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

by Tony Joseph

The fossil record of Africa is rich with the remains of our closest relatives – Sahelanthropus tchadensis 7 million years ago, Ardipithecus ramidus 4 million years ago, Kenyanthropus platyops 3.5 million years ago, Homo habilis 2.4 million years ago and Homo heidelbergensis 700,000 to 200,000 years ago – and there is no other region in the world that comes anywhere close to it.

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.

Geologists in the 1960s and 1970s discovered a way to figure out the chronology of global climate fluctuations by drilling the deep sea to get sedimentary cores and then looking at the oxygen isotope data that these contained at different depths. High levels of Oxygen-18 represent cold, glacial periods and low levels of Oxygen-18 represent warmer, wetter periods. Based on this, 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. Odd-numbered MIS stages are all warm and wet, while even-numbered MIS stages denote cold and dry glacial periods.

Toba supervolcanic eruption, the most violent volcanic eruption in the past two million years, thus leaving behind no genetic trace in today’s populations.

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.

The earliest evidence of Palaeolithic tools in India is from Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu, sixty-nine kilometres from Chennai, and dated to around 1.5 million years ago (that is, 1.2 million years before modern humans emerged). The Hunsgi–Baichbal valley in northern Karnataka (around 1.2 million years ago), the Middle Son valley in Madhya Pradesh, the Shivalik Hills in the outer Himalaya – the subcontinent is littered with evidence of the widespread presence of archaic humans much before modern humans set foot in the region or even evolved.

The suggestion that modern Indians carry a significant amount of west-Eurasian-related ancestry was unpalatable to many, probably because it seemed to support the long-standing theory that it was a migration of Steppe pastoralists from central Asia sometime within the last 4000 years that brought Indo-European languages, including an early version of Sanskrit, and related cultural practices and concepts to India. These Indo-European-language speakers called themselves Aryans, and for many in the right wing the idea that they came to India from elsewhere is unacceptable because they believe it would dethrone Sanskrit and the Vedas as the singular and fundamental source of Indian culture, as it would mean that the mighty Harappan Civilization that has left an indelible impression on Indian history and culture would have preceded their arrival. Reich describes the reaction to the findings of the research in his 2018 book, Who We Are and How We Got Here:

The remains of the three individuals from Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta were dated to between 3100 BCE and 2200 BCE. These individuals, in contrast to the rest, had between 14 and 42 per cent of their ancestry related to the First Indians and 58 to 86 per cent of their ancestry related to Iranian agriculturists. Since they had no Anatolian ancestry, it was clear to the researchers that they came from farther east since Anatolian ancestry keeps declining towards the east. That they had significant First Indian ancestry also suggested the same – that they came from the east, from the Harappan Civilization, and were migrants to Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta. In other words, the study showed that the Harappan population from around 3100–2200 BCE had part ancestry from the Zagros agriculturists, while there was no indication of a First Indian ancestry in the Zagros agriculturist ancient DNA dating to 7000–8000 BCE. The direction of migration, therefore, was clear. People had migrated from the Zagros region of Iran towards India.

Here’s a recap then of how these new findings add greater detail to what we already knew. As we saw earlier, genetic studies based on present-day haplogroups had suggested significant migrations that brought new lineages to India. And studies based on whole genome sequencing of present-day populations had shown that Indians today are a mixture of First Indians and populations that are closely related to present-day west Eurasians. But these studies could not conclusively answer questions involving the direction of migration. What the latest ancient DNA-based study has done is exactly that: given a definitive answer to the question of the direction of migration, while also providing a finer understanding of the multiple migrations that caused the affinity between present-day Indians and west Eurasians. We now know that there was a migration of Iranian agriculturists from the Zagros region to the Indus Valley. From the Swat samples, we also know there was a migration from the Steppe, which we will talk about in detail later.11

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 Iranian agriculturists. And we also know that the ancestry of ANI comes from First Indians (AASI), Iranian agriculturists 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.

The Uruk example

The need for religion

The moment of the enormous increase in the size of temples and their absolute predominance, when compared to domestic dwellings, corresponds clearly to the transition from the chiefdom to the early state.

The temple, or ‘the house of god’, as it was called, was now the predominant actor in Uruk, the central agency, in terms of owning a lot of the land, and with the ability to call upon the village communities and family units to provide it almost free labour in return for subsistence food.

Some of these Zagrosian migrants who reached south Asia may have remained herders to this day, like the Brahuis of Balochistan. They speak the Brahui language, which has been linguistically determined to be closely connected to Elamite. Other migrants from the Zagros may have settled down in places like Mehrgarh to become farmers, and both the herders and the farmers may have mixed with the existing population – the First Indians – at some point.

So the best guess we can make based on archaeological and genetic evidence is that a population of herders from the southern or central Zagros region, speakers of Proto-Elamite or a related language, migrated to south Asia sometime after 7000 BCE, mixed with the First Indians and this new, mixed population sparked an agricultural revolution in the north-western region of India and then went on to create the Harappan Civilization over the next few millennia.

What about Indo-European languages that today dominate the region that once belonged to the Harappan Civilization? Could not these languages have been spoken there during the Harappan period? We will come to that in chapter 4, but briefly, the generally accepted chronology for the spread of Indo-European languages around the world puts their arrival in south Asia only after 2000 BCE, when the Harappan Civilization was already in decline. This has been strongly supported by recent genetic studies based on ancient DNA which suggest that Steppe pastoralists, who took Indo-European languages to Europe, reached India only in the Late Harappan period, bringing with them an early version of Sanskrit and related cultural concepts and practices such as ritual sacrifices. Many of these practices and beliefs are reflected in the Vedas, especially the earliest one, the Rigveda. The newly arrived Indo-European-language speakers called themselves ‘Aryans’. What all of this means is that the Harappan Civilization had nothing to do with the ‘Aryans’ or Sanskrit or the Vedas, and was pre-‘Aryan’ or pre-Vedic. We will discuss this further in the next chapter.

The languages Indians speak fall into four major families – Dravidian, which is spoken by about a fifth of Indians and has no relatives outside of south Asia today; Indo-European, which is spoken by over three-quarters of Indians and is spread all the way from south Asia to Europe; Austroasiatic, which is spoken by about 1.2 per cent of Indians and is spread across south Asia and east Asia; and Tibeto-Burman, which is spread across south Asia, China and south-east Asia and is spoken by less than 1 per cent of Indians.

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 Zagros agriculturists, the Austroasiatic-language speakers and the Tibeto-Burman-language speakers. The wheels of history were turning, making a unique culture out of many different traditions, practices and belief systems. But there was one component yet missing: those who called themselves ‘Aryans’.

According to the classification made by David W. McAlpin, Proto-Zagrosian is the ancient language of south-western Iran that split into Proto-Elamitic and Proto-Dravidian, with Proto-Elamitic splitting further into Elamite and Brahui, and Proto-Dravidian splitting into Proto-Peninsular Dravidian, and Proto-North Dravidian.

The study says there was indeed a southward migration of pastoralists from the Kazakh Steppe – first towards southern central Asian regions, that is, present-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, after 2100 BCE; and then towards south Asia throughout the second millennium BCE (2000 BCE to 1000 BCE). On their way, they impacted the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC, a civilization that thrived between 2300 BCE and 1700 BCE, centred on the Oxus river and covering today’s northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and western Tajikistan), but mostly bypassed it to move further down towards south Asia. Here they mixed with the existing people of the Harappan Civilization, thus creating one of the two main sources of population in India today: Ancestral North Indians, or ANI, the other being Ancestral South Indians, or ASI, who were formed by the mixing of the people of the Harappan Civilization with the First Indians in southern India around the same time. The study arrived at these conclusions after detecting signals of the migrations in the ancient DNA. To quote: ‘Our analysis shows no evidence of Steppe pastoralist ancestry in groups surrounding BMAC sites prior to 2100 BCE, but suggests that between 2100 to 1700 BCE, the BMAC communities were surrounded by peoples carrying such ancestry.’ This shows there was a migration of the people of the Steppe to the BMAC region around 2100 BCE.

There’s more. Remember we said the present-day Indian population is a product of the mingling between the ANI [Harappans (First Indians + Zagros agriculturists) + Steppe pastoralists] and ASI (Harappans + First Indians)?

In south Asia, the incoming herders from Zagros mixed with the First Indians and went on to create the Harappan Civilization. Europe later saw the arrival of Steppe pastoralists who mixed with the local inhabitants to produce new population groups that created and/or spread the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and other cultures. 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.

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.

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.

Indo-Iranians are that branch of Indo-European-language-speaking Steppe pastoralists who called themselves ‘Aryans’ and migrated towards southern Asia, ultimately settling in Iran and India. Their culture and myths, as depicted in the Zend-Avesta, the primary religious text of Zoroastrianism, and the Rigveda, the earliest of the Sanskrit Vedas, are similar in many ways.

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].’

One can imagine two separate groups who had maintained their genetic distance for a long time suddenly deciding that enough was enough and starting to mix. But it is more difficult to visualize groups that had already been mixing waking up one day and deciding to put a stop to it, and creating barriers to continued intermixing. 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.

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.

Take, for example, our food habits. It is clear that north Indians and western Indians consume far more milk and milk products and far less meat and fish than east Indians or south Indians. Politicians and commentators often look at these differences as sociopolitical in nature. But these have a more foundational reason: genes. Or more specifically, a gene mutation called 13910T which originated in Europe some 7500 years ago. This gene allows the human body to digest milk beyond infancy, into adulthood. Homo sapiens are the only mammals in the world who have acquired this ability. This is not surprising because before humans figured out they could keep cattle or goats and exploit them for milk, such a mutation would have been unnecessary. But once they started domesticating cattle, the ability to digest milk as adults would have became tremendously useful, and a mutated gene that fit the bill was selected over time by evolution.

The best way we can define ourselves is as a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its traditions and its practices from a variety of heredities and migration histories. The Out of Africa migrants, the fearless pioneering explorers who reached this land around sixty-five millennia ago and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population; those who arrived from west Asia and contributed to the agricultural revolution and the building of the Harappan Civilization which then became the crucible for new practices, concepts and the Dravidian languages that enrich much of our culture today; those who came from east Asia, bringing with them new languages and plants and farming techniques; and those who migrated here from central Asia, carrying an early version of what would become a great language, Sanskrit, and all its associated beliefs and practices that have reshaped our society in fundamental ways; and those who came even later seeking refuge or for conquest or for trade, and then chose to stay – all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call Indian. We are all Indians. And we are all migrants.

However, the 2012 study’s findings that a long-term weakening of the monsoon is what caused the drying up of the Ghaggar–Hakra got a big thumbs-up in July 2018 when 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. This is significant because according to the ICS, the Meghalayan age 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. For the ICS to approve a classification