Review | India’s genetic ‘pizza’: new evidence of early Indians’ influence and how Aryans, Sanskrit and Vedas were latecomers
- Tony Joseph’s book Early Indians shows how understanding the human genome is changing people’s ideas about archaeology
- It also challenges the Eurocentric perspective on early human civilisations, and may upset Indians who believe their unique culture began 4,000 years ago
Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph, pub. Juggernaut. 4/5 stars
The use of first-person plurals in the title of Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors And Where We Came From should not put non-Indians off.
Based on and catalysed by the most recent genetic research, Tony Joseph has written a clear, readable and, for those unfamiliar with the subject, fascinating history of Indians as a people. It will also serve both as a primer to the way the ability to read the human genome is revolutionising archaeology as well as a counterpoint to the Eurocentric perspective of many treatments of early human history.
What is now India had the world’s largest human population around 20,000 years ago, partly because modern humans got to India early, something like 65,000 years ago. Although there is some argument about this date, and whether isolated bands might have it made it there earlier, this is far earlier than Homo sapiens made it to Europe, the route to which seems to have been blocked by some combination of poor weather and Neanderthals.
The genetic ancestry of these first Indians “still constitutes between 50 and 65 per cent for most population groups”. (In Europe, by contrast, “the percentage of the original hunter-gatherer ancestry has gone down to single digits” due to a couple of large population replacements in the past 10,000 years.)
