The Origins of Indians

Introduction

The study of the origin of humans, their ancestors and the peopling of the world is an area of research that has seen much progress over the last 50 years. The research involved archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and dating of fossils. By 2003, the Human Genome Project had sequenced 90% of the human genome. The ability to extract DNA from human fossils, analyze them and compare them to the human genome has added clarity to the discussion.  This website will focus on the origins of the people of India. 

Abstract

Over the last few decades, two schools of thought have developed about the origins of Indians.  The Out of India theory postulates that Indians have lived here for a very long time and migrations have happened from India to other regions. They believe that Hinduism, Sanskrit and the Vedas originated in India and there were no external influences that shaped them.

The competing theory, sometimes called the Aryan migration theory, states that there has been an influx of people from other regions, most notably from the Zagros mountains in present day Iran and from the Steppe region of Central Europe. They brought with them cultural and religious practices and influenced languages. In this theory, Indians are not entirely indigenous but have a mixed ancestry.

This website will look at the evidence to determine which of these theories has a scientific basis. 

The website is organised as follows -

The chapter titled Out of Africa touches upon the migration of a group of Homo Sapiens out of Africa about 65,000 years ago. There is scientific evidence that shows that every person living outside Africa can trace his or her ancestry to this group of migrants. There have been other migrations from Africa prior to this one. Groups of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo Erectus also migrated out of Africa and populated Eurasia. All these species are now extinct and Homo Sapiens is the only species left on Earth.

The evolution of the genus Homo starts with a brief summary of the discovery of a fossil of the species Australopithecus Afarensis. This fossil, called Lucy, made news around the world because it was, at the time of its discovery in 1974, the oldest biped that had been found.  The fossil is about 3.2 million years old. Lucy is considered as an ape that could walk on two legs. It belong to the genus Australopithecus. 

The rest of the chapter is focused on  Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus and Neanderthals. This is the chronological order in which the genus evolved. 

The chapter on Dating of Fossils describes the methods used to date fossils. It explains both relative and absolute dating methods.

Paleogenetics introduces chromosomes, DNA and haplogroups and their use to trace ancestry. The Y-haplogroups and mtDNA haplogroups can be used to trace patrilineal and matrilineal ancestry. They have been used to discover the routes taken by Homo Sapiens to migrate to all the continents of the world after they emerged from Africa. 

These 4 chapters provide the background for the rest of the contents.

Mehrgarh is a place in present day Pakistan that was the site of a civilization that evolved into the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC).  This chapter looks at two papers from 2019, one in Science and one in Cell, that has brought much clarity to the discussion. The authors analyze DNA from fossils to show that there was a migration of people from the Steppe region into the region of the IVC. This migration has given some Indians ancestry from the people of the Steppe.  The fossils from the Indus Valley Civilization shows no Steppe ancestry. These two papers are at the heart of this discussion.

Indus Valley Civilization provides a brief overview of the IVC, the attempts to decipher its script and the similarities between the IVC script and those found in pottery excavated from Keeladi in the state of Tamil Nadu, several thousands kilometers away.

The final chapter titled, Indigenous or Mixed, collates all the evidence to show that the Out of India theory has no scientific basis. The evidence shows that there have been two large scale migrations into India - one from the Zagros mountains of Iran from about 10,000 years ago and the other from the Pontic Steppe region of Central Europe about 3500 years ago. Both these migrations have influenced the culture, religion and languages of India. Indians today have a mix of ancestry from Ancient Ancestral South Indians, who are the people who have been living in India from the Out of Africa migration 65,000 years ago, hunter gatherers from Iran and the people of the Steppe. 

This website has benefited from various sources. These include (but is not limited to) the book "Early Indians" by Tony Joseph, two papers published in September 2019 in the journals Science and Cell and various other sources on the Web. References have been provided throughout this website. If there are any omissions or mistakes in the references, please send a mail to the address at the bottom of this page. 

This is, and will always be, a work-in-progress.  Comments and questions are welcome. Please keep them civil, relevant and scientific in nature.

If there are is any text, photos or graphs that violate copyright, please send a mail to the address below with the correct attribution. 

This page has been created solely for educational purposes. There is no commercial aspect to this page. Feel free to refer in your website or book. 

This website is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International  license

References

1. Early Indians by Tony Joseph

2. Lucy The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey

3. Who we are and how we got here by David Reich

See Also

• First People of the Indian subcontinent

• Review of Early Indians 

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