Mehrgarh

Fig.28 Mehrgarh painted pottery
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Introduction

By the 10th century BCE, Homo Sapiens had migrated to all the continents of the world. Agriculture had developed independently in various parts of the world. Emmer wheat and barley were grown in the Fertile Crescent (comprising Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria  and Western Iran) by about 9500 BCE.  Rice was cultivated in China around 6000 BCE.  There is evidence of potatoes, tomatoes and peanuts cultivation in South America in 9000 BCE.

In South Asia, the earliest evidence of agriculture was found in Mehrgarh  located in the province of Baluchistan in Pakistan.  Mehrgarh was discovered in 1976 by the French archaeologists Jean-Francois Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige. The earliest settlements in Mehrgarh are dated between 7500  BCE and 6000 BCE.  Initially Barley was cultivated in Mehrgarh with a smaller amount of wheat.

Mehrgarh is important because it is thought to be the forerunner of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Note  : The term "Arya" comes from Indo-Iranian languages. It was used in ancient Iran as a self identity and is related to the homeland of the Zoroastrians, "Airyanem Vaejah" mentioned in the holy book of the Zoroastrians, Avesta. Airyanem Vaejah is believed by Zoroastrians to be the place where Zarathustra, the founder of the religion received the religion from Ahura Mazda who is the creator of the religion.

The term Arya features prominently in the Vedas and is linked to Aryavarta, the land of the Aryas. The Rig Veda has several references to Arya which means "noble". Aryas are supposed to uphold Dharma and be righteous. In contrast Mlecchas are used to denote non-Aryans and Dasyus refers to troublemakers.

Background

Before analyzing the findings at Mehrgarh and other places, it is useful to know about two competing theories on the origins of Indians, Hinduism and Sanskrit. 

One theory postulates the "Out of India" or "Indigenous Aryan" theory. According to its supporters, Aryans originated in the Indian subcontinent. The Vedic civilization is given an older date than in the competing theory. They contend that the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was a Vedic civilization and that there has been a continuous unbroken Indian civilization stretching back to more than 10,000 years.  

The other theory states that the Indus Valley Civilization predates the beginning of the Vedic civilization. According to this theory, the mature Harappan phase of the IVC was from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. The late Harappan phase followed from 1900 BCE to 1300 BCE.  During the late Harappan phase, there was an influx of people from the Steppe region of Europe who had a genetic, cultural and linguistic influence on the people who lived in the area of the IVC. The Vedic civilization, starting with the Rig Veda, began around 1500 BCE, around the time the IVC was declining. The people of the IVC moved out to other parts of India, such as the Gangetic plain and south India. This theory, whose main theme is the migration of people from the Steppe,  is sometimes called the "Aryan migration" theory.

Note: The Steppe, or more precisely, the Pontic Steppe, extends from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. It spans northeastern Bulgaria, southern Romania, eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia. 

Critics of the Out of India theory include noted historian Romila Thapar, who says that "there is no scholar at this time seriously arguing for the indigenous origin of Aryans".  In his book, "Early Indians", Tony Joseph marshals evidence from archaeology, genetics and linguistics to state that "Out of India is out of the reckoning".

Critics of the Aryan migration theory include Subhash Kak, David Frawley and others. Some other critics of the theory see racist and colonial overtones in the Aryan migration theory which states that the Vedas and Sanskrit are influenced by the migration.

The evidence for both theories relied on Archaeology, linguistics and the study of ancient texts, such as the Vedas.  

Over the last 2 decades, scientists have managed to extract DNA from human fossils. With the advent of high throughput Next Generation Sequencing, the ability to clean up the DNA sequences where necessary and the availability of the complete Human Genome, a new area of research using ancient DNA (aDNA) has opened up. This has done much to bring clarity to the debate. 

Beginnings

Mehrgarh was continually occupied from about 7500 BCE to about 2500 BCE. The dates are obtained from stratigraphic evidence, radiocarbon dating and analyzing the artifacts found at the site. 

In his paper Jarrige mentions that  in the earliest fossils, the  tools found in Mehrgarh are Neolithic in nature and there is no evidence of ceramics. This is called the Mehrgarh Period 1  that lasted till about 5500 BCE.  Multi-roomed mud brick houses were found along with barley and wheat in the soil. Stone axes, ornaments and sea shells were found in the burial sites. Since Mehrgarh is not near the coast, this could be evidence of trading with coastal communities.  

The walls of the buildings had 2 rows of hand-molded thin mudbricks. They found buildings with multiple rooms - 2, 4, 6 and 10 rooms.  The walls were plastered with clay on the inside and outside. Some of the outside walls were colored in red. There were firepits with pebbles in them. These were used for cooking.  This method of cooking is apparently followed in Baluchistan to this day.

Buildings with larger number of rooms had no fireplaces in them. It is thought that these might have been  used for storage rather than for living. Barley accounted for 90% of the seed imprints with the rest being wheat. 

There is evidence of proto-dentistry from this period. Flint tips were used for drilling tooth enamel. Nine drilled molars were discovered in the fossils of nine adults. 

The II and III periods are dated 5500 BCE - 4800 BCE and 4800BCE - 3500 BCE respectively. Fossils from these two periods were found in different sites in Mehrgarh. Ceramics, dated around 6000 BCE,  were found in the fossils and there is evidence of cotton and copper usage, dated around 5300 BCE.  The use of copper shows a transition from Neolithic to the Chalcolithic era. 

About 2500 BCE, Mehrgarh was abandoned in favor of a new settlement called Nausharo, about 5 miles away.

Since H.Sapiens were already living in present day India, it is possible that the inhabitants of Mehrgarh were people who migrated westward from India. Another possibility would be for people from Iran to have migrated eastward to Mehrgarh. 

Fig. 32 Mehrgarh Ruins

Ashish_Premier, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Three Age System

• The Paleolithic (paleos - "old",  lithos - "stone") age  is a period in human history which refers to the use of stone tools. As mentioned in a previous section, stone tools have been used by Homo Erectus & Home Habilis for more than a million years. The Paleolithic age ends about 12,000 years ago. This was followed by the Mesolithic (Meso - "middle",  lithos - "stone") era. In Europe it lasted from about 13000 BCE 3000 BCE. In the Middle East, this lasted from ~18000 to 8000 BCE. Not all areas entered a particular age at the same time.  The final stone age is Neolithic  (Neo - "new ",  lithos - "stone") which ended about 1400 BCE

• The Chalcolithic age follows the Neolithic age. This refers to a period when Copper was smelted. Different parts of the world entered this age at different times. There is evidence of copper smelting in Siberia around 5000 BCE.  In the Middle East the age lasted from 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE. In South Asia, it lasted from 3500 BCE to ~1500 BCE.  A number of copper artifacts have been discovered from the Indus Valley civilization

• The Bronze age followed the Copper age and lasted from  ~3200 BCE to ~1200 BCE. The Bronze age civilizations such as the Sumerian Egyptian and Indus Valley civilizations were urban civilizations. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin and bronze artifacts have been found in several civilizations. 

• The Iron age followed the Bronze age. The Iron age started around 1500 BCE. 

The three age system - Stone, Bronze (starting with Copper) and Iron age - has been criticized by several anthropologists as Eurocentric and irrelevant with the discovery of radioactive dating that provides a way to precisely date artifacts.  In addition, regions "entered" the ages at different times and there is overlap between the ages. It has been included here to help understand the rest of this section. 

Origins of Mehrgarh

Three factors are considered for determining the origins of the residents of Mehrgarh - agriculture, archaeology and genetics.

Agriculture

There is evidence of agriculture in Gujarat around 3700 BCE and in southern and eastern India around 3000 BCE. In Malwa in Central India, agriculture developed around 2700 BCE. All of these are later than the evidence for Mehrgarh. However there is evidence of agriculture in Lahuradewa in Uttar Pradesh dated to 7000 BCE. Here rice was harvested but not barley or wheat.  When agriculture is considered as a metric, the people of Mehrgarh may not have come from present day India. Jarrige points out that agriculture might have developed independently in Mehrgarh and not necessarily come entirely from the Zagros mountains or from India.

Archaeology

According to Jarrige, there are similarities between the discoveries in Mehrgarh and the excavated remains in present day Iran. At Ganj Dareh and Ali Kosh at the foothills of the Zagros mountains in Iran, archaeologists have found the same kind of quadrangular houses made of narrow bricks, 60 cms long with finger marks for the mortar. Circular firepits with pebbles were found similar to what has been found in Mehrgarh. Red paint has been found in the outer walls. A few graves in Ali Kosh have skeletons placed in positions similar to what has been found in Mehrgarh. Ornaments made of sea shells and stones, copper beads and baskets coated with bitumen are other similarities between these sites and Mehrgarh. 

Remains of big multi-cellular granaries have been found in all three sites - Ganj Dareh, Ali Kosh and Mehrgarh. 

Archaeological evidence suggest that Mehrgarh was populated by people who migrated east from the foothills of the Zagros mountains in present day Iran.

Genetics

Two papers were published in 2019 that have done much to give us a better understanding of the origins of Indians. The first paper published in Science in September 2019 was titled, "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia". The lead author was Vagheesh Narasimhan who was with the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. The paper had over 100 authors including well known experts in the field of Archaeology and Genetics such as David Reich, Vasant Shinde, Kumaraswamy Thangaraj, etc. 

Another paper published in October 2019 in Cell was titled, "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers". The senior author was Vasant Shinde and it had some of the same authors as the previous paper. 

Terminology

1. The term "herders" refers to people who domesticated animals but did not cultivate crops; "farmers" refers to people who cultivated crops and probably herded animals

2.  Yamnaya were a nomadic pastoralist culture from the late Copper early Bronze age who lived in the Steppe region of Europe. They were originally from the eastern Steppe which is in present day Ukraine and Russia. They are dated between 3200 BCE to 2600 BCE.  It is believed that they were the first to domesticate horses and ride horse driven chariots

3. Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) is a Bronze age civilization primarily in Margiana which is in present day Turkmenistan. There are a few sites in southern Uzbekistan and one site in Northern Afghanistan. 

4. The paper by Narasimhan et.al., uses the term Andaman Hunter Gatherers (AHG). AHG refers to present day indigenous Andaman Islanders who, the authors hypothesize, are related to unsampled indigenous South Asians (Ancient Ancestral South Indians - AASI). In the book, "The Early Indians" by Tony Joseph, they are called the "First Indians"

5. Ancestral South Indians - ASI. ASI derive their ancestry from First Indians (aka AHG or AASI) and Iranian herders and/or hunter-gatherers

6. Ancestral North Indians - ANI. ANI derive their ancestry from First Indians, Iranian herders and/or hunter-gatherers and Steppe pastoralists

7. Cline - In anthropology, a cline refers to a gradual change in a biological characteristic. An example is skin colour that is darker near the equator and becomes lighter as we move North or South into the tropical and temperate zones

8. Indus Periphery Cline - The region consisting of Gonur in BMAC, Shahr-i-Sokhta in Iran and Swat and Chitral districts of Pakistan. There is little or no Anatolian ancestry in this cline

9. IVC - Indus Valley Civilization

10. Indo-European languages - These are languages that are spoken in most of Europe, the Iranian plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent. It includes Italian, German, French, English, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi etc.

11. Indo-Iranian languages - This is a subset of Indo-European languages and includes Indo-Aryan languages and Iranian. Iranian languages includes Avestan (language of the Zoroastrians), Persian, Kurdish, Pashto etc.

12. Indo-Aryan languages - The languages spoken in North India, Northwest India, Bengal and Sri Lanka. This includes Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, SIndhi and Sinhalese. The oldest known Indo Aryan language is Vedic Sanskrit of the Rig Veda. 

Ancient Ancestral South Indians

The section on Paleogenetics discussed the most recent migration of Homo Sapiens out of East Africa about 60,000 to 75,000 years ago. They crossed the Bab-El-Mandeb to present day Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. They headed north into present day Iraq and traveled via Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan into present day India. 

People might have lived in India at an earlier time period. Excavations in Jwalapuram in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India have uncovered stone tools below a layer of volcanic ash from the Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago. It appears that humans lived in India before the Toba eruption. However no human fossils have been discovered and it is not clear if they were Homo Sapiens or an earlier species such as Homo Erectus. Another study in Jwalapuram has unccovered human fossils dated to 35,000 years ago. Excavations in Dhaba in Central India show stone tools dated to 80,000 years ago. People who lived in India tens of thousands of years ago are called Ancient Ancestral South Indians - AASI

The Formation of Human populations in South and Central Asia by Narasimhan et al

Dataset

• DNA was analyzed from 523 individuals from three regions along with 19 previously sequenced data. The following table shows the regions, number of samples and the date of the samples obtained from radiocarbon dating.

• The libraries created for DNA sequencing using equipment from Illumina had 1.2 million overlapping SNPs

• Previously reported data was added to the dataset to bring the total number of samples to 837

•  The dataset was filtered so that the genomic data of the individuals that had at least 15,000 of the targeted SNPs was chosen. This left 92% of the data. 

• The median number of SNPs analyzed per individual was ~617000

• This data was merged with whole genomic sequence data from 686 present day individuals

• The data was co-analyzed with 1,789 present-day people from 246 ethnographically-distinct groups in South Asia genotyped at ~600,000 SNPs  

• The samples were grouped based on archaeological and chronological information obtained by radiocarbon dating of 269 skeletal remains

Summary of the Results

Indians today derive their ancestry from two groups - Ancestral South Indians (ASI) and Ancestral North Indians. Ancestral South Indians have an ancestry from the First Indians (also known as Ancient Ancestral South Indians - AASI) and Iranian hunter gatherers and/or herders. Ancestral North Indians have a mix of First Indians, Iranian hunter gatherers and/or herders and pastoralists from the Steppe region. Around the time of the decline of the IVC after the mature Harappan phase (2600 - 1900 BCE), people from the Steppe region arrived in present day Pakistan and Northwest India between 1900 BCE and 1500 BCE. It is postulated that Indo European languages in South Asia spread from the Steppe and not from the Iranian plateau. 

People of the IVC moved south and east after the mature Harappan phase and mixed with groups that had lived in South India at that time (which would have been the AASI). The people from the IVC would have brought a proto Dravidian language with them. There are similarities in the languages in Southern India (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam) and the Brahui language in Baluchistan.

Over a period of time, South Indian languages were influenced by the Sanskrit language and have incorporated some of it into their language. 

People in North India have a significant amount (20%) of Steppe genes, especially among certain castes like Brahmins and Bhumihars. Steppe ancestry is absent among certain populations in South India such as the Palliyar tribe in TN. Based on the evidence, it is proposed that some populations in S. India have ancestry from the residents of the IVC who moved south before the people from the Steppe migrated into the IVC area.

Data Analysis

• 8th and 9th millennium BCE herders from the Zagros mountains of Iran had a distinctive West Eurasian profile. Later groups had a mix of West Eurasian and early Anatolian (present day Turkey) ancestry. 

• In the Copper and Bronze age, there is decreasing Anatolian ancestry as we move from west to east - 70% in Anatolia, 31% in eastern Iran and 7% in far eastern Turan. In addition, there is a small amount of West Siberian hunter gatherers ancestry.

• The genome data from 84 individuals who lived in the BMAC area between 3000 - 1400 BCE had early Iranian farmer related ancestry (60-65%) and Anatolian farmer ancestry (20-25%). Based on the high ratio of Anatolian farmer ancestry to Iranian farmer ancestry, the authors conclude that the people who lived in BMAC are not a major source of ancestry for South Asians.  Studies have shown that South Asians have minimal Anatolian ancestry.

• Pastoralists from the Steppe arrived in Turan by about 2100 BCE. By this time the Mehrgarh area had been abandoned and the IVC was in the middle of its mature Harappan phase

• The study had access to DNA from 11 fossils - 3 with radiocarbon dates between 2500–2000 BCE from the BMAC site of Gonur in present day Turkmenistan, and 8 with radiocarbon dates or archaeological context dates between 3300 BCE to 2000 BCE from the eastern Iranian site of Shahr-i-Sokhta in present day Iran. The paper states that "the 11 outliers  fit as a primary source of ancestry for 86 ancient individuals from post-IVC cultures living near the headwaters of the Indus River ~1200–800 BCE as well as diverse present-day South Asians". They arrived at these conclusions based on the following -

  • The 11 individuals had 11-50% of Andamanese Hunter Gatherer (AHG or First Indians) ancestry and 89-50% of Iranian farmers and Western Siberian Hunter Gatherers. The other fossils at the site carried 20-25% Anatolian ancestry and 60-65% Iranian farmers ancestry. Hence the 11 individuals were considered outliers

  • The individuals had no detectable Anatolian farmer-related ancestry which is similar to the low or no Anatolian ancestry for people in South Asia

  • Two carried Y chromosome haplogroup H1a1d2 which today is primarily found in southern India.  

  • The individuals were dated to the time frame of the mature Harappan period of 2600 - 1900 BCE

  •  The individuals at Shahr-i-Sokhta were buried with artifacts stylistically linked to Baluchistan in South Asia whereas burials associated with the other ancestries did not have these linkages   

  • Iranian farmers and First Indians were in contact well before the Indus Valley Civilization

• Before 2000 BCE, the people represented by the 11 outliers (and who are the primary ancestry for 86 individuals who lived in 1200-800 BCE near the Indus) are a mixture of First Indians (or AASI or AHG) and Iranians. At the west end of the Indus Periphery Cline, they have mostly Iranian farmer ancestry; at the east end, they have mostly First Indian ancestry. This means that most people of the IVC had this ancestry (Remember that the mature phase of the IVC was between 2600-1900 BCE). 

• After 2000 BCE, represented by 117 individuals dated between 1400 BCE and 1700 CE in the Swat and Chitral districts of Pakistan, there is a 59% contribution from the Indus Periphery Cline and 41% from the Steppe. This represents a period after the IVC. There is increasing Steppe ancestry in this period. This is the Steppe Cline

• Today's Indians are a mixture of two populations - Ancestral North Indians (comprising First Indians (AASI), Iranian farmers and Steppe pastoralists) and Ancestral South Indians (comprising First Indians and Iranian farmers).  This is the Modern Indian cline. Notice that the ancestry of ASI is similar to that for the people of the IVC. There is no ancient DNA data from either ASI or ANI. The authors have modeled the formation of the ANI and ASI.  This is explained in detail in the paper. There are several tribes in South India that have no Steppe ancestry. Examples include the Palliyar tribe in the state of Tamil Nadu and the Kurchas tribe in the state of Kerala. This paper examines this topic in detail.

• The authors state that individuals with the Steppe ancestry arrived in the Swat district of Pakistan between 1900 - 1500 BCE. This is around the time the mature Harappan phase started to decline and moved away from the Indus Valley. 

• Steppe ancestry in Indians is primarily derived from males and is disproportionately higher in certain groups like Brahmins and Bhumihars. Brahmins are traditionally of the priestly class and have been known to read, write and speak Sanskrit for millennia. Due to strong endogamy (marrying within the same class or caste) in the Brahmin community, this high percentage of Steppe ancestry exists to this day among Brahmins. This also suggests a Steppe origin for India's Indo-European languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi etc. which are derived from Sanskrit

• The authors believe that Indo Aryan languages owe their origins to Proto-Indo-European language spoken in the Steppe region. However there is an alternative theory that Indo-European languages have a Anatolian (present day Turkey) origin

The figure below shows the spread of the Yamnaya ancestry from the Steppe to Europe and South Asia. This is from the bioRxiv preprint published in March 2018 under the title "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia" by Vagheesh Narasimhan et al.
An updated diagram titled "Ancestry Transformations in Holocene Eurasia"  in the paper by Narasimhan et al.  is available here.
It is not shown here for copyright reasons. 

Fig. 35 The Yamnaya Migration
from The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia  Courtesy - Vagheesh Narasimhan et al  CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License

An Ancient Harappan Genome lacks ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers by Vasant Shinde et al

Dataset

The DNA data for this study was obtained from 61 skeletal samples that was excavated from Rakhigarhi in Haryana. The area  has been dated to 2800-2300 BCE which is in the middle of the mature Harappan  phase. As in the previous study, libraries were created and enriched both for mtDNA and nuclear DNA to obtain sequence overlap and the targeted ~3000 nuclear positions. The DNA libraries had ~1.2 million SNPs and mapped to mtDNA rsrs (Reconstructed Sapiens Reference Sequence) and human reference genome hg19. The most promising sample,  which had the genetic identification code I6113, was determined to be a female. 68 libraries were chosen and they had 86,440 common SNPs. When data was restricted to those that showed cytosine to thymine mismatch, which is characteristic of ancient DNA, the resulting data had 31,760 SNPs.

The mtDNA haplogroup was found to be U2b2. This is absent from mtDNA sequences from ancient Central Asians but today is exclusive to South Asia.  

Summary of the results

It was found that the genetic makeup of I6113 was similar to the 11 outliers found in Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta described in the previous section. All of them had a mixture of ancestry related to ancient Iranians and tribal South Indians (AASI). This suggests that the ancestry of the inhabitants of the IVC was the same. The authors state, "it is reasonable to conclude that the individual I6613's ancestry profile was widespread among people of the IVC at sites like Rakhigarhi and it supports the conjecture that the 11 outlier individuals in the Indus Periphery Cline are migrants from IVC living in non-IVC towns". The authors group the 12 individuals into a new genetic gradient called the IVC cline. 

The samples had no Steppe pastoralist related ancestry. This is an important finding because Steppe ancestry is widespread in South Asia. It means that pastoralists from the Steppe arrived in India after the mature phase of the IVC. Comparing with samples from other areas of Iran, the authors conclude that the ancestry of the IVC cline was a mixture of Iranians before they took to farming (87%) and 13% from Southeast Asian hunter gatherers. These have been called AASI in the other paper. Therefore farming in South Asia may not be due to the eastward migration of farmers from the Zagros mountains of Iran but could have developed in South Asia without large scale migration. This is in line with the hypothesis by Jarrige that agriculture might have developed independently in Mehrgarh and not come entirely from the Zagros mountains of Iran. There is a theory that Mehrgarh was the forerunner of the IVC and agriculture in the IVC may have come from the people of Mehrgarh.

Most Indians today have Harappan ancestry. 

Another conclusion is on the origins of Indo-European languages. Since there is negligible Anatolian ancestry among IVC and present day South Asians, and language spread is associated with large scale people movement, there is a low probability for an Anatolian origin for Indo European languages.  The data suggests a Steppe origin for Indo European languages. It spread from Eastern Europe via Central Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE (2000 - 1500 BCE).  They write, "The fact that the Steppe pastoralist ancestry in South Asia matches that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe ... provides additional evidence for this theory, as it elegantly explains the distinctive shared distinctive features of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages." This is in agreement with the conclusion in the other paper.

The authors add a note of caution at the end. A single sample or the 12 samples from the IVC  cline "cannot characterize a cosmopolitan ancient civilization."

Timeline

Radiocarbon and other types of absolute dating have enabled anthropologists to date fossils with a high degree of accuracy. However these dates are not exact and might vary by a few or hundreds of years. 

The following diagram shows the timeline from 10000 BCE along with events relevant to this discussion. 

Stone, Copper and Bronze articles continue to be manufactured to this day. The end date for an age signifies that another age has come into play. For example, when Copper age is shown a range from 3500 to 1500 BCE, it means the Bronze age and the Iron age have started by 1500 BCE.

Fig. 37 The peopling of Mehrgarh, IVC and the Vedic civilizations

Conclusions

The analysis of ancient DNA by Narasimhan et al., and Shinde et al., shows the following -

1. The residents of the mature Harappan phase (2600 - 1900 BCE) have ancestry from Iranians (before they started agriculture) and Andamanese Hunter Gatherers aka Ancient Ancestral South Indians who have lived in India from before the Holocene epoch that started in 9700 BCE. They have no Steppe ancestry

2. Steppe pastoralists arrived in South Asia between 2000 - 1500 BCE. They influenced religion, cultural practices and the Sanskrit language in South Asia. This conclusion had been arrived at previously based on linguistics as well. Sanskrit is considered to be the oldest Indo Aryan language and has similarity with Latin and Greek. All of them have 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neutral), three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and seven syntactic cases. One of the first persons to notice the link between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek was William Jones, a British judge in India. In a talk to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1786, he said, "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists ..."

3. Farming in South Asia might have developed independently without the migration of farmers from the Zagros mountains of Iran

4. Indians today derive their ancestry from two branches - Ancestral South Indians and Ancestral North Indians. Ancestral South Indians derive their ancestry from AASI and early Iranians before they started farming which is the same ancestry as those who lived in the mature Harappan phase. The paper in Cell makes this clear in the title. Ancestral North Indians derive their ancestry from AASI, early Iranians and pastoralists from the Steppe. Steppe ancestry is highest among the Brahmin caste who traditionally belong to the priestly class and considered to be the speakers, propagators and guardians of Sanskrit. This lends credence to the theory that Sanskrit started and/or developed due to the migration from the Steppe

At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed Mehrgarh and its origins. Archaeology suggests that they arrived from the Zagros mountains of Iran. The paper in Cell shows that Iranian herders from around 8000 BCE had no Anatolian ancestry. It is possible that Iranian herders who migrated to Mehrgarh, started a civilization and several millennia later moved to Nowshera and surrounding areas which gave rise to the Indus Valley Civilization. This theory is bolstered by the fact that the people of the IVC had no Anatolian ancestry.

References

1. History of Agriculture

2. Agriculture in ancient Asia

3. Mehrgarh Neolithic Jean-Francois Jarrige

4. The Formation of Human Populations in Central and South Asia - Narasimhan et al.

5.  An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers - Shinde et al. 

6. 4600-year-old-woman-from-rakhigarhi

7. Interview with Vagheesh Narasimhan

8. Radiocarbon dating : Results S.Kusumgar et al

See Also

• Early Indians by Tony Joseph Ch.2 - The First Farmers

• The origin of early Harappan Cultures 

• The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents

• A Burst of Clues to South Asians Genetic Ancestry

• HOLISTIC APPROACH TO DATING IN ANCIENT HISTORY ESPECIALLY INDIAN HISTORY 

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