What Recent Research Reveals About the Origins of the People of India and South Asia
Historians and geneticists have the same answer
When British colonial writers and part-historians began to write their versions of Indian history in the 1700s and 1800s, they popularized an idea that became known as the Aryan invasion theory. Basically, when Europeans learned about South Asia’s Sanskrit language and discovered its connection with the classical languages of Europe, they assumed that there had to be, in the distant past, some kind of common “Indo-European” language, hence culture and peoples, which gave rise to later Indians and Europeans. This common culture was labeled “Aryan” culture. As Indian historian Romila Thapar describes in The History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300,
“[Europeans] maintained that the Aryans had originated in central Asia, one branch migrating to Europe and another settling in Iran, with a segment of the Iranian branch subsequently moving to India. The Aryans had invaded in large numbers and subordinated the indigenous population of northern India in the second millennium BC. They had introduced the Indo-Aryan language, the language of the conquerors who represented a superior civilization.”
Interestingly, many Indians accepted this theory. For example, those belonging to the privileged castes (the “upper” castes) found it palatable in the 1800s because it helped them identify themselves as descendants of a supposedly superior “race” (the Aryans), while for many anti-caste leaders, this theory showed that “the Sanskrit-speaking brahmans (a category of privileged caste Indians) were descended from the Aryans who were alien to India,” and that the “lower” castes were in fact the original inhabitants of India [quote from Thapar].
In the 1900s, these colonial ideas began gradually to be replaced by more robust historical research and theories. Historians knew that there definitely was a movement, or migration, of people from what today is Central Asia and Iran, into South Asia, but they also knew that evidence for violent invasions was absent. It became clear, as Thapar writes, that:
“… groups of Indo-Aryan speakers gradually migrated from the Indo-Iranian borderlands and Afghanistan to northern India, where they introduced the language. The impetus to migrate was a search for better pastures, for arable land and some advantage from an exchange of goods. The migrations were generally not disruptive of settlements and cultures.”
Now, detailed studies of ancient DNA have buttressed this historical understanding and provided additional details of the peopling of South Asia, as outlined in the book Who We Are and How We Got Here by Harvard-based geneticist David Reich, and in countless papers (e.g., this and this).
The earliest humans in South Asia
Let’s begin with a clean slate — consider a time when there are no modern humans in South Asia (this does not refer to hominins). Modern humans, i.e., the species Homo sapiens, evolved in eastern Africa gradually over hundreds of thousands of years. The earliest fossils of recognizably modern Homo sapiens appear in Ethiopia, around 200,000 years ago.
According to the current scientific consensus, these earliest Homo sapiens started to leave Africa around 70,000 years ago. One group reached South Asia some 60,000 years ago. In other words, the earliest people in India were these early humans who came from the African continent about, if I may, 58,000 BCE. Some authors call them the “First Indians.”
The hunter-gatherers of South Asia
For the next several thousand years, these humans, the “natives” now, lived as hunter-gatherers. They were most probably joined by additional groups of humans who also arrived there from Africa. Evidence of the presence of these early Homo sapiens in South Asia is abundant, especially in the form of stone tools: for example, the Hiran valley in Gujarat (around 57,000 years ago), Kalpi in northern India (about 45,000 years ago), and Nandipalli in southern India (about 23,000 years ago). [Reference: Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Medieval India]
As the centuries and millennia went by, these early humans also developed what we now consider art forms. For example, ostrich eggshell beads (used as ornaments) dating 40,000 years to 25,000 years ago have been found in Bhimbetka and Patne. (Yes, ostriches lived in what is now India thousands of years ago.) And exquisite rock art, known as petroglyph, has been found in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, dating to some 12,000 years ago.
The Harappans / the Indus Valley Civilization
Some nine to ten thousand years ago, i.e., around 7500 BCE, humans from what is today Iran and the surrounding regions, began migrating eastwards and reached the Indian subcontinent. These human communities had started to practice farming and animal domestication (as against previous humans who mostly were hunter-gatherers), and they brought their agriculture to India.
Now as we know, there already lived hunter-gatherers in the South Asian region — the ‘First Indians’ — for many thousands of years. So the new migrants, or the West Asian farmers, mixed with the old hunter-gatherers to form a hybrid population.
This mixed-heritage population began emerging around 7000 BCE and continued for several centuries. This is also the time period that experts reckon marks the beginnings of what later became the sprawling Harappan/Indus Valley Civilization. Since the incoming agriculturalists were from the West Asian (Iranian) region, the initial encounters and mixtures with “First Indians” (the hunter-gatherers) happened in what is now northern Pakistan and northern India. These mixed societies gradually became more urbanized and organized to form the famous urban centers of the Indus Valley.
In other words, the Indus Valley people were a mixture of ‘First Indians’ and agriculturalists from West Asia.
Ancestral South Indians and Ancestral North Indians
The Harappan civilization reached its peak around 2600 BCE, after which there was a gradual decline (the reasons for which are not important here, except that it did not decline due to any violent conquests by any sort of invaders, as British colonial writers believed). Around the same time, South Asia saw the arrival of yet another new population — the pastoralists from the European Steppe region, shown as (2) and by the uneven red circle in the map.
Let’s pause and look at the different parts of South Asia around this time (2000–1500 BCE). The Indus valley civilization in the north is in decline. Here the populations (Harappans) are a mixture of native hunter-gatherer Indians and West Asian agriculturalists (A+B = C). The rest of India, in the peninsula, still mostly has the hunter-gatherer communities with little contact with Harappans. As the Indus civilization declined and as the Harappans left their initial settlements, they moved southward. Now they mixed with the hunter-gatherer populations already in the south, and thus gradually we see the rise of a new kind of mixed population (C+A). This has been labeled by researchers as the Ancestral South Indian population (ASI).
The newly arriving pastoralists from the Steppe region (D), as they entered South Asia, encountered the already settled Indus Valley people in northern India/Pakistan. These pastoralists also were the speakers of early forms of Indo-European languages (the infamous “Aryan invaders” of European imagination). Their mixture with the Harappans produced another new population (C+D), which scholars have named the Ancestral North Indians (ANI).
Most South Asian persons today trace their genetic ancestry to the descendants from a mixture of these ASI and ANI peoples.
Of course, movements and migrations did not stop after the steppe people. There were the ancient Greeks, the Turks, the Mongols, the Mughals, and the Europeans, to name a few. Perhaps the easiest way to think about the origins and diversity of people in India today is author Sidin Vadukut’s description in the book The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths Behind the Zero and Other Indian Glories:
“We are all, every single one of us, the outcomes of centuries of civilizational upheaval. We are part-Greek, part-Mongol, part- Persian, part-British, part-Mughal, part-French, Part-Portuguese, part-Arab, part-Turk, part-everything. Indeed, it would be entirely possible and plausible to draw up an individual’s family line which starts from the cities of Mohenjo-daro or Harappa, winds its way through an Aramaic-speaking scribe in Taxila, through to a Buddhist satrap in the Gangetic basin, and thence on to a Hindu priest in the Deccan plateau, then a Muslim trader on the Malabar coast, before winding its way into an Anglo-Franco-Indian family in Pondicherry.”
