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The 'petrous bone' is an inelegant but useful chunk of the human skull -- basically it protects your inner ear. But that's not all it protects. In recent years, genetic scientists working to extract DNA from ancient skeletons have discovered that, thanks to the extreme density of a particular region of the petrous bone (the bit shielding the cochlea, since you ask), they could sometimes harvest 100 times more DNA from it than from any other remaining tissue.
Now this somewhat macabre innovation may well resolve one of the most heated debates about the history of India.
As the dust of the petrous bones of a 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Haryana, settles, we may have the answer to a few questions that have vexed some of the best minds in history and science -- and a lot of politicians along the way:
Q: Were the people of the Harappan civilisation the original source of the Sanskritic language and culture of Vedic Hinduism? A: No.
Q: Do their genes survive as a significant component in India's current population? A: Most definitely.
Q: Were they closer to popular perceptions of 'Aryans' or of 'Dravidians'? A: Dravidians.
Q: Were they more akin to the South Indians or North Indians of today? A: South Indians.
All loaded questions, of course. A paper suggesting these conclusions is likely to be online in September and later published in the journal Science.
These revelations are part of the long-awaited and much-postponed results of an excavation conducted in 2015 by a team led by Dr Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice chancellor of Pune's Deccan College.
he archaeologist was referring to the fact that any research dealing with the Harappan civilisation would have to confront the Hindutva agenda of the government of India -- whose politics demands a genuflection to Vedic Hinduism as the origin of Indian civilisation.
For historians or anyone working on the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation, this is a complication. Indeed, when the Indus Valley Civilisation was first 'discovered' in the 1920s, colonial archaeologists quickly identified it as evidence of a pre-Vedic culture, which, they theorised, had been utterly destroyed by the advent of 'Aryan' invaders from the Northwest who represented the dawn of Hindu India.
In later years, most mainstream historians have discarded the 'Aryan invasion theory' or 'AIT' as an oversimplification -- while retaining a chronology that places the Vedic civilisation as a successor to the Indus Valley Civilisation.
And the Aryan invasion theory continues to rankle Hindutva nationalists even as it has taken root in South India as the core narrative of a popular politics which sees the Indus Valley Civilisation as a Dravidian culture that has survived 'Brahminical' invaders only south of the Vindhyas.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Meanwhile, the reality of who the Indus Valley Civilisation people were has remained a mystery. Shinde knows all too well the incongruous burden of expectations that has now settled on a 4,500-year-old resident (classified as 'I4411') of Rakhigarhi, a ramshackle village in the dusty khadar or floodplain of an almost extinguished river.
You may know of Rakhigarhi too: over the last decade-and-a-half, the name has become a staple of school textbooks, tourism pamphlets and journalism-invoked as the largest Harappan/Indus Valley site in India. In fact, since 2014, it has been regularly cited as 'even larger than Mohenjo-Daro' -- the archaeological site in Sindh, Pakistan, first excavated in the 1920s.
Despite the element of hyperbole, excavations here -- conducted intermittently since the late 1960s -- have established its significance as an extensive and enduring urban settlement with its beginnings arguably as early as the 7th millennium BCE.
Most importantly, the village with its seven teelas or mounds has produced enough evidence to identify it as the site of a 'mature' Harappan settlement of the 2nd and 3rd millennium BCE. In other words, a town that witnessed the rise and -- more than 4,000 years ago -- the mysterious fall, of India's first urban civilisation.
On the face of it, the single most startling revelation of the Rakhigarhi research may be what it doesn't talk about: the complete absence of any reference to the genetic marker R1a1 in the ancient DNA retrieved from the site.
This is significant because R1a1, often loosely called 'the 'Aryan gene', is now understood to have originated in a population of Bronze Age pastoralists who dispersed from a homeland in the Central Asian 'Pontic steppe' (the grasslands sprawling between the Black Sea and the Caspian) some 4,000 years ago. The genetic impact of their migrations has left a particularly strong and 'sex-biased', (i.e. male-driven) imprint on the populations of two geographically distant but linguistically related parts of the world: Northern India and Northern Europe.
"We are not discussing R1a," says Niraj Rai, the lead genetic researcher on the Rakhigarhi DNA project. "R1a is not there." The admission came wrapped in some prevarication but was all the more telling given that the Rakhigarhi data presented in this paper are derived primarily from the genetic material of 'I4411', a male individual -- R1a is a mutation seen only in samples of the male Y chromosome.
The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today.
Rai points out that the fact that haplogroup R1a did not show up in the Rakhigarhi sample could be attributed to the limited amount of genetic data retrieved. Or it could be because it's just not there. "We do not have much coverage of the Y chromosome regions [of the genome]," Rai says, revealing that they had retrieved more data from the mitochondrial and autosomal DNA in their sample (mitochondrial DNA reflects maternal descent and autosomal tests reveal genetic information inherited from both parents).
However, he was emphatic in acknowledging that while "a mass movement of Central Asians happened and significantly changed the South Asian genetic make-up", the inhabitants of ancient Rakhigarhi "do not have any affinity with the Central Asians". In other words, while the citizens of the Indus Valley Civilisation had none of this ancestry, you, dear average Indian reader, owe 17.5 per cent of your male lineage to people from the Steppe.
It's worth noting that this genetic footprint is of an entirely more impressive order than the relatively inconsequential biological legacy of Islamic or European colonial invasions that often preoccupy the political imagination in India.
So much for what we have now learned about who our 4,500-year-old ancestor 'I4411' was not. What about who he was? The short answer, says Rai, is that I4411 "has more affinity with South Indian tribal populations". Notably, the Irula in the Nilgiri highlands.
A draft of the paper argues that this individual could be modelled as part of a clade [a group sharing descent from a common ancestor] with the Irula but not with groups with higher proportions of West Eurasian related ancestry such as Punjabis, and goes on to suggest that the inhabitants of Rakhigarhi probably spoke an early Dravidian language.
However, the results also show clear evidence of mixing with another population from outside the subcontinent, labelled 'Iranian agriculturalist'. This is a population that had been identified in earlier studies of ancient DNA and is consistent with the hypothesis that some agricultural technologies were introduced to the subcontinent through contact with the 'fertile crescent' in West Asia, widely regarded as one of the birthplaces of Eurasian agriculture in the 5th-8th millennium BC.
For an older generation of Indians, the Rakhigarhi results may sound like a reboot of half-remembered schoolbooks: 'Dravidian' Harappans followed by Vedic horsemen from the Steppe. And for anyone who has been following more recent developments in population genetics too, the latest findings will sound familiar.
Meanwhile, in the popular press, coverage of recent discoveries in the archaeology or genetics of Harappan India has been obsessively and distractingly focused on the 'Aryan invasion theory'. What gives? And why does it matter? The answer has to do with the fact that recent years have been a very busy time in ancient Indian history. And modern Indian politics.
SKULDUGGERY
In the months preceding the news of the Rakhigarhi findings, anticipation was high, and fuelled by a series of related research papers and their journalistic glosses, an amusing if acrimonious debate erupted in the social media and the blogosphere. Shinde for his part was given to dropping broad hints that the Rakhigarhi results would point to a 'continuity' between the population of the ancient town and its present-day inhabitants (predominantly Jats, a population marked by pronounced R1a Steppe ancestry).
Perhaps it should be no surprise, in these fractious times, that fake news would be deployed as a weapon in the civil war that has consumed ancient Indian history. In January this year, a Hindi newspaper carried an article purportedly based on an interview with Rai, asserting that the Rakhigarhi DNA was, in fact, a close match for North Indian Brahmins and that the findings would establish that India was the 'native place' of the Indo-European language family.
"Utter crud!" was the reaction of David Wesolowski, host of the Eurogenes blog-well regarded by some of the world's leading geneticists as a go-to site for the latest debate. Wesolowski's site witnessed frequent arguments over the likelihood that Rakhigarhi DNA would turn up the R1a1 marker.
Here, extended and nuanced discussions of the finer points of molecular evidence would often conclude with kiss-offs along the lines of "you're an idiot" or "you're going to need psychiatric help when the results are out". In the event, Wesolowski's own prediction, "Expect no R1a in Harappa but a lot of ASI [Ancestral South Indian]", would prove to be spot on.
Behind the surly invective and the journalistic misdirection were rumours and whispers of a face-off between a rising tide of scientific evidence and the political pressures of nativist, Hindutva sentiments.
The saga of 'Hindutvist history' is by now another familiar tale, with its origins in early Hindu nationalist reaction to colonial archaeology and linguistics, a monomaniacal obsession with refuting the 'Aryan invasion theory'.
It is perhaps most clearly expressed in an irate passage from former RSS sarsanghchalak M.S. Golwalkar's screed Bunch of Thoughts (1966): "It was the wily foreigner, the Britisher, who carried on the insidious propaganda that we were never one nation, that we were never the children of the soil but mere upstarts having no better claim than the foreign hordes of Muslims or the British over this country."
In recent years, this resentful impulse has focused particularly intently on asserting the wishful conclusion that the Indus Valley Civilisation itself must be 'Vedic'. This has understandably gained traction in the popular imagination in tandem with the political rise of Hindutva. In 2013, Amish Tripathi, a bestselling author of 'Hinduistical fantasy' novels, gave vent to the keening desire for a 'Vedic IVC' in a short fiction in which future archaeologists discover clinching evidence "that the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Vedic-erroneously called Aryan-civilisation were one and the same." The story is poignantly titled, 'Science Validates Vedic History'.
Inevitably, the advent of a BJP majority government in the general elections of 2014 has given new energy -- and funding-to the self-gratifying urges of Hindutvist history.
The charge has been led by the Union minister for culture Mahesh Sharma, who has prioritised the project of 'rewriting Indian history', whether by appointing a pliant obscurantist as head of the Indian Council of Historical Research or promoting the 'research' of para-scientific outfits such as I-SERVE (Institute of Scientific Research on Vedas) and a former customs officer who uses hobby astronomy software to establish that "thus Shri Ram was born on 10th January in 5114 BC...around 12 to 1 noontime [in Ayodhya]".
In March this year a Reuters report revealed details of a meeting of a 'history committee' convened by Sharma at the office of the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in January 2017. Its task, according to the committee chairman K.N. Dixit, was "to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history".
https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/magaz...-1327247-2018-08-31?__twitter_impression=true
Now this somewhat macabre innovation may well resolve one of the most heated debates about the history of India.
As the dust of the petrous bones of a 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Haryana, settles, we may have the answer to a few questions that have vexed some of the best minds in history and science -- and a lot of politicians along the way:
Q: Were the people of the Harappan civilisation the original source of the Sanskritic language and culture of Vedic Hinduism? A: No.
Q: Do their genes survive as a significant component in India's current population? A: Most definitely.
Q: Were they closer to popular perceptions of 'Aryans' or of 'Dravidians'? A: Dravidians.
Q: Were they more akin to the South Indians or North Indians of today? A: South Indians.
All loaded questions, of course. A paper suggesting these conclusions is likely to be online in September and later published in the journal Science.
These revelations are part of the long-awaited and much-postponed results of an excavation conducted in 2015 by a team led by Dr Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice chancellor of Pune's Deccan College.
he archaeologist was referring to the fact that any research dealing with the Harappan civilisation would have to confront the Hindutva agenda of the government of India -- whose politics demands a genuflection to Vedic Hinduism as the origin of Indian civilisation.
For historians or anyone working on the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation, this is a complication. Indeed, when the Indus Valley Civilisation was first 'discovered' in the 1920s, colonial archaeologists quickly identified it as evidence of a pre-Vedic culture, which, they theorised, had been utterly destroyed by the advent of 'Aryan' invaders from the Northwest who represented the dawn of Hindu India.
In later years, most mainstream historians have discarded the 'Aryan invasion theory' or 'AIT' as an oversimplification -- while retaining a chronology that places the Vedic civilisation as a successor to the Indus Valley Civilisation.
And the Aryan invasion theory continues to rankle Hindutva nationalists even as it has taken root in South India as the core narrative of a popular politics which sees the Indus Valley Civilisation as a Dravidian culture that has survived 'Brahminical' invaders only south of the Vindhyas.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Meanwhile, the reality of who the Indus Valley Civilisation people were has remained a mystery. Shinde knows all too well the incongruous burden of expectations that has now settled on a 4,500-year-old resident (classified as 'I4411') of Rakhigarhi, a ramshackle village in the dusty khadar or floodplain of an almost extinguished river.
You may know of Rakhigarhi too: over the last decade-and-a-half, the name has become a staple of school textbooks, tourism pamphlets and journalism-invoked as the largest Harappan/Indus Valley site in India. In fact, since 2014, it has been regularly cited as 'even larger than Mohenjo-Daro' -- the archaeological site in Sindh, Pakistan, first excavated in the 1920s.
Despite the element of hyperbole, excavations here -- conducted intermittently since the late 1960s -- have established its significance as an extensive and enduring urban settlement with its beginnings arguably as early as the 7th millennium BCE.
Most importantly, the village with its seven teelas or mounds has produced enough evidence to identify it as the site of a 'mature' Harappan settlement of the 2nd and 3rd millennium BCE. In other words, a town that witnessed the rise and -- more than 4,000 years ago -- the mysterious fall, of India's first urban civilisation.
On the face of it, the single most startling revelation of the Rakhigarhi research may be what it doesn't talk about: the complete absence of any reference to the genetic marker R1a1 in the ancient DNA retrieved from the site.
This is significant because R1a1, often loosely called 'the 'Aryan gene', is now understood to have originated in a population of Bronze Age pastoralists who dispersed from a homeland in the Central Asian 'Pontic steppe' (the grasslands sprawling between the Black Sea and the Caspian) some 4,000 years ago. The genetic impact of their migrations has left a particularly strong and 'sex-biased', (i.e. male-driven) imprint on the populations of two geographically distant but linguistically related parts of the world: Northern India and Northern Europe.
"We are not discussing R1a," says Niraj Rai, the lead genetic researcher on the Rakhigarhi DNA project. "R1a is not there." The admission came wrapped in some prevarication but was all the more telling given that the Rakhigarhi data presented in this paper are derived primarily from the genetic material of 'I4411', a male individual -- R1a is a mutation seen only in samples of the male Y chromosome.
The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today.
Rai points out that the fact that haplogroup R1a did not show up in the Rakhigarhi sample could be attributed to the limited amount of genetic data retrieved. Or it could be because it's just not there. "We do not have much coverage of the Y chromosome regions [of the genome]," Rai says, revealing that they had retrieved more data from the mitochondrial and autosomal DNA in their sample (mitochondrial DNA reflects maternal descent and autosomal tests reveal genetic information inherited from both parents).
However, he was emphatic in acknowledging that while "a mass movement of Central Asians happened and significantly changed the South Asian genetic make-up", the inhabitants of ancient Rakhigarhi "do not have any affinity with the Central Asians". In other words, while the citizens of the Indus Valley Civilisation had none of this ancestry, you, dear average Indian reader, owe 17.5 per cent of your male lineage to people from the Steppe.
It's worth noting that this genetic footprint is of an entirely more impressive order than the relatively inconsequential biological legacy of Islamic or European colonial invasions that often preoccupy the political imagination in India.
So much for what we have now learned about who our 4,500-year-old ancestor 'I4411' was not. What about who he was? The short answer, says Rai, is that I4411 "has more affinity with South Indian tribal populations". Notably, the Irula in the Nilgiri highlands.
A draft of the paper argues that this individual could be modelled as part of a clade [a group sharing descent from a common ancestor] with the Irula but not with groups with higher proportions of West Eurasian related ancestry such as Punjabis, and goes on to suggest that the inhabitants of Rakhigarhi probably spoke an early Dravidian language.
However, the results also show clear evidence of mixing with another population from outside the subcontinent, labelled 'Iranian agriculturalist'. This is a population that had been identified in earlier studies of ancient DNA and is consistent with the hypothesis that some agricultural technologies were introduced to the subcontinent through contact with the 'fertile crescent' in West Asia, widely regarded as one of the birthplaces of Eurasian agriculture in the 5th-8th millennium BC.
For an older generation of Indians, the Rakhigarhi results may sound like a reboot of half-remembered schoolbooks: 'Dravidian' Harappans followed by Vedic horsemen from the Steppe. And for anyone who has been following more recent developments in population genetics too, the latest findings will sound familiar.
Meanwhile, in the popular press, coverage of recent discoveries in the archaeology or genetics of Harappan India has been obsessively and distractingly focused on the 'Aryan invasion theory'. What gives? And why does it matter? The answer has to do with the fact that recent years have been a very busy time in ancient Indian history. And modern Indian politics.
SKULDUGGERY
In the months preceding the news of the Rakhigarhi findings, anticipation was high, and fuelled by a series of related research papers and their journalistic glosses, an amusing if acrimonious debate erupted in the social media and the blogosphere. Shinde for his part was given to dropping broad hints that the Rakhigarhi results would point to a 'continuity' between the population of the ancient town and its present-day inhabitants (predominantly Jats, a population marked by pronounced R1a Steppe ancestry).
Perhaps it should be no surprise, in these fractious times, that fake news would be deployed as a weapon in the civil war that has consumed ancient Indian history. In January this year, a Hindi newspaper carried an article purportedly based on an interview with Rai, asserting that the Rakhigarhi DNA was, in fact, a close match for North Indian Brahmins and that the findings would establish that India was the 'native place' of the Indo-European language family.
"Utter crud!" was the reaction of David Wesolowski, host of the Eurogenes blog-well regarded by some of the world's leading geneticists as a go-to site for the latest debate. Wesolowski's site witnessed frequent arguments over the likelihood that Rakhigarhi DNA would turn up the R1a1 marker.
Here, extended and nuanced discussions of the finer points of molecular evidence would often conclude with kiss-offs along the lines of "you're an idiot" or "you're going to need psychiatric help when the results are out". In the event, Wesolowski's own prediction, "Expect no R1a in Harappa but a lot of ASI [Ancestral South Indian]", would prove to be spot on.
Behind the surly invective and the journalistic misdirection were rumours and whispers of a face-off between a rising tide of scientific evidence and the political pressures of nativist, Hindutva sentiments.
The saga of 'Hindutvist history' is by now another familiar tale, with its origins in early Hindu nationalist reaction to colonial archaeology and linguistics, a monomaniacal obsession with refuting the 'Aryan invasion theory'.
It is perhaps most clearly expressed in an irate passage from former RSS sarsanghchalak M.S. Golwalkar's screed Bunch of Thoughts (1966): "It was the wily foreigner, the Britisher, who carried on the insidious propaganda that we were never one nation, that we were never the children of the soil but mere upstarts having no better claim than the foreign hordes of Muslims or the British over this country."
In recent years, this resentful impulse has focused particularly intently on asserting the wishful conclusion that the Indus Valley Civilisation itself must be 'Vedic'. This has understandably gained traction in the popular imagination in tandem with the political rise of Hindutva. In 2013, Amish Tripathi, a bestselling author of 'Hinduistical fantasy' novels, gave vent to the keening desire for a 'Vedic IVC' in a short fiction in which future archaeologists discover clinching evidence "that the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Vedic-erroneously called Aryan-civilisation were one and the same." The story is poignantly titled, 'Science Validates Vedic History'.
Inevitably, the advent of a BJP majority government in the general elections of 2014 has given new energy -- and funding-to the self-gratifying urges of Hindutvist history.
The charge has been led by the Union minister for culture Mahesh Sharma, who has prioritised the project of 'rewriting Indian history', whether by appointing a pliant obscurantist as head of the Indian Council of Historical Research or promoting the 'research' of para-scientific outfits such as I-SERVE (Institute of Scientific Research on Vedas) and a former customs officer who uses hobby astronomy software to establish that "thus Shri Ram was born on 10th January in 5114 BC...around 12 to 1 noontime [in Ayodhya]".
In March this year a Reuters report revealed details of a meeting of a 'history committee' convened by Sharma at the office of the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in January 2017. Its task, according to the committee chairman K.N. Dixit, was "to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history".
https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/magaz...-1327247-2018-08-31?__twitter_impression=true
