The Indian reader may be tempted here to think of the Ancestral South Indians (ASI) as the Dravidians and the Ancestral North Indians (ANI) as the Aryans. While I have nothing against the words themselves, one should be cautious about using the terms as they are often used in the context of bogus nineteenth-century racial theories. The ANI and ASI are just different genetic cocktails and not ‘pure’ races. Moreover, we are dealing here with Stone Age bands and not horse-drawn chariots, cities and iron weapons that were said to be part of the Aryan–Dravidian rivalry.
This is a very simplified and stylized account of how the Indian Ocean rim was populated by modern humans. In reality, there would have been back-and-forth movements, dead ends and near extinctions. Also note that the genetic and archaeological evidence is still flowing in and the narrative is not set in stone, but the new information fits together much better than unreliable theories based on linguistics.
A further word of caution is warranted here. We are still dealing with tiny bands of Stone Age hunter–gatherers. A number of factors decided who died out and who survived and flourished—availability of food, changing climate, disease, tribal wars, the decisions of leaders and pure chance. A small difference in circumstances at this stage would show up as a big difference in the population distributions of later times. This is why anyone using the genetic data on early humans to support grand theories of racial and cultural superiority is missing the point.
The Age of Ice
Most traditional accounts about the emergence of civilization roughly run along the following script. Farming is ‘discovered’ somewhere in the Middle East and then spreads quickly, often with the help of Neolithic migrants who awe the locals with this new technology. Overwhelmed by the awesomeness of agriculture, hunter–gatherers leave their traditional life in droves and take to cultivating wheat and barley. This switch to farming is seen to imply large improvements in the quality of life and consequently, steady increases in population. At some point, it gets crowded enough to allow the building of cities and the emergence of civilization. Wonderful story, but it is mostly untrue.
The last major Ice Age is key to understanding the sequence of events. The cycle of cooling started about 30,000 years ago and temperatures kept falling till the Ice Age peaked about 18–20,000 years ago. At the glacial maximum, one third of the Earth’s land surface was covered in ice (compared to less than an eighth today) and half of the oceanic surface.19 With so much water locked up in ice, sea levels dropped dramatically from 50 m below present-day levels 30,000 years ago to around 130 m below at the peak.
Falling sea levels, in turn, exposed large tracts of land. In South East Asia, Sundaland took over most of what is now the Gulf of Thailand and extended far into the South China Sea. The Ancestral South Indians would have witnessed very large tracts being opened up along the Indian coast, especially to the south-east. The Ancestral North Indians, who were newly coalescing into an identifiable group, would have been able to walk more than 150 kms out from today’s Gujarat coast.
The retreat of the sea, however, did not make life easier for our ancestors. Many places had become just too cold but, even in warmer latitudes, climate became a lot drier and many rivers and lakes dried up. Central Asia became a very cold, dry desert that could support few animals or humans. Further south, the monsoons were still active but much weaker than today. The Himalayas were covered in glaciers and north-western areas of the Indian subcontinent may have been steppe-like temperate grasslands. We have evidence that even places like Bengal were relatively dry at the peak of the Ice Age. In Africa, the Sahara expanded by around 500 kms along its southern edge while Lake Victoria almost entirely dried up. At its peak, the sands of the Kalahari desert extended almost to the plains of the Zaire River in central Africa.
As one can imagine, the sharp increase in aridity caused a great deal of turmoil. In many places, people were forced to abandon old hunting grounds and move closer to the remaining rivers. The Sahara savannah had so far supported a significant population but desertification forced many to shift to the Nile. Note that the arid conditions meant that the Nile was not the broad river of earlier and later times but a modest tangle of braided channels that may not have even reached the Mediterranean.20
Surrounded by desert, the people settling along the Nile ‘oasis’ became increasingly sedentary. The ‘oasis’ ran from Sudan to Cairo, around 800 kms, but was no more than a few kilometres wide. We have evidence that human population steadily increased over time, probably through a combination of local births and further inward migration. This must have increased the pressures on the system and we even have the earliest evidence of a battle between two groups. Given the growing pressure, around 15,000 years ago, we can see signs of organized food production in the Nile floodplain—not quite farms but the active management of a semi-wild ecosystem, distinct from being a nomadic hunter-gatherer. The evidence suggests that Nile people harvested catfish and tubers of wild nutgrass.
People in other parts of the world would have gone through a very similar experience and may have also attempted some form of farming. Researchers have recently uncovered the remains of a 23,000-year-old farming settlement near the Sea of Galilee in Israel.21 It appears that farming is a lot older than the traditional view that it was a Neolithic invention. It is more than likely that the Indian Ocean rim also had such pre-Neolithic farming communities.
One may be tempted to think that Egyptian civilization evolved directly from the Nile oasis people, but the actual course of events is much more complicated. After the glacial peak 18,000 years ago, the world began to warm up again. Rising sea levels began to inundate the coastlines while increased rainfall revived previously arid areas. By 12,500 years ago, Lake Victoria was full and the Sahara was again an inhabitable savannah. The combination of melting ice and increased rain also fed the rivers. On one hand, the return of a strongly flowing Nile may have washed away the carefully tended ecosystem of the ‘oasis’ phase but, on the other hand, the Sahara beckoned. Thus, the world’s first ‘farmers’ drifted back to being hunter–gatherers! This is why we find cave paintings of savannah animals in the middle of the Sahara at locations that would appear uninhabitable today.
The Indian Ocean rim also went through a similar shift. The coasts of Sundaland and India were flooded and seawater began to encroach into the Persian Gulf by 12,500 years ago. However, at the same time, previously arid areas became much wetter and more habitable. As with the Sahara, the desert zone that extends across Arabia into western India also became much more humid and capable of supporting hunter–gatherers.22 The northern latitudes also became much warmer as the glaciers retreated even as the monsoons became stronger in southern Asia. The combination of flooding coastlines and a warmer, wetter land mass led to a great deal of human migration into areas that had been previously uninhabitable.
From Cities to Farms
Then, in the midst of rising sea levels and all this migrating, the hunter–gatherers did something special—they built large monumental structures! In 1995, archaeologists digging a site called Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey made an astonishing discovery. As they dug, they found monumental pillared structures with elaborate carvings. The stone pillars were each 5–6 m high and weighed 7 tons. In a nearby quarry they even found a half-finished pillar weighing 50 tons. This would have been an important discovery by any standards, but what made it really special was the realization that it was 11,500 years old (i.e. 6000 years older than Stonehenge). In other words, these structures were built either by hunter–gatherers or by pre-Neolithic farming communities! We have no idea who these people were and why they built Göbekli Tepe. Possibly it was an important ceremonial or religious centre. Perhaps it also served as a trading hub.
The plot has thickened further as more such sites are being found around the world. A huge stepped pyramid has been discovered at Gunung Padang on Java, Indonesia. The layers were built at different times, but the oldest layers are at least as old as G
öbekli Tepe. Yet again, we do not know what purpose it served and who built it.
Then, in 2001, a team from India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology found evidence of two large settlements while doing undersea sonar surveys in the Gulf of Khambhat, off the coast of Gujarat.23 Although this site has not been fully researched due to its depth, it is worth noting that it is at a location that would have been flooded more than 7500 years ago; so the settlements would have been built a lot earlier. It is likely there are several other such sites that are still undiscovered or are now under the sea. Whatever the reason for such constructions, there is no doubt that they required the cooperation of large numbers of people, and hunter–gatherer societies would have had to support those building and looking after these projects. This has led researchers like Yuval Noah Hariri to wonder if agriculture was invented to feed the workers and those who lived in these settlements. In other words, did the need to feed urban hubs lead to farming? Is it a coincidence that the wild varieties from which wheat was domesticated grew just a few miles from Göbekli Tepe?
We do not know all the answers but these new discoveries are challenging many well-established assumptions about the flow of human history and the origins of civilization. At the very least, we need to stop thinking of history as a smooth, linear transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic, and then from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The path of history is a lot more messy with different people adopting different technologies at different times, sometimes skipping a phase and occasionally retracing. Scholars may also need to reconsider what we mean by terms like ‘Neolithic’. Such terms often come with assumptions about social and economic structures that go beyond the use of a particular technology. I have continued to use such terms for convenience in this book, but readers should be aware that they have somewhat fluid meanings.
It was once thought that agriculture had a single point of origin in the Middle East and that migrants carried the knowledge to other places. We now know that both crops and animals were domesticated at multiple locations around the world. Sugar cane was domesticated by Melanesians in New Guinea. They may have also tamed banana although a separate species may have been independently domesticated in India or South East Asia. Rice and pigs were domesticated in China. Rice cultivation then spread quite quickly to South East Asia and to India. Sesame and cotton appear to have been first cultivated in India. West Africans learned to cultivate sorghum and African millet. Cows seem to have been domesticated in India and separately in the Middle East (the humped and non-humped varieties respectively). I am not even listing here the numerous crops that were domesticated entirely independently in the Americas.
It is no surprise that humans learned to farm since hunter–gatherers would have known quite a lot about plants and animals. The real question is, why did they bother to switch? By all accounts, agriculture did not improve the lives of people. It was risky business that required the upfront investment of a lot of effort while the returns were uncertain—the rains could fail, wild animals could destroy the crops and neighbouring tribes could steal the produce. Moreover, cultivation yielded a narrow variety of food compared to that available to hunter–gatherers. Most importantly, living in concentrated villages in close proximity to animals increased the likelihood of spreading disease. Analysis of human remains from Neolithic farming sites repeatedly shows that farmers were less healthy and had much shorter lifespans than their hunter–gatherer ancestors. This may explain why the Nile oasis people went back to hunting in the Sahara grasslands as soon as climate permitted them.
Whatever the original reason humans took to farming, it had one advantage—it produced more calories per unit area. A sedentary lifestyle may have also reduced the gap between births. This allowed for a big increase in human population even if the individual now had a lower quality of life. China’s population today exceeds 1.3 billion but 40 per cent of its males derive their genes from just three Neolithic ‘super-grandfathers’.24
After the Great Flood
Meanwhile, climate kept getting warmer and the coastlines kept getting inundated. In a last burst of flooding around 7000 years ago (i.e. 5000 BC), the Persian Gulf was completely inundated and came to look roughly like it does today. In India, the coastline shifted to turn Gujarat’s Saurashtra region into a peninsula (and briefly an island). Sri Lanka separated from the Tamil coast and became an island. Sundaland, already much diminished, now witnessed the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo take shapes that would be familiar to us.
Most ancient civilizations have a myth about the Great Flood. There is the well-known biblical story of Noah and his Ark. The Sumerians mention the Great Flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. The Indians have the legend about Manu who was warned about the coming flood by the god Vishnu. So he built a large ship and filled it with wise sages, seeds and animals. Vishnu, in the form of a fish, then guided Manu’s ship to safety. The survivors are said to have re-established civilization at the foothills of the Himalayas. Notice the similarity with the story of Noah. Indeed, many cultures around the world have a story about the Great Flood and one wonders if it is a memory of this period of climate change and coastal flooding.
All this flooding would have led to further migrations. Based on linguistic models, the current population of South East Asia was once thought to be descendants of migrants from Taiwan. However, genetic models now confirm that they already lived in northern parts of Sundaland and that they were probably dispersed by the floods. An interesting aspect of this group is the prevalence of a strong matrilineal streak. We do not know why this was the case but there may have been a phase during the transition to agriculture when the men were still mobile as hunters and herders while the women settled down to grow crops. This may have been especially true of rice-growing areas because rice requires greater investment in water management. The female line, being more stable, may have therefore become the social anchor. There is evidence that even Chinese clan names may have been matrilineal till the early Bronze Age.
Mind you, it was not just flooding but also shifting climate zones that affected the Neolithic people. After being habitable till 7500 years ago (i.e. 5500 BC), the Sahara steadily became more arid over the next thousand years. We see similar desertification across Arabia. As we shall see, the process of desertification would eventually spread east into western India.
Given these changes, we see migrations within and from the Indo-Iranian continuum. It appears that some groups, probably tired of all the flooding and desertification, took advantage of warmer conditions to push north. One such group carrying the R1a1a gene would make their way through Central Asia and eventually come to settle in Eastern Europe. This is why Iranians, Pakistanis and north Indians are more closely related to Eastern Europeans like Lithuanians and Poles than to R1b carrying Western Europeans who had separated much earlier.25 It also explains some of the ancient cultural and linguistic links between Europe and India.
Note, however, that the links relate to the Neolithic or very early Bronze Age, and not the Iron Age—and the flow is from the south to the north and not the other way around.26 In other words, this is not about some Iron Age ‘invasion’ of Iran and India from the steppes. To quote a paper by geneticist Peter Underhill and his colleagues: ‘it would exclude any significant patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, at least since the mid-Holocene period’.27 An independent study of Iranian genes also came to a similar conclusion: ‘none of the identified sub-branches support a patrilineal gene flow from western Eurasia through southern Asia ascribable to the diffusion of the Indo-European languages’.28
Analysis of the genetic mix of Afghans similarly came to the conclusion that except for Uzbeks and Hazaras (who are known to have come during the medieval period), most Afghan groups have been living in the general area since Neolithic times. Moreover, they were found to be closely related to north Indians and their evolution into separate tribes coincided with the Bronze Age Harappan civilization in north-western India. Again, th
ere is no evidence of an Iron Age invasion or migration from Central Asia. Indeed, the 2012 study by Marc Haber et al. specifically states, ‘R1a1a-M17 does not support, as previously thought, expansion from Pontic Steppe bringing the Indo-European languages to Central Asia and India.’29
All these findings have been further confirmed by yet another study published in 2015. The study analysed the genes of 6600 men and found that the oldest strains of the R1a haplogroup are found in the Indian subcontinent (approximately 15,500 years old) compared to Eastern Europe (12,500 years old) and Northern Europe (6900 years old). This is again consistent with a post-Ice Age migration from the south to the north.30
So, if they are related, why do Lithuanians and Poles today look so different from modern Indians and Iranians? Firstly, remember that none of them is a ‘pure race’, and they have separately mixed with different streams of humanity over subsequent millennia. Secondly, the difference is mainly related to skin/hair tone which we know are very recent developments. The analysis of DNA extracted from the remains of European hunter–gatherers suggests that lighter skin may have spread among Europeans as recently as 5000 BC (i.e. after the migration) although I suspect some pre-existing north European populations may have become light-skinned much earlier.31
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 4
