All of us learnt at school about the Indus Valley civilisation, their mysterious disappearance and the never-ending debate about Indians are people indigenous to the sub-continent or descendants of people from elsewhere. This long read in Aeon recasts this age old debate in a very original way. The author, Kiran Kumbar, is a historian, writer, and public health expert. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, US.
Dr Kumbar introduces us to the genetic studies of Indians which began being published from 1970 onwards. These he says began reframing our thinking of our past: “The edited collection The Indian Human Heritage (1998) was an early work to make substantial historical claims using genetic evidence, in a chapter called ‘Peopling of India’ by Madhav Gadgil and colleagues. A collaborative effort between the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and Stanford University in California, it was based on mitochondrial DNA (‘mtDNA’) analysis of 101 individuals. It dated the arrival of Homo sapiens in South Asia to about 65,000-50,000 years ago, and argued that certain tribal groups ‘may be amongst the first group of Homo sapiens to have reached India’. Another study concluded that contemporary Indian tribal people were ‘descendants of the initial [Homo sapiens] settlers’, and a 2008 study said that the ‘tribes of [the] southern and eastern region along with Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic speakers of central India are the modern representatives of earliest settlers of subcontinent.’”
Then Dr Kumbar informs us that our ancestors were fairly aggressive people insofar as they displaced other hominins from ancient India: “…modern Homo sapiens arrived first in the subcontinent about 65,000-50,000 years ago, they would have found the region already inhabited by other human species, whom we now term hominins. Over time, the hominin population declined and that of modern humans increased, so much so that ‘between approximately 45 and 20 thousand years ago most of humanity lived in Southern Asia’…
As the centuries and millennia went by, these early humans of South Asia developed art forms like ornamental ostrich eggshell beads dating 40,000 to 25,000 years ago, and exquisite rock art dating to 12,000 years ago. These hunter-gatherer people – the descendants of the earliest modern humans in the subcontinent – were labelled as ‘First Indians’ by the Indian journalist Tony Joseph in his celebrated book Early Indians (2018). In this essay I will use that label with a minor change, and call these early residents the ‘First South Asians’. Genetic scientists say that, today, almost all people in South Asia carry this ‘First South Asians’ ancestry in their genomes to varying degrees, with tribal groups possessing more of it than others.”
And then Dr Kumbar introduces a novel twist – it seems that for tens of thousands of years our ancestors travelled in and out of the sub-continent thus blurring the distinction between who is an Indian and who is, say, a Central Asian: “Research from 2019 led by Vagheesh M Narasimhan at Harvard found that, around 7500 BCE, people from the Zagros mountain region of present-day Iran began moving to northwest South Asia. These people practised agriculture (perhaps in addition to hunting and gathering), and they either introduced farming to the First South Asians (who by now had spread across the subcontinent), or blended their agricultural practices with the farming that the latter perhaps had already been doing. Agriculture then thrived in northern South Asia for centuries, ultimately leading to the early stages of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which was kickstarted around 3500 BCE by the descendants of this mixture of Zagros-Iranian migrants and First South Asians.
When the Harappan cities went into decline after around 1900 BCE, their residents migrated eastward and southward, into regions where the First South Asians were still around. This resulted in another mixture: migrating Harappan people (who carried some Zagros-Iranian ancestry) mixing with First South Asians, giving rise to the Ancestral South Indian population. Narasimhan and colleagues have found a ‘strong correlation between ASI (Ancestral South Indian) ancestry and present-day Dravidian languages’, while Reich and colleagues argued that the ASI people ‘may have spoken a Dravidian language before mixing with the ANI (Ancestral North Indian)’.
From the vantage point of today, the 2000-1000 BCE time period looks extremely dynamic with regard to demographic and cultural changes in the subcontinent. The Harappans were leaving their cities and moving around, the First South Asians were mixing with the Harappans and learning new languages and agriculture-related practices and, in the middle of all this, new migrants were moving in from the east as well as the northwest. Those in the east were the bearers of the Austroasiatic language family, and mixed with the First South Asians and the Ancestral South Indians depending on local demographics. The descendants of this mixture – which include people of the Munda tribal groups like Jaipal Singh Munda – now reside primarily in eastern and central India.
The migrants coming in from the northwest were the bearers of the Indo-European language family. They were descendants of pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe region, an ancestry that ‘matches that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe … [and hence] elegantly explains the shared distinctive features of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages.’ On their arrival in the northwest of the subcontinent, these Steppe-origin people – ie, the Aryan people of 19th-century historical narratives – encountered the Harappans, and the mixture of those two groups resulted in the formation of what is called the Ancestral North Indian population.”
Given these incredibly fluid origins of our ancestors, only the most idle mind would want to pigeonhole them into a little cubby hole of exclusively local origins.
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