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

by Tony Joseph

in many parts of Europe today, the percentage of the original hunter-gatherer ancestry has gone down to single digits, though there are some exceptions in northern Europe. In India, by contrast, the ancestry of the First Indians still constitutes between 50 and 65 per cent for most population groups when you look at the whole genome (as opposed to either Y-chromosome or mtDNA separately). This difference is also visible in language distribution: 94 per cent of western Europeans today speak an Indo-European language while only about 75 per cent of Indians do so. Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 20 per cent of Indians, while western Europe has no non-Indo-European language with a similar strong presence.

in July 2018, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of geologic time, introduced a new age called ‘The Meghalayan’ which runs from 2200 bce to the present and which began with a mega drought that crushed a number of civilizations worldwide – in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and, of course, India. The mega drought was likely triggered by shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation.

That the newly dominant elite from the Steppe had a clear preference for a non-urban, mobile lifestyle may be part of the reason why India had to wait for more than a millennium after the Harappan Civilization, for its ‘second urbanization’ that began after 500 bce.

in one instance, the contrast between the Rigvedic principles and Harappan practice is quite striking. The Rigveda denounces ‘shishna-deva’ (literal meaning: phallus god or phallus worshippers), while Harappan artefacts leave no one in doubt that phallus worship was part of its cultural repertoire.

Now on pure archaeological evidence, domestic horse starts appearing from 1900 bce. That is Late Harappan period, which is 1900 to 1500 bce. So this is one fixed point – about 1900 or 1800. Iron was here in north India by 1400 to 1500 bce. So you can safely put Rigveda to be somewhere between 2000 bce and 1400 bce.

The way houses are built around courtyards; the bullock carts; the importance of bangles and the way they are worn; the manner in which trees are worshipped and the sacredness of the peepul tree in particular; the ubiquitous Indian cooking pot and the kulladh; the cultic significance of the buffalo; designs and motifs in jewellery, pottery and seals; games of dice and an early form of chess (dice and chess-like boards have been found at multiple Harappan sites); the humble lota which is used to wash up even today; and even the practice of applying sindoor and some measurement systems – the ways in which we carry on the traditions of the Harappan Civilization are too many to count.

The Rigveda has a limited number of borrowed words from Dravidian languages, but the number goes up steadily in the later Vedas.

So in the burials of the earliest Corded Ware culture, there is no typical Corded Ware pottery. It appeared only later in northern Europe, and the study says the reason for this was that Corded Ware pottery began only after women with ceramic skills married into the incoming Yamnaya culture and then began making ceramic ware that imitates the leather, wooden and woven containers of the Yamnaya.

Both in India and in Europe, the Indo-European-language speakers were the last migrants significant enough to change the demography. India has seen multiple incursions since then – from Alexander’s army in 326 bce to the Sakas or the Scythians around 150 bce, the Huns around 450 ce, the Arabs in 710 ce, the Mughals in 1526 ce, and then the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and the British – but none of them have left more than a delicate and small impression on our demography, although their impact on our culture has often been bigger.

Look at all that happened: a long-standing civilization, the largest of its kind at the time, fell apart due to the ravages of a long drought, and its most visible symbols of power and prestige slowly disappeared even as urbanism itself did; people migrated to the east and the south in search of a new life; a new set of migrants came in from the north-west, bringing new languages and a different culture that put emphasis on sacrificial rituals and prioritized pastoralism and cattle breeding over urban settlements; another set of migrants came in from the north-east, bringing new languages, new domesticated plants and perhaps wetland farming techniques and a new variety of rice . . . and thus the pot of Indian culture was put on the boil. Four thousand years later, it is still simmering, with new ingredients getting added once in a while, from the Jews to the Syrians to the Parsis.

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.

What is surprising, because it is counter-intuitive, is that the mixing came to an end sometime around 100 ce.

The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two or three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans. The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.

To begin with, there is no certainty that the Sarasvati described as ‘mighty’ and ‘powerful enough to break mountaintops’ in the Rigveda is the one in India and not the Harahvaiti river in Afghanistan which the ‘Arya’ may have become familiar with on their journey into India through Afghanistan.

Contrary to earlier assumptions that a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, identified by some with the mythical Sarasvati, watered the Harappan heartland on the interfluve between the Indus and Ganges basins, we show that only monsoonal-fed rivers were active there during the Holocene. As the monsoon weakened, monsoonal rivers gradually dried or became seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses.

In other words, from about 10,000 bce onward, Ghaggar–Hakra has been a rain-fed river and, therefore, couldn’t have been the ‘mighty river’ that was powerful enough to ‘break mountaintops’ like a snowmelt-fed river would be.

Indus urban settlements thus developed along an abandoned river valley rather than an active Himalayan river . . . We suggest that this abandoned incised valley was an ideal site for urban development because of its relative stability compared to Himalayan river channel belts that regularly experience devastating floods and lateral channel migration.

The overwhelming evidence today, therefore, is that what shrunk the Ghaggar–Hakra was not a tectonic event that stole its waters and gave it to the Ganga or the Indus, but a mega drought that had global impact. To reiterate, the Ghaggar was a monsoon-fed river that was weakened by monsoon failure, and not a mighty, snow-fed river that was used to ‘breaking mountaintops’ as migration denialists insist.

While the world was being thus populated, a major event intervened – a glacial period between 29,000 and around 12,000 years ago that separated the Out of Africa migrants in different regions from each other. This is because during the glacial period, many areas became arid and uninhabitable and so movement from region to region became impossible.

The oldest stone tool in India was recovered from Attirampakkam near Chennai in Tamil Nadu, dated to about 1.5 million years ago. To really grasp the significance of this, remember that modern humans or Homo sapiens evolved in Africa not before 300,000 years ago. So archaic humans have been in India five times as long as modern humans have been in existence!

How long ago Mitochondrial Eve lived can change over time because of lineages going extinct. For example, if Mitochondrial Eve had three daughters whose direct lineages are still extant, but over time two of those lineages go extinct, then there would be a new Mitochondrial Eve and it would be her remaining daughter who will become the most recent common ancestor of all women with an unbroken mother-to-daughter chain.