 to 6 per cent Denisovan DNA.

we now know that large portions of European populations were replaced not once but twice within the last 10,000 years. First, a mass migration of farmers from west Asia around 9000 years ago mixed with or replaced already established hunter-gatherers in Europe. And then a mass migration from the Eurasian Steppes about 5000 years ago mixed with or replaced the then existing population of European farmers.

In the Americas, we now know that native American populations, before the arrival of Europeans, owed their ancestry to not one but at least three migrations from Asia.

In other words, the paper was saying that it was not Iranian ‘farmers’ whose lineage was visible in Rakhigarhi, but the lineage of a population that split from the ‘Iranian farmers’ before agriculture was invented and, therefore, were not farmers themselves yet. They were hunter-gatherers then.

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.

The DNA evidence has been conclusive that modern humans outside of Africa are all descendants of a single population of Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who moved into Asia sometime after 70,000 years ago and then spread around the world, perhaps replacing their genetic cousins such as Homo neanderthalensis along the way.

The twenty-three chromosomes together with the mtDNA comprise a person’s genome.

While the track record of mutations as reflected in the mtDNA and Y-chromosome allows us to create genetic family trees, the mutation rate allows us to work out the approximate time that has passed since two branches or sub-branches of a tree diverged.

mtDNA. We cannot create genetic trees out of the twenty-two non-sex chromosomes – which are called autosomes – because recombination, or the shuffling and division of genes, makes that impossible.

When you look at the mtDNA of people outside of Africa all around the world, you will find they all descend from a single haplogroup with deep lineage in Africa, namely, L3.

Again, this means that all humans outside of Africa are descended from a single man who started the Y-chromosome haplogroup CT.

we can now look back at the climatic history of the world for the past many millions of years, which has been divided into periods called Marine Isotope Stages (MIS). Currently we are in MIS 1, a warm, wetter period that began about 14,000 years ago and is still continuing.

Whenever the warm interglacial periods ended and the climate cooled again, the Neanderthals already in central or northern Eurasia would perhaps have moved down to southern Eurasia in greater numbers in search of slightly warmer climes, putting pressure on the newly arrived Homo sapiens there. It is thus possible that the climate cycles and the presence of Neanderthals together are what scuppered the attempts of the first modern humans to colonize the rest of the world from Africa through the Levant.

All non-Africans carry about 2 per cent of Neanderthal genome.

The earliest evidence for modern human occupation of Europe dates to about 45,000 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.

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

‘It has been estimated that between about 45,000 and 20,000 years ago, most of humanity lived in South Asia. This evidence is thought to reflect a population expansion in the subcontinent that is unparalleled elsewhere.’

In fact, between half and two-thirds of our genome-wide ancestry today comes from the First Indians.

if you look at mtDNA lineages you will find that somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of people are descendants of the First Indians, with M lineages being the most popular. If you look at Y-chromosome lineages, though, the picture is different: First Indian descendants account for only 10 to 40 per cent of the haplogroups, depending on which population group you are considering.

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.

In India the extinction of the archaic Homo species may have happened around 35,000 years ago,

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.

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.

(‘Neolithic’ is associated with the beginnings of farming and the domestication of animals and plants in general. In archaeological records, this period is often represented by polished stone tools and implements such as grinding stones and, sometimes, pottery. The Neolithic Age is preceded by the Palaeolithic Age and succeeded by the Chalcolithic or Copper Age.)

So the broad picture we see is that between 9500 bce and 6500 bce – that is, a 3000-year period immediately following the end of the Younger Dryas and the beginning of Holocene – both plant and animal domestication had spread across most of the Fertile Crescent, after progressing in fits and starts during the last glacial period, with different regions contributing in different ways at different times and probably with multiple instances of domestication for the same species.

To use a more technical description, we now know that the ancestry of ASI derives from First Indians (Ancient Ancestral South Indians or AASI) and a population related to Iranian farmers. And we also know that the ancestry of ANI comes from First Indians (AASI), a population related to Iranian farmers and Steppe pastoralists. Almost all present-day populations of Indians are a mixture of ANI and ASI, in different proportions in different regions and communities.

Unlike the Mesopotamians with their monumental ziggurats (houses for the patron gods and goddesses of each city), the Harappans have nothing that can be identified as grand temples or even large ritual places.

Neither were there clearly recognizable palaces for the kings in the Harappan Civilization, again quite unlike in Mesopotamia.

A striking feature of the Harappan Civilization that sets it apart from its contemporaries is the lack of representation of violence between humans.

Even more striking than the civic amenities, perhaps, is another feat of the Harappans: uniform weights. Across the length and breadth of this largest of civilizations there was only one way to weigh materials, using standardized cubic weights made of chert (a type of rock).

As ubiquitous as the weights in Harappan cities were the bangles – hundreds of thousands of them.

what is usually called the Mature Harappan phase of the civilization began only around 2600 bce, that is, about 4600 years ago. It is around this time that the usage of a common script and common seals became prevalent across the cities of the civilization, but many elements that go into the making of a civilization were already in process by then.

Historians divide the period from the beginnings of agriculture in places such as Mehrgarh (7000 bce) to the disintegration of the Harappan Civilization (five millennia later) into four broad stages: the Early Food Producing Era (7000–5500 bce), Regionalization or Early Harappan Era (5500–2600 bce), Integration or Mature Harappan Era (2600–1900 bce) and Localization or Late Harappan Era (1900–1300 bce).

The extraction of resources from the producers, and from consumption within the families, and their diversion towards social services, required a strong dose of coercion. Such coercion could be physical, but the use of force is expensive and becomes counterproductive after a while. Therefore, preferably the coercion is ideological. The temple was the only institution that could convince producers to give up substantial parts of their work for the advantage of the community and its administrators

The Indus seals depict many animals but not the horse. The horse and the chariot with spoked wheels were the defining features of the Aryan-speaking societies.

The tiger is often featured on Indus seals and sealings, but the animal is not mentioned in the Rigveda.

It is thus possible to see the heritage of Harappa in the language/s of the Dravidians, and in the myths, phrases and words borrowed by the Indo-Aryans from the Harappan tradition.

Whichever way you look at it, by around 2000 bce, some of the most important elements that make up India’s population as it is today were in place: the descendants of the Out of Africa migrants, the Iranian-farmer-related population, the Austroasiatic-language speakers and the Tibeto-Burman-language speakers.

Many studies have repeatedly shown that there is much higher prevalence of R1a among the upper castes than the lower castes and that it is about twice as high among the Brahmins as among the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes. So what we see is a genetic signature that is prevalent among Indo-European-language-speaking countries and that also has a strikingly elevated presence among the traditional custodians of the oldest layer of Indo-European languages in India: Sanskrit.

Then, starting around 5000 bce there was an influx of people from the Caucasus – the region between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea that connects west Asia to the Steppe – into the Steppe, resulting in new settlements. The Yamnaya are the result of this influx, and they draw equal ancestry from the Caucasus and the hunter-gatherer population of the Steppe.

There were three technological innovations that the Yamnaya adapted from neighbouring populations such as the Maikop that shaped their role in history: the wheel, the wagon and the horse.

The Yamnaya burst upon Europe around 3000 bce, a thousand years before their descendants and relatives reached south Asia. In the archaeological record, this new influx into Europe was reflected by a new culture called Corded Ware that started becoming evident from around 2900 bce.

‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’ confirmed that between 2000 bce and 1400 bce, a vast region of the eastern European and trans-Ural Steppe had a relatively homogeneous population that was different from those who populated the region earlier.

To put that into plainer words, the Steppe migrations that changed Indian demography had to have happened in the first half of the second millennium bce, because after that period, the demographic pattern of central Asia itself changed with people there carrying significantly more ancestry from ESHG.

In south Asia, the incoming Steppe pastoralists mixed with the Harappans to create the new genetic cluster ANI, while the Harappans mixed with the inhabitants of south India, the direct descendants of the First Indians, to create the new genetic cluster ASI. Both groups mixed again, to varying degrees in different regions and during different periods, to create the population of India as it is today.