Ancient DNA from India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site is telling volumes about the destiny of the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization.
Around 3000 BC, Neolithic hunters in northern Scotland began settling into new sedentary lifestyles and erected vast stone circles and burial chambers, while in Egypt at this time the first pyramids were built. Meanwhile, the Harappans of South Asia, better known as the Indus Valley Civilization , erected massive brick housing complexes connected with extensive canal systems , yet hardly anything was known of the actual people, until now.
At its peak the civilization covered northwestern India and parts of eastern Pakistan and besides ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia it was one of the world’s first urban agricultural societies with five cities holding a population of between 1 million and 5 million. The series of collapses of ancient Egyptian dynasties is relatively well known, but the causes of the fall of the Harappan civilization around 1700 BC are much less understood, and that’s why this new genome research of an ancient Harappan is making the headlines.
Hot Climates Scorch Scientists Efforts
The team of researchers, led by geneticist David Reich from Harvard University and archaeologist Vasant Shinde at Deccan College in Pune, India, published their new study on Cell, based on studies at the Indus site known as Rakhigarhi, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Delhi. “More than 60 skeletal pieces, including numerous petrous bones” were tested before the scientists successfully found and extracted a sample of ancient DNA, according to the scientists report.
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
An article in Science Mag explains that the region’s hot climate quickly degrades genetic material and while hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed in the Indus Valley this is the first one to hold valuable DNA, which the report says was sequenced more than 100 times to piece together what was called a “relatively complete genome”. Reich said, “There’s no doubt this is the most intensive effort we’ve ever made to get ancient DNA from a single sample.” While the findings say little about ‘why’ the society collapsed a new story is revealed about its continuing genetic legacy in modern Indians.
5,000-Year-Old Harappan Migrants
The DNA was sampled from an individual that was most likely female, who was found buried among dozens of ceramic bowls and vases dated to between 2800 and 2300 BC. Her genome closely matched DNA samples from 11 other individuals who had been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, with whom the Harrapans traded. Because the 11 individuals had ”little in common genetically with others buried in their regions,” Reich and researchers concluded that they were most likely Harappan migrants .
The Helpful Harappan Explains How Ancient Indus Valley Technology Could Solve Many of Today’s Problems
Archaeologists may have located ancient port dating back 4,500 years in Goa
Ancient City of Mohenjo Daro Has Survived 5 Millennia but May Disappear in 2 Decades
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use)
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use )
The researchers next compared these genetic signatures against DNA from ancient Eurasians as well as modern populations and the researchers made an ‘Indus family tree’ which reveals in its bowers that “genetic stock from the ancient Harrapan civilization can be found in most of today’s Indian population ”, according to the report in Cell.
Ancient Origins of Harappans Rewritten
What’s more, the paper also says that modern people from north India have “the genetic marks” of Harappans having interbreed with animal herders living on the Eurasian steppe , “moving southward around 2000 BC”. And explaining the once-perplexing genetic link between Europeans and South Asians those steppe herders must have carried European DNA, from previous interbreeding events, and over the next three millennia the groups in north and south India intermixed, leading to the current population’s “complex ancestral mix”.
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
A side observation which excites scientists provides new answers for why ancient Iranian DNA is found in modern South Asians, and how agriculture got to the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the current belief that the world’s first farmers emerged from what is today Iran, about 10,000 years ago, and integrated with South Asian hunter-gatherers, the new study suggests the Iranian-related DNA “predates the rise of agriculture in Iran by some 2000 years”.
This means ancient Iranian DNA came from “interbreeding with 12,000-year-old hunter-gatherers, not more recent farmers”, Reich explains in the paper. All this, from one tiny sample of DNA.
A 4,500-old woman from Rakhigarhi spoke this week, and made Indians ask ‘Who are we?’
New DNA study results from Rakhigarhi remains set off a debate about Indian history, politics, and British colonialism online.
Awoman’s skeleton from 2500 BC has finally spoken. A team of Indian and international scientists and archaeologists — who conducted a genetic analysis of the remains of a woman buried in Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in Haryana — have found no traces of the R1a1 gene, which is often loosely called the ‘Aryan gene’.
This new finding has set off a debate about history, politics and British colonialism online. The enduring “Who we were” question is not a simple one in India anymore. Which is why the ancient Rakhigarhi skeleton is our newsmaker of the week.
What are the findings
The DNA study titled ‘An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers’, published Thursday in the science journal Cell, shows that there is no “detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers” in the remains of the woman’s skeleton.
It indicates that farming in the Indus Valley Civilisation started locally among indigenous populations and was not a lifestyle brought by those who migrated from the West and Central Asia.
It also indicates the Steppe pastoralists migrated to India after the decline of the Harappan civilisation and brought with them the Indo-European group of languages.
The Aryan ‘invasion’ debate
The finding is being called by many on the internet as a ‘setback’ to what is known as the ‘Aryan invasion theory’.
This theory is said to have been proposed during the British colonial rule to deepen the caste divide in India by claiming that members of the ‘high castes’ were the scions of Aryan invaders from Central Asia who conquered the Harappan Civilisation, and who are also the predecessors of modern Europeans.
Proponents of the Hindutva school of thought, however, argue that the ancestors of Indians were natives of this land, and established Vedic Hinduism. Hindutva ideologues argue that the entire Indian population has a unifying factor in its ancestry in the sense that ancient Indians developed farming and carried forward their civilisation on their own — and were not foreign invaders or migrants.
However, to reduce the study to say it is debunking the Aryan invasion theory is inaccurate and a misreading of history.
When the draft of the study was published earlier last year, Niraj Rai, one of the researchers in the project, told ThePrint that their findings simply implied that “Rakhigarhi residents hadn’t mixed with the central Asians till then”.
What the study really focuses on
The history of how humans advanced from being hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities has always been a question of enormous interest to anthropologists. This is because the shift signifies the birth of close-knit human communities, which led to the rise of civilisations, and eventually modern life as we know it.
The Rakhigarhi DNA study, using genetic data, also tries to establish how farming began in India. Since the Central Asian ‘Steppe’ gene — found in a majority of India’s populace today — was not detected in the Rakhigarhi skeleton, the researchers came to the conclusion that farming in South Asia arose from “local foragers” rather than from migrants from the West.
Interpretations of genetic data are never straightforward or incontestable, which makes them difficult to cram into tweets or headlines that more often than not have a character limit.
A number of news reports chose to devote their headlines on the news study to the Aryan invasion theory, which does not find a single mention in the actual study. Some of the headlines were: “Rakhigarhi DNA study questions Aryan invasion theory” or “New DNA study debunks Aryan invasion theory”, “New Report Based On Genetic Study Questions Aryan Migration Theory, Draws Flak”, “DNA analysis of Rakhigarhi remains challenges Aryan invasion theory”, etc.
This question of ‘Who we really are’, an irrevocable consequence of the Rakhigarhi study, thus triggered the Twitterverse to erupt in outrage.
Tarun Vijay, an RSS and BJP worker, used the findings to say that “All #Indians belong to #India, #Harappan Civilisation”.
2500 BC Rakhigarhi skeletons have no traces of ‘Aryan gene’, finds DNA study
Study examined DNA of skeletons found in Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation site in Haryana, and found no traces of R1a1, or Central Asian ‘steppe’, gene.
The study of DNA samples of the skeletons found in Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation site in Haryana, has found no traces of the R1a1 gene or Central Asian ‘steppe’ genes, loosely termed as the ‘Aryan gene’.
The study — titled ‘An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers’ — examined the DNA of the skeletal remains of an individual in Rakhigarhi dating back to around 2500 BC, which was part of the ‘mature Harappan civilisation’ or the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
“The population has no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting farming in South Asia arose from local foragers rather than from large-scale migration from the West,” said the study published Friday.
The Central Asian ‘steppe’ gene is found in much of the Indian population today.
“These individuals (in Rakhigarhi) had little of any Steppe pastoralist-derived ancestry, showing that it was not ubiquitous in north-west South Asia during the IVC as it is today,” according to the study.
It added, “While there is a small proportion of Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in South Asians today, it is consistent with being entirely derived from Steppe pastoralists who carried it in mixed form and who spread into South Asia from 2000–1500 BCE.”
The study, led by archaeologist Vasant Shinde, concluded: “Our analysis of data from one individual from the IVC…demonstrates the existence of an ancestry gradient that was widespread in farmers to the northwest of peninsular India at the height of the IVC, that had little if any genetic contribution from Steppe pastoralists or western Iranian farmers or herders, and that had a primary impact on the ancestry of later South Asians.”
However, towards the end of the study, there is a disclaimer, stating, “While our study is sufficient to demonstrate that this ancestry profile was a common feature of the IVC, a single sample — or even the gradient of 12 likely IVC samples we have identified — cannot fully characterise a cosmo-politan ancient civilisation.”
The Aryan invasion theory is said to be the brainchild of India’s former colonial rulers, who peddled the idea that members of the country’s high castes were descendants of Aryan invaders from Central Asia who are also the forebears of the Europeans.
Some Hindu groups subsequently argued that Aryans were not invaders at all, but native to the land, and that these indigenous people developed Vedic Hinduism. The invasion theory suggests that Vedic Hinduism was developed by European migrants, and came after the Indus Valley civilisation.
Ancient DNA from India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site is telling volumes about the destiny of the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization.
Around 3000 BC, Neolithic hunters in northern Scotland began settling into new sedentary lifestyles and erected vast stone circles and burial chambers, while in Egypt at this time the first pyramids were built. Meanwhile, the Harappans of South Asia, better known as the Indus Valley Civilization , erected massive brick housing complexes connected with extensive canal systems , yet hardly anything was known of the actual people, until now.
At its peak the civilization covered northwestern India and parts of eastern Pakistan and besides ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia it was one of the world’s first urban agricultural societies with five cities holding a population of between 1 million and 5 million. The series of collapses of ancient Egyptian dynasties is relatively well known, but the causes of the fall of the Harappan civilization around 1700 BC are much less understood, and that’s why this new genome research of an ancient Harappan is making the headlines.
Hot Climates Scorch Scientists Efforts
The team of researchers, led by geneticist David Reich from Harvard University and archaeologist Vasant Shinde at Deccan College in Pune, India, published their new study on Cell, based on studies at the Indus site known as Rakhigarhi, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Delhi. “More than 60 skeletal pieces, including numerous petrous bones” were tested before the scientists successfully found and extracted a sample of ancient DNA, according to the scientists report.
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
An article in Science Mag explains that the region’s hot climate quickly degrades genetic material and while hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed in the Indus Valley this is the first one to hold valuable DNA, which the report says was sequenced more than 100 times to piece together what was called a “relatively complete genome”. Reich said, “There’s no doubt this is the most intensive effort we’ve ever made to get ancient DNA from a single sample.” While the findings say little about ‘why’ the society collapsed a new story is revealed about its continuing genetic legacy in modern Indians.
5,000-Year-Old Harappan Migrants
The DNA was sampled from an individual that was most likely female, who was found buried among dozens of ceramic bowls and vases dated to between 2800 and 2300 BC. Her genome closely matched DNA samples from 11 other individuals who had been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, with whom the Harrapans traded. Because the 11 individuals had ”little in common genetically with others buried in their regions,” Reich and researchers concluded that they were most likely Harappan migrants .
The Helpful Harappan Explains How Ancient Indus Valley Technology Could Solve Many of Today’s Problems
Archaeologists may have located ancient port dating back 4,500 years in Goa
Ancient City of Mohenjo Daro Has Survived 5 Millennia but May Disappear in 2 Decades
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use)
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use )
The researchers next compared these genetic signatures against DNA from ancient Eurasians as well as modern populations and the researchers made an ‘Indus family tree’ which reveals in its bowers that “genetic stock from the ancient Harrapan civilization can be found in most of today’s Indian population ”, according to the report in Cell.
Ancient Origins of Harappans Rewritten
What’s more, the paper also says that modern people from north India have “the genetic marks” of Harappans having interbreed with animal herders living on the Eurasian steppe , “moving southward around 2000 BC”. And explaining the once-perplexing genetic link between Europeans and South Asians those steppe herders must have carried European DNA, from previous interbreeding events, and over the next three millennia the groups in north and south India intermixed, leading to the current population’s “complex ancestral mix”.
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
A side observation which excites scientists provides new answers for why ancient Iranian DNA is found in modern South Asians, and how agriculture got to the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the current belief that the world’s first farmers emerged from what is today Iran, about 10,000 years ago, and integrated with South Asian hunter-gatherers, the new study suggests the Iranian-related DNA “predates the rise of agriculture in Iran by some 2000 years”.
This means ancient Iranian DNA came from “interbreeding with 12,000-year-old hunter-gatherers, not more recent farmers”, Reich explains in the paper. All this, from one tiny sample of DNA.
Around 3000 BC, Neolithic hunters in northern Scotland began settling into new sedentary lifestyles and erected vast stone circles and burial chambers, while in Egypt at this time the first pyramids were built. Meanwhile, the Harappans of South Asia, better known as the Indus Valley Civilization , erected massive brick housing complexes connected with extensive canal systems , yet hardly anything was known of the actual people, until now.
At its peak the civilization covered northwestern India and parts of eastern Pakistan and besides ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia it was one of the world’s first urban agricultural societies with five cities holding a population of between 1 million and 5 million. The series of collapses of ancient Egyptian dynasties is relatively well known, but the causes of the fall of the Harappan civilization around 1700 BC are much less understood, and that’s why this new genome research of an ancient Harappan is making the headlines.
Hot Climates Scorch Scientists Efforts
The team of researchers, led by geneticist David Reich from Harvard University and archaeologist Vasant Shinde at Deccan College in Pune, India, published their new study on Cell, based on studies at the Indus site known as Rakhigarhi, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Delhi. “More than 60 skeletal pieces, including numerous petrous bones” were tested before the scientists successfully found and extracted a sample of ancient DNA, according to the scientists report.
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
An article in Science Mag explains that the region’s hot climate quickly degrades genetic material and while hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed in the Indus Valley this is the first one to hold valuable DNA, which the report says was sequenced more than 100 times to piece together what was called a “relatively complete genome”. Reich said, “There’s no doubt this is the most intensive effort we’ve ever made to get ancient DNA from a single sample.” While the findings say little about ‘why’ the society collapsed a new story is revealed about its continuing genetic legacy in modern Indians.
5,000-Year-Old Harappan Migrants
The DNA was sampled from an individual that was most likely female, who was found buried among dozens of ceramic bowls and vases dated to between 2800 and 2300 BC. Her genome closely matched DNA samples from 11 other individuals who had been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, with whom the Harrapans traded. Because the 11 individuals had ”little in common genetically with others buried in their regions,” Reich and researchers concluded that they were most likely Harappan migrants .
The Helpful Harappan Explains How Ancient Indus Valley Technology Could Solve Many of Today’s Problems
Archaeologists may have located ancient port dating back 4,500 years in Goa
Ancient City of Mohenjo Daro Has Survived 5 Millennia but May Disappear in 2 Decades
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use)
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use )
The researchers next compared these genetic signatures against DNA from ancient Eurasians as well as modern populations and the researchers made an ‘Indus family tree’ which reveals in its bowers that “genetic stock from the ancient Harrapan civilization can be found in most of today’s Indian population ”, according to the report in Cell.
Ancient Origins of Harappans Rewritten
What’s more, the paper also says that modern people from north India have “the genetic marks” of Harappans having interbreed with animal herders living on the Eurasian steppe , “moving southward around 2000 BC”. And explaining the once-perplexing genetic link between Europeans and South Asians those steppe herders must have carried European DNA, from previous interbreeding events, and over the next three millennia the groups in north and south India intermixed, leading to the current population’s “complex ancestral mix”.
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
A side observation which excites scientists provides new answers for why ancient Iranian DNA is found in modern South Asians, and how agriculture got to the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the current belief that the world’s first farmers emerged from what is today Iran, about 10,000 years ago, and integrated with South Asian hunter-gatherers, the new study suggests the Iranian-related DNA “predates the rise of agriculture in Iran by some 2000 years”.
This means ancient Iranian DNA came from “interbreeding with 12,000-year-old hunter-gatherers, not more recent farmers”, Reich explains in the paper. All this, from one tiny sample of DNA.
A 4,500-old woman from Rakhigarhi spoke this week, and made Indians ask ‘Who are we?’
New DNA study results from Rakhigarhi remains set off a debate about Indian history, politics, and British colonialism online.
Awoman’s skeleton from 2500 BC has finally spoken. A team of Indian and international scientists and archaeologists — who conducted a genetic analysis of the remains of a woman buried in Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in Haryana — have found no traces of the R1a1 gene, which is often loosely called the ‘Aryan gene’.
This new finding has set off a debate about history, politics and British colonialism online. The enduring “Who we were” question is not a simple one in India anymore. Which is why the ancient Rakhigarhi skeleton is our newsmaker of the week.
What are the findings
The DNA study titled ‘An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers’, published Thursday in the science journal Cell, shows that there is no “detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers” in the remains of the woman’s skeleton.
It indicates that farming in the Indus Valley Civilisation started locally among indigenous populations and was not a lifestyle brought by those who migrated from the West and Central Asia.
It also indicates the Steppe pastoralists migrated to India after the decline of the Harappan civilisation and brought with them the Indo-European group of languages.
The Aryan ‘invasion’ debate
The finding is being called by many on the internet as a ‘setback’ to what is known as the ‘Aryan invasion theory’.
This theory is said to have been proposed during the British colonial rule to deepen the caste divide in India by claiming that members of the ‘high castes’ were the scions of Aryan invaders from Central Asia who conquered the Harappan Civilisation, and who are also the predecessors of modern Europeans.
Proponents of the Hindutva school of thought, however, argue that the ancestors of Indians were natives of this land, and established Vedic Hinduism. Hindutva ideologues argue that the entire Indian population has a unifying factor in its ancestry in the sense that ancient Indians developed farming and carried forward their civilisation on their own — and were not foreign invaders or migrants.
However, to reduce the study to say it is debunking the Aryan invasion theory is inaccurate and a misreading of history.
When the draft of the study was published earlier last year, Niraj Rai, one of the researchers in the project, told ThePrint that their findings simply implied that “Rakhigarhi residents hadn’t mixed with the central Asians till then”.
What the study really focuses on
The history of how humans advanced from being hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities has always been a question of enormous interest to anthropologists. This is because the shift signifies the birth of close-knit human communities, which led to the rise of civilisations, and eventually modern life as we know it.
The Rakhigarhi DNA study, using genetic data, also tries to establish how farming began in India. Since the Central Asian ‘Steppe’ gene — found in a majority of India’s populace today — was not detected in the Rakhigarhi skeleton, the researchers came to the conclusion that farming in South Asia arose from “local foragers” rather than from migrants from the West.
Interpretations of genetic data are never straightforward or incontestable, which makes them difficult to cram into tweets or headlines that more often than not have a character limit.
A number of news reports chose to devote their headlines on the news study to the Aryan invasion theory, which does not find a single mention in the actual study. Some of the headlines were: “Rakhigarhi DNA study questions Aryan invasion theory” or “New DNA study debunks Aryan invasion theory”, “New Report Based On Genetic Study Questions Aryan Migration Theory, Draws Flak”, “DNA analysis of Rakhigarhi remains challenges Aryan invasion theory”, etc.
This question of ‘Who we really are’, an irrevocable consequence of the Rakhigarhi study, thus triggered the Twitterverse to erupt in outrage.
Tarun Vijay, an RSS and BJP worker, used the findings to say that “All #Indians belong to #India, #Harappan Civilisation”.
2500 BC Rakhigarhi skeletons have no traces of ‘Aryan gene’, finds DNA study
Study examined DNA of skeletons found in Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation site in Haryana, and found no traces of R1a1, or Central Asian ‘steppe’, gene.
The study of DNA samples of the skeletons found in Rakhigarhi, an Indus Valley Civilisation site in Haryana, has found no traces of the R1a1 gene or Central Asian ‘steppe’ genes, loosely termed as the ‘Aryan gene’.
The study — titled ‘An ancient Harappan genome lacks ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers’ — examined the DNA of the skeletal remains of an individual in Rakhigarhi dating back to around 2500 BC, which was part of the ‘mature Harappan civilisation’ or the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
“The population has no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting farming in South Asia arose from local foragers rather than from large-scale migration from the West,” said the study published Friday.
The Central Asian ‘steppe’ gene is found in much of the Indian population today.
“These individuals (in Rakhigarhi) had little of any Steppe pastoralist-derived ancestry, showing that it was not ubiquitous in north-west South Asia during the IVC as it is today,” according to the study.
It added, “While there is a small proportion of Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in South Asians today, it is consistent with being entirely derived from Steppe pastoralists who carried it in mixed form and who spread into South Asia from 2000–1500 BCE.”
The study, led by archaeologist Vasant Shinde, concluded: “Our analysis of data from one individual from the IVC…demonstrates the existence of an ancestry gradient that was widespread in farmers to the northwest of peninsular India at the height of the IVC, that had little if any genetic contribution from Steppe pastoralists or western Iranian farmers or herders, and that had a primary impact on the ancestry of later South Asians.”
However, towards the end of the study, there is a disclaimer, stating, “While our study is sufficient to demonstrate that this ancestry profile was a common feature of the IVC, a single sample — or even the gradient of 12 likely IVC samples we have identified — cannot fully characterise a cosmo-politan ancient civilisation.”
The Aryan invasion theory is said to be the brainchild of India’s former colonial rulers, who peddled the idea that members of the country’s high castes were descendants of Aryan invaders from Central Asia who are also the forebears of the Europeans.
Some Hindu groups subsequently argued that Aryans were not invaders at all, but native to the land, and that these indigenous people developed Vedic Hinduism. The invasion theory suggests that Vedic Hinduism was developed by European migrants, and came after the Indus Valley civilisation.
Ancient DNA from India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site is telling volumes about the destiny of the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization.
Around 3000 BC, Neolithic hunters in northern Scotland began settling into new sedentary lifestyles and erected vast stone circles and burial chambers, while in Egypt at this time the first pyramids were built. Meanwhile, the Harappans of South Asia, better known as the Indus Valley Civilization , erected massive brick housing complexes connected with extensive canal systems , yet hardly anything was known of the actual people, until now.
At its peak the civilization covered northwestern India and parts of eastern Pakistan and besides ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia it was one of the world’s first urban agricultural societies with five cities holding a population of between 1 million and 5 million. The series of collapses of ancient Egyptian dynasties is relatively well known, but the causes of the fall of the Harappan civilization around 1700 BC are much less understood, and that’s why this new genome research of an ancient Harappan is making the headlines.
Hot Climates Scorch Scientists Efforts
The team of researchers, led by geneticist David Reich from Harvard University and archaeologist Vasant Shinde at Deccan College in Pune, India, published their new study on Cell, based on studies at the Indus site known as Rakhigarhi, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of modern-day Delhi. “More than 60 skeletal pieces, including numerous petrous bones” were tested before the scientists successfully found and extracted a sample of ancient DNA, according to the scientists report.
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Rakhigarhi archaeological site, India. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
An article in Science Mag explains that the region’s hot climate quickly degrades genetic material and while hundreds of skeletons have been unearthed in the Indus Valley this is the first one to hold valuable DNA, which the report says was sequenced more than 100 times to piece together what was called a “relatively complete genome”. Reich said, “There’s no doubt this is the most intensive effort we’ve ever made to get ancient DNA from a single sample.” While the findings say little about ‘why’ the society collapsed a new story is revealed about its continuing genetic legacy in modern Indians.
5,000-Year-Old Harappan Migrants
The DNA was sampled from an individual that was most likely female, who was found buried among dozens of ceramic bowls and vases dated to between 2800 and 2300 BC. Her genome closely matched DNA samples from 11 other individuals who had been found in Iran and Turkmenistan, with whom the Harrapans traded. Because the 11 individuals had ”little in common genetically with others buried in their regions,” Reich and researchers concluded that they were most likely Harappan migrants .
The Helpful Harappan Explains How Ancient Indus Valley Technology Could Solve Many of Today’s Problems
Archaeologists may have located ancient port dating back 4,500 years in Goa
Ancient City of Mohenjo Daro Has Survived 5 Millennia but May Disappear in 2 Decades
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use)
The Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia. (Science / Fair Use )
The researchers next compared these genetic signatures against DNA from ancient Eurasians as well as modern populations and the researchers made an ‘Indus family tree’ which reveals in its bowers that “genetic stock from the ancient Harrapan civilization can be found in most of today’s Indian population ”, according to the report in Cell.
Ancient Origins of Harappans Rewritten
What’s more, the paper also says that modern people from north India have “the genetic marks” of Harappans having interbreed with animal herders living on the Eurasian steppe , “moving southward around 2000 BC”. And explaining the once-perplexing genetic link between Europeans and South Asians those steppe herders must have carried European DNA, from previous interbreeding events, and over the next three millennia the groups in north and south India intermixed, leading to the current population’s “complex ancestral mix”.
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
Evidence suggests Rakhigarhi was a major Harappan city center. (Homeric Origins / YouTube)
A side observation which excites scientists provides new answers for why ancient Iranian DNA is found in modern South Asians, and how agriculture got to the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the current belief that the world’s first farmers emerged from what is today Iran, about 10,000 years ago, and integrated with South Asian hunter-gatherers, the new study suggests the Iranian-related DNA “predates the rise of agriculture in Iran by some 2000 years”.
This means ancient Iranian DNA came from “interbreeding with 12,000-year-old hunter-gatherers, not more recent farmers”, Reich explains in the paper. All this, from one tiny sample of DNA.
