Humans have been on the Indian subcontinent for a very long time - from what we know at
least 50 thousand years.
But recent work on the analysis of ancient DNA is revealing who the ancestors of people
living in that region today really were - and its very politically controversial.
For some people Indian history is all about the British, Mughal, Turkic, Sena, Pala, Mauryan
- Emperor Ashoka - as if History is just about kings, Emperors and their wars!
… But didn’t all this happen just 2000 years
ago?
What came before that?
Oh yeah, the Aryans came from the North, those horse riding mighty Aryans with pale skin,
still considered today the highest caste in traditional hindu societies.
The same ancient Aryans who even today are used as a political weapon for Right wing
nationalists not just in India but also in Europe and America - but we’ll talk more
about that later.
We tend often to think of history as what is written or recorded, but that’s only
about 5,000 years old.
Ancient DNA analysis has totally changed the game.
It means we can reveal ancient history well beyond 5,000 years, we’re talking 10’s
of thousands of years.
In a groundbreaking study published in 2018, geneticists teamed up with experts from all
sorts of disciplines to analyse the ancients genomes of human skeletons who had lived in
the Indus Valley civilisation + and the surrounding areas we call Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan today.
They compared this ancient genetic data with live DNA samples from 246 different groups
living in the Indian subcontinent today.
I’m sure you all know that modern humans, Homo Sapiens - yeah, me and you - first evolved
in Africa about 300,000 years ago.
These early ancestors left Africa about 70-80 thousand years ago and by 50,000 years ago
they’d already started living in the Indian subcontinent.
About 12 thousand years ago farming developed in the fertile crescent of Western Asia and
spread out.
There was a huge migration from Iran to Northern India right around this time or little earlier.
Many thought these Iranians brought farming to India but a more recent study confirms
that farming did not spread to South Asia through the migration of people from the Near
East.
Agriculture might have arisen independently here or spread though cultural contact.
But these massive Iranian population migrating to the northern India mixed with indigenous
hunter gatherer communities who were already living there.
And this mixed population created the famous Indus Valley civilisation in the areas known
today as ancient Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
The genetic analysis of 4,500 year old human skeletons from ancient Harappa found no genetic
markers at all linked to the Aryan people.
This was big, and politically controversial - partly because today’s Hindu nationalist
movement in India draws heavily from theories about “higher caste” Aryans being the
people that build the original Indus Valley Civilisation.
During British colonial times they had this theory called the “Aryan invasion theory”
- this idea that the “more advanced” Aryan warriors destroyed the less advanced “Indus
Valley civilisation”.
Although this had been disproved for a while, this study confirmed it once and for all.
What does this mean?
Well, not only was the great Indus Valley civilisation not built by the ‘Great Aryans’,
we cannot even give them credit for its destruction either!
What likely happened is that changes in river patterns and reduced rainfall caused the civilisation
to break up slowly.
But uhhh … history is pretty boring sometimes, right?
Now soon after that, the Aryan migration did start from the Steppes in Central Asia.
And Aryans did begin to mix with the local North Indian population.
The mixture of this steppe ancestry and the local Northern Indian farmer ancestry has
been named Ancestral North Indian or ANI for short.
And the people that moved south before mixing with the Aryans are named the Ancestral South
Indians or ASI.
But, it’s not that the ANI and ASI populations got separated genetically, exactly the opposite.
They kept mixing and mingling which is why you see a varied range of mixture of ANI and
ASI in the Indian subcontinent today.
But because of caste system and endogamy - that is, only marrying into your own community
- in later period people following the Hindu religion you’ll see more of the ANI genetic
markers in the North and more of the ASI generic markers in the South of modern day India.
The people from the Indian subcontinent also mixed with previously established Tibetan-Burmese
and Austroasiatic populations from the East.
They then again mixed with the Arabs, the Turks, the Mughals, and later the Europeans.
But these groups didn’t have their genes spread all across the population of the subcontinent
as it did with those early Iranian farmers.
This recent data is not, at all, good news for Hindu nationalists.
According to the Out of India theory that many subscribe to, the Aryans originated in
India, then ventured out and built higher civilisations in Asia and Europe.
On the other side in hard-right nationalist groups in the West, some claim that these
“pure” Aryans actually originated in Europe and are their ancestors - claiming that the
Aryans were particularly suited to building higher or “better” civilisations.
The facts are pretty simple, there is no “pure” race.
The Aryans were just one more group of people, from Central Asia, like the thousands of other
groups in human history.
The human species has hardly stayed in one place, we’ve continuously moved, spread
all around the world and bred with each other.
All of us are nothing but mixes.
Genetic studies have shown we’re not just mixed within our own species, but Homo Sapiens,
us, had even bred with other extinct human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
So what unites us today is that we are one species - homo sapiens.
And both scientifically and morally, there is no basis for discrimination based on race,
caste or religion, just as there is no basis for the concept of “purity” or “excellence”
of one arbitrary group over another.
This ideology has been weaponised time and time again, for political gain or economic
interest.
But like all ideas, they only persist if we allow ourselves to remain ignorant!