Tony Joseph

The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

Early Indians

Shrini S

** spoiler alert **
           We now know that large portions of European populations were replaced not once but twice within the last 10,000 years. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

The genetic term for this is recombination and what this means is that each parent randomly shuffles and divides the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes they inherited from their own parents and then passes on only one set of twenty-three chromosomes to their child.

Where the parallel breaks is in the fact that while both men and women carry mtDNA, only men carry the Y chromosome. 

That all people outside of Africa are descended from a single African woman who originated the L3 mtDNA haplogroup! 

Currently we are in MIS 1, a warm, wetter period that began about 14,000 years ago and is still continuing. 

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 Africans of today are exactly as removed from the earliest modern humans as we are, and have gone through similar levels of mutation and change as the rest of humanity. 
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 

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. 

The hotspot of the earliest experiments in agriculture in south Asia is a village today called Mehrgarh, located at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan in modern-day Pakistan. 

For example, their seeds no longer shatter when ripe, and they germinate far more easily and are larger.

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 ancient individuals came from many regions and periods: Iran and Turan, an old term for the region that includes Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (5600–1200 BCE); the Steppe east of the Ural mountains, including Kazakhstan (4799–1000 BCE); and the Swat valley of Pakistan (1200 BCE to 1 CE). 

It found that an Iranian agriculturist population from around the Zagros region had contributed significantly to the ancestry of the ‘Indus Periphery’ population at least by between 4700 BCE and 3000 BCE. 

It took nearly 5000 years for the seeds that were planted – literally – in the Kacchi plain of Balochistan around 7000 BCE to grow into the mighty tree that was the Harappan Civilization between 2600 and 1900 BCE. 

The Harappan Civilization is also likely to have had the largest population of any contemporary civilization – which is not surprising, considering that we were the largest modern human population even as far back as 20,000 years ago, 

The first ‘city’ in the world by this definition would be Uruk in Lower Mesopotamia – perhaps better known as the capital city of Gilgamesh, the mythic hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh. At the height of its power, around 3200 BCE, Uruk would have had tens of thousands of people within its walls, much like Harappa or Mohenjo-daro around 2600 BCE. 

Therefore, it is likely that at least during the Mature Harappan period, when there was a high degree of standardization in general, there was one language that was predominantly used, perhaps for administrative, trade and legal purposes.

A serious candidate for this would be Elamite, the language of a people who built one of the most powerful and intermittently persistent kingdoms in the area covering central and southern Zagros mountains, as also the plains of Khuzistan and the Persian Gulf coast in today’s Iran. 

Linguistic research that shows the close connection between the Dravidian languages of India and Elamite. 

The reasoning is straightforward: the word ‘tal’ exists in both Elamite and Proto-Dravidian, but with different meanings. In Elamite, it means ‘write’; in Proto-Dravidian, it means ‘push in’. 

We saw there was one plant that was imported from the Harappan Civilization to Mesopotamia: sesame. Remarkably, the name of this oilseed is the same in Akkadian and in many Dravidian languages of south India today: ellu. 

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. 

In fact, there is reason to think Dravidian languages may have reached south India perhaps as early as around 2800 BCE, even before the Mature Harappan period began in 2600 BCE. 

Genetic studies have confirmed that they come from a single ethnic group that left north-western India (the regions of Punjab, Sindh, Rajasthan and Haryana) some 1500 years ago – long after Indo-European languages became well established in Europe and elsewhere. 

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. 

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. 

Interestingly, the only indigenous non-Indo-European language left standing in western Europe today, Basque, is spoken in a region that withstood the massive Steppe migrations into Europe. 
‘Hydroclimatic stress increased the vulnerability of agricultural production supporting Harappan urbanism, leading to settlement downsizing, diversification of crops, and a drastic increase in settlements in the moister monsoon regions of the upper Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.’ 

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’. 

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

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.

The first Indian empire, that of the Mauryas (322–180 BCE), had also arisen in this region, outside of the closely defined Aryavarta. This was the region called Magadha that gave rise to both Jainism and Buddhism between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE. 

Somewhere between the composition of the Mahabhasya and the Manusmriti, the ideology of Magadha had perhaps changed enough for the elite of Aryavarta to consider it as their own. 

‘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.’ 

But the European mutation 13910T is of particular interest to us because most Indians who have the ability to consume milk as adults carry this European version.

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

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