Where Have We Come From?

 

Where Have We Come From?

History of the species is written on the genes of its each individual. Genome is a palimpsest. Eons scribble on it – in a simple language comprising four alphabets and twenty odd, three-lettered words – as the organism evolves over geological ages.

 Life originated on earth nearly three thousand five hundred million years ago. Humans have been around for about 0.4 million years. Thus, a major portion of the book of our genome was written when we were not humans; if the book had one page for each million years, human story would occupy less than half a page in the three thousand five-hundred-page book.

 Modern humans originated in Africa. Story of our African parentage is indelibly etched in each cell of our body, numbering trillions. These etchings tell us a singularly fascinating tale of our ancestors as they travelled out of Africa and established home in the wider world. They were then, hunter-gatherers. Civilisations were born many millennia later. Movement of people across the continents continued. There was mixture of genes between the old inhabitants of the land and the new arrivals. A new race, a new culture arose from this union and became native to the land.

 Till recently, knowledge about how the people in our world came to be what they are today, was available only through history, archaeology, linguistics and genetics. These sciences provided only a narrow peep into our deep past. In the last decade a new branch of genetics, Ancient DNA studies, revolutionised our knowhow of human prehistory.

 I read two wonderful books on this subject, this year. David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Came Here, and Tony Joseph’s Early Indians.

 I want to talk about Tony Joseph’s book today.

  

Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

Tony Joseph

 

History is an important refuge of a rabble-rousing politician. World is seeing a tilt towards extreme right today. Leaders outdo themselves as they invent increasingly rabid versions of chest-thumping, exclusivist nationalism. History has thus found new fans. But what these people profess is not history. It’s a farrago of myths and folklores. It is pedalled as history in an attempt to give this mish-mash a patina of respectability. Its assertions are not arrived at by the painstaking study of ruins, fossils, rocks and artifacts in the jungles of Africa or in the mounds of Mohenjo-Daro or Babylon, but manufactured in the minds of fanatics.

 Ancient DNA research has revealed many surprising facts about movement of people across continents in the very deep past. David Reich has been in the forefront of this global research. His book, Who We Are and How We Came Here, published in 2018, is a tour de force. It details Reich’s decade-long research in mapping the migration of people in the prehistoric times.

 In the book, Reich discussed the origin of the modern populations of each continent. He devoted a chapter on India. This erased much ignorance but also incited a greater thirst. I recently read Early Indians, by Tony Joseph, published in the same year as Reich’s book. Joseph, a journalist by profession, has written a magnificent book about the origins of Indians.

 Tony Joseph begins the book with the earliest humans who came to India from Africa, about sixty thousand years ago. Evidence of these has been found in the hills of Bhimbetka in Madya Pradesh. He then discusses the Harappan people: Did they descend purely from the earliest humans in India, i.e., people of Bhimbetka? Or were Harappans a mixture of west Asians and the early Indians? He talks about the decline of Harappan civilization and the controversial subject of the arrival of Yamnaya people – who came to be called Aryans – from the Eurasian Steppes. This fact is repudiated by the neo-nationalists in India today.

 There is much jingoistic bombast by a faction of Indian politicians these days, about Harappans being the original inhabitants of India. These xenophobes are loath to countenance the fact that a group of people, the Aryans, arrived in India from another land with their language, gods and culture and mingled with natives so inseparably that each one of us today is the product of this admixture that occurred many millennia back. According to these demagogues, we are the original Aryans, ancestors of all other Indo-European races, and Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European languages. It is we who spread this culture across the world. The extant knowledge about ancient Indians, gleaned from geology, palaeontology, archaeology, philology – study of ancient languages, anthropology, and reinforced by the findings of Ancient DNA studies, proves the claims of these politicians, a laughable rant. I do not know why these ignorant leaders start with Harappans. Why not claim that modern Humans did not originate in Africa, but in India? And then spread to all other continents from here.

 But facts, supported by evidence speak a different language.

i)                    People from every part of India today, are a mix of the Earliest Indians (venturing out-of-Africa 60-70,000 years back), Iranian agriculturists (from Zagros mountains in Eastern Iran) and Yamnaya pastoralists (from Eurasian steppes, the so-called Aryans)

ii)                   Aryans came from north and had first contact with the people of North India. These were Harappans. North Indians have greater share of Aryan genes compared with the people of South India.

iii)                 Sanskrit is derived from a proto Indo-European language – root of other Indo-European languages like English, French, German, Spanish, etc., – the language of the Yamnaya people. Languages derived from Sanskrit are spoken in the Northern regions of India.  Arrival of Aryans may have pushed Harappan people to southern India. Dravidian languages spoken in South India, are similar to Proto-Elamite which was spoken in the Zagros mountain region of Iran about 6000-7000 years ago, around the time that Harappan civilisation too thrived. Harappans share genetic similarity with these people.

iv)                 70-90 percent of mitochondrial DNA of Indians (mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the maternal lineage) belongs to Earliest Indians while only 10-40 percent of Y chromosome (Y chromosome is inherited only from fathers) in Indians, traces its lineage from the Earliest Indians (Occupying armies comprise largely males, who often take local women as partners).

v)                   People of higher castes and speakers of Sanskrit family of languages – spoken largely in Northern India – have higher genetic heritage from Aryans.

vi)                 Onge people of the Little Andaman, the southernmost island in the Andaman Archipelago, with a population of only 112 today, have the genome that is closest to the Earliest Indians, having no traces of the Iranian or Aryan inheritance. (Should they then be the strongest contenders for the most authentic Indian?)

 Joseph cites evidence from various fields of historical studies. He explains each in a clear and simple prose. Near the end, he devotes a section to the origin of caste-system in Indian society.

 This is a remarkable book. It presents technical knowledge with stunning clarity. It reads like a well-narrated tale, which it is; the story of who we Indians are and how we came to this great subcontinent. No Indian can afford to remain ignorant of this story.