2
At 7.58 a.m. local time, on 26 December 2004, an undersea earthquake shook the ocean floor north-west of the island of Sumatra. The earthquake of 9.1 magnitude unleashed a tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people and caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage. The devastation was not limited to nearby Sumatra or Thailand but was spread across the Indian Ocean—India, Sri Lanka and even as far away as East Africa. It was a reminder that the Indian Ocean is not merely a geographic term but an ecosystem interconnected by both human and natural forces.
It appears that such tsunamis have taken place many times in the past and are remembered in the oral traditions of aboriginal tribes in the region. When rescue parties arrived to look for survivors among the Onge and Jarawa people of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, they found that the tribes had suffered almost no casualties despite being very close to the epicentre. Evidently, they had followed an old oral tradition that instructed them to move inland to higher ground whenever the ground shook.1 These tribes are said to have arrived on these islands more than 30,000 years ago as part of early human migrations and must have experienced such deadly tsunamis many times in their history. In contrast, the neighbouring Nicobarese tribes, who arrived in the islands less than 600 years ago, did not have this traditional memory and suffered hundreds of casualties. An Indian military base on Car Nicobar Island was also badly damaged. Thus, in order to understand the Indian Ocean, it is necessary to go back right to the beginning.
The Making of the Indian Ocean
The purpose of this chapter is to give the reader a broad overview of how the geographic and human landscape of the Indian Ocean rim took shape in prehistoric times. Those who have read my previous book, Land of the Seven Rivers, will be familiar with some of the material presented here, especially that pertaining to India, but I hope they will indulge me as I narrate the story of the broader region.
Till a hundred years ago, it was assumed that the relative positions of the continents and oceans were fixed. Geological change was seen in terms of vertical and not horizontal movement. This view was radically challenged by Alfred Wegener in 1912 and further elaborated in his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915. Wegener argued that today’s continents had once been part of a gigantic supercontinent and had later drifted apart like icebergs. The hypothesis explained an observation that had puzzled cartographers like Ortelius since the sixteenth century—the fact that the continents, especially those on opposite sides of the Atlantic, seemed to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
We now know that Wegener was right and that the planet’s geological history has been defined by the periodic converging and drifting apart of its land masses. Around 270 million years ago, the continental land masses converged to form a gigantic supercontinent called Pangea. A map of Pangea would show India, Australia, Madagascar and Antarctica wedged together along what is now the eastern coast of Africa. In other words, the India Ocean simply did not exist.
It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared around 230 million years ago. The supercontinent appears to have held together till around 175 million years ago when it began to split up due to a sequence of rifts. First, it broke up into two large land masses—the northern continent of Laurasia (which included North America, Europe and Asia) and the southern continent of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica). Incidentally, the name Gondwana is derived from the Gond tribe of central India.
Next, Gondwana itself began to break up. Geological studies suggest that India and Madagascar broke away together from Africa about 158–160 million years ago and then from Antarctica–Australia about 130 million years ago. Next, about 90 million years ago, India broke away from Madagascar and started drifting north. As it drifted north, the Indian craton passed over the Reunion hotspot, an area of long-term eruption, and experienced a period of intense volcanic activity that created the Deccan Traps in peninsular India. Scientists speculate that this volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs (with the exception of those dinosaurs that evolved into birds).
There is some dispute about the exact trajectory of the northward movement, but around 55 million years ago India collided with the Eurasian plate. The collision pushed up and created the Himalayas. As a result, the seabed that had existed between India and Asia was thrust into the sky. This explains why fossils of marine animals can be found high up in the mountain range.2 The Indian plate continues to push into Asia and the Himalayas are still rising by about 5 mm every year. This is why the Himalayan range is seismically very active and experiences frequent earthquakes.
Meanwhile, Australia and Antarctica began to tear apart like a zipper between 85 and 45 million years ago. Once separated, the Australian plate shifted north and became fused with the Indian plate, thus creating the Indo-Australian plate. This is a very simplified version of the sequence of tectonic events that created the Indian Ocean, and the process is still not complete. The Red Sea is the result of a growing rift between the Arabian and African plates, while East Africa is breaking away from the rest of the continent thereby creating the East African Rift Valley—the landscape where our species evolved.
We may even be witnessing the creation of new rifts. The western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, runs along the boundary between the Indo-Australian plate and the Sunda plate (which covers much of South East Asia). This is why the area is prone to frequent earthquakes and tsunamis; this is what caused the deadly tsunami of 26 December 2004. Lesser known are a pair of strong undersea earthquakes that took place off the Sumatra coast in April 2012. These two quakes took place away from the main fault line and seismologists see it as a sign that the Indian and Australian plates are separating. The reason for this new rift is that the collision of the Indian plate into Asia has slowed it down whereas Australia is still moving quickly.3 The resulting pressures will now cause the Indo-Australian plate to break into its constituents—a process that will probably cause frequent earthquakes in this area and could produce deadly tsunamis in the future.
In addition to tectonic movements, the Indian Ocean landscape is constantly being moulded by many other natural and environmental factors. The coastlines, for instance, have moved as the sea level has changed due to the periodic warming/cooling of our planet. Since the peak of the last Ice Age 18–20,000 years ago, the sea level has risen by 120 metres as the ice sheets have melted. This process flooded the coasts and, as we shall see, had a major impact on early human history. The sea level began to stabilize about 7000 years ago (i.e. 5000 BC) and remained broadly unchanged between AD 0 and AD 1800, but it has again begun to gradually rise since the nineteenth century.4
Numerous other factors also affect the Indian Ocean landscape—the shifting of sand and silt by ocean currents and rivers and, of course, human intervention. The complex interaction between all these factors means that the landscape is alive and constantly changing. Till very recently, histories were written as if the terrain was static but a growing number of researchers have begun to incorporate the impact of an evolving landscape into their writings.
Of Humans Big and Small
Modern humans appeared in the East African Rift Valley about 200,000 years ago. Being an exceedingly modest lot, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, we would come to name ourselves Homo Sapien, that is, ‘wise man’. Note that there were several other hominids around at that time and it would not have been obvious at this stage that Homo sapiens would one day be the sole surviving human species. The Neanderthals were well established in Europe and the Middle East. The closely related Denisovans roamed across many parts of Asia. We have only discovered the existence of the Denisovans by chance in 2010 due to the genetic sequencing of an ancient finger bone.
There were also isolated remnants of earlier human groups. On the small island of Flores, Indonesia, one such group went through a process of dwarfing. It is unclear how archaic humans reached this island but it is likely that this happened at a time when sea levels were low and the island was easily accessible from the mainland. When sea levels rose, the group became trapped on an island with limited resources. In response to scarcity, the survivors reduced in size and evolved into a species named Homo floresiensis that reached a maximum height of one metre and a weight of 25 kgs. Nonetheless, they continued to produce stone tools and seemed to have hunted the island’s dwarf elephants. There is evidence to suggest that this dwarf species may have survived till as recently as 12,000 years ago.5
At some stage, early Homo sapiens began to expand out of their original habitat in the Rift Valley. Thus, the first human eyes to look upon the open sea would have seen the waves of the Indian Ocean crashing into the East African shore. We know that at least one group migrated north, and archaeological remains found at the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel suggest that Homo sapiens reached the Levant around 120,000 years ago. However, this initial foray out of Africa appears to have been unsuccessful and this group either died out or withdrew back into the African continent. Perhaps the climate turned colder and the Neanderthals, better adapted to cold, reoccupied the area.
So who were these early Homo sapiens? Genetic surveys suggest that the Khoi-San people of south-western Africa are the oldest surviving human population as they have the greatest genetic variation.6 Note that Khoi-San is a composite term derived from the hunter–gatherer San people, also known as Kalahari ‘bushmen’, and the closely related Khoi people who engage in herding. Right at the onset, let me clarify that the Khoi-San are not a relic population of ‘living fossils’. They are modern Homo sapiens who happen to carry the wider genetic mix from which the rest of us derive our ancestry.
The Long Walk to Australia
Most of the evidence now suggests that a small number of people, perhaps a single band, crossed over from Africa to the Arabian peninsula near what is now Yemen about 65–70,000 years ago. All non-Africans, despite their superficial differences, are said to be descendants of this tiny tribe.7We do not know why they left Africa but major droughts may have played a role as studies suggest that the water in Lake Malawi dropped by 95 per cent.8 The landscape these humans were traversing would have looked very different from what we see now. The planet was a lot cooler, sea levels were far lower and shorelines extended 50–100 kms further out from today’s contours. Thus, the hop over from what is now Djibouti to Yemen, across the Bab-el-Mandeb, would probably have been a short journey. Unless they crossed during the brief periods that the strait was dry land, it does suggest that early Homo sapiens already had the capability to build some sort of raft.
The Yemen–Oman coast encountered by the migrants would have been somewhat wetter than it is now and the Indian Ocean monsoons probably watered this area. Even today, a small area of Oman gets monsoon rains. As our ancestors moved further north, they would have arrived at what is now the Persian Gulf. However, at that time the whole area was above water forming a well-watered plain. As pointed out by researchers like Jeffrey Rose, the Persian Gulf ‘was once a low-lying floodplain beginning at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, the Karun River draining off the Iranian Plateau, and the Wadi Batin River flowing across northern Arabia. Together, these systems joined together into the Ur-Schatt River Valley. Further downstream, the Ur-Schatt was fed by additional surface runoff from both eastern Arabia as well as the Zagros Mountains. The Ur-Schatt catchment zone terminates at a large lake basin (>100,000 km2) positioned in the heart of the Gulf some 140 m below current sea level.’9
In other words, the ‘Gulf Oasis’ was a veritable Garden of Eden and there was probably a significant expansion in population. Soon, they began to spread out along the Makran coast into India.10 Today, the dry, sparsely populated deserts of Baluchistan look like a barrier between the worlds of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, but 60,000 years ago the coast was much wetter and acted as an important grassland/scrubland corridor for early human migrations. The coastline was also much further out and what is now the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat was not a peninsula at all but a continuous coast. Thus, the stretch from the Persian Gulf to north-west India was a genetic and cultural continuum for most of prehistory.
There is an interesting twist in the human story at this stage. As already pointed out, there were other human species around when Homo sapiens made their way out of Africa. They would all go extinct over time—the Neanderthals, for instance, steadily withdrew into Western Europe till the last of them died out in Gibraltar about 24,000 years ago.11 We do not know exactly why they died out. Changes in climate may have played a role but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the arrival of Homo sapiens was an important factor. Perhaps the Neanderthals lost their best hunting grounds to the new entrants or perhaps our ancestors brought deadly diseases with them from Africa. Nonetheless, scholars have often speculated that there may have been some interbreeding between Homo sapiens and other humans.
Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Plank Institute, Liepzig, finally cracked the puzzle when they discovered that around 1–4 per cent of the DNA of all non-Africans is derived from Neanderthals. This interbreeding, moreover, appears to have happened soon after Homo sapiens arrived in the Middle East. Most of the offspring from such mating were probably infertile, like mules derived from the mating of horses and donkeys, but a small number were able to pass on their genes. This means that the Neanderthals did not entirely die out but live on within us. Of course, this finding merely confirms what has long been suspected by anyone who has attempted to drive on the roads of Delhi.
The journey of how Svante Pääbo made this discovery is itself a story worth reading. Interested readers should pick up a copy of his autobiographical book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, published by Basic Books in 2014.
A research paper published in 2014 further reveals that the Neanderthal DNA that survived relates mostly to hair and skin.12 Although we do not yet know what this implies, it should be noted that Neanderthals lived in a cold climate and were light-skinned and may also have had light hair. In contrast, early Homo sapiens would have all been uniformly dark given their tropical origins. One possibility is that Neanderthals introduced a variation in skin tone that would later get exacerbated by natural selection as modern humans settled in different climate zones due to factors like vitamin D deficiency, melanin protection from sun and so on.
About 50–55,000 years ago, a small adventurous group seems to have left the Persian Gulf–India continuum and headed east. They probably made their way along the Indian coast on foot and kept going till they reached what is now South East Asia. Almost the whole tribe seems to have kept moving since they have left only the tiniest genetic traces of their passage through the Indian subcontinent. When the group arrived in South East Asia, the sea level was much lower than it is today, and many of the islands of the region would have been connected by land to the Asian mainland. Thus, the group would have been able to spread out quickly on foot. Their descendants are the Melanesians who now live in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and parts of eastern Indonesia.
The early Melanesians were initially traversing territories that were already inhabited by other human species. There is evidence that they interbred with at least one such group, the Denisovans. Genetic studies show that Denisovans contributed up to 6 per cent of the DNA of Melanesians. Given all this mixing, forget racial purity, it seems most of us are not even pure Homo sapiens!
Then, about 45,000 years ago, a branch of this Melanesian group hopped across to Australia. Even allowing for lower sea levels and extended coastlines, this would have required the ability to cross a significant body of water. We know this because the flora and fauna of Asia and Australia have remained separate despite being so close to each other. An imaginary line called the Wallace Line, that runs between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok, separates the two ecosystems. Although the two islands are barely 35 kms apart, the channel between them seems to be deep enough for animals from mainland Asia (such as the tiger) to make it to Bali but not Lombok even when sea levels were at their lowest.
The ancestors of the Australian aborigines, therefore, must have acquired the ability to build rafts that could cross seas that other human species could not. The arrival of humans in Australia was a major event. So far, Homo sapiens had been traversing lands that had witnessed other hominid species but they were now entering virgin territory. Their entry into Australia had a dramatic impact on the flora and fauna of the continent.
As an island that had been long separated from other continents, Australia was home to plants and animals that had evolved in isolation for a long time. There was a 200-kg, 2-metre-tall kangaroo, a marsupial lion, giant koalas and flightless birds twice the size of an ostrich. The diprotodon, a giant wombat weighing 2-and-a-half tons roamed the forests.13 Many of these mega-creatures were marsupials who gave birth to small, helpless offspring that they then nursed in an abdominal pouch. Even the smaller creatures were strange, such as the platypus which is an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet and a duck’s bill.
Human entry into this ecosystem had a devastating effect. Within a few thousand years almost all of the mega-fauna vanished. Of twenty-four species weighing over 50 kgs, twenty-three became extinct. It is thought unlikely that natural cycles like climate change would have caused this mass extinction since these creatures had already survived several cycles. Hunting for food was probably only one of the ways in which humans caused extinction. The ancestors of the Australian aborigines probably upset the overall ecological balance in several other ways. For instance, they may have used fire to clear and manage their landscape in order to benefit some species at the expense of others (contrary to popular perception, many hunter–gatherers actively managed their territories). The eucalyptus, which is rare in fossil records till 45,000 years ago, suddenly became very common at the expense of other plant species. In turn, this would have upset the whole food chain. This fits a pattern that we witness repeatedly through history whenever humans entered a virgin ecosystem like Madagascar or New Zealand.
We know virtually nothing about the individuals who made up these groups of early human explorers—their names, their world view, their relationships with each other. However, they have left behind paintings and handprints in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Discovered in the 1950s, they were originally thought to be 10,000 years old but have recently been dated to almost 40,000 years ago, among the oldest in the world.14 The handprints, which include those of both adults and children, are particularly intriguing as if they are reaching out to us through the mists of time. They were created by spitting out a mouthful of mineral ochre over an outstretched hand in order to leave a stencilled outline. The result is very similar to the handprints made on rock surfaces by Australian aborigines well into modern times.
Populating the Indian Ocean Rim
As narrated above, a small group of modern humans made it out of Africa about 65,000 years ago and around 45,000 years ago they reached Australia, on the other side of the Indian Ocean. A substantial population remained in the Persian Gulf–north India continuum and one by one other groups migrated out.
Some 40,000 years ago, another group made its way across India to South East Asia. We cannot be sure but 42,000-year-old stone tools found recently in Purulia, in the Indian state of West Bengal, may be the remains of this migration.15 When these people finally arrived in South East Asia, they would have found a terrain quite different from what we see today. As already mentioned, the sea level was a lot lower and the coastlines much further out. Islands like Sumatra, Java and Borneo were joined to the Asian mainland as part of a land mass called Sundaland. The new group, however, seems to have taken a more northward route than the Melanesians and settled in what is now Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, parts of southern China and probably extended out to adjoining areas that are now under water.
A recent study by a consortium of geneticists argues that this group of hunter–gatherers, usually associated with Y-chromosome haplogroup O-M175, became the ancestors of most people who today live in East and South East Asia including the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Tibetan, Burmese, Malay, Filipino and most Indonesians.16 The Polynesians scattered across the Pacific are also derived from this group, as are a number of tribes who live in eastern India. At this stage, however, we are still dealing with small bands of closely related people. We will later see how subgroups descended from this migration would colonize the eastern Indian Ocean rim and even make their way to Madagascar.
Meanwhile, new groups continued to be pumped out by the Persian Gulf–north India area. Some headed into Europe, some decided to brave the freezing Siberian cold and a few even headed back to Africa. One specific group headed out around 30–35,000 years ago and settled in southern India. Not only was the coastline further out but Sri Lanka was then attached to India and there was a large area of dry land off the coast of present-day Tamil Nadu. In fact, as the planet drifted into a new Ice Age, the new migrants would have witnessed a further expansion of land area as sea levels kept falling. This group would evolve into what geneticists call ‘Ancestral South Indians’, which is one of the two main founder populations from which most Indians derive their ancestry.17 Another group would make its way to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (the ancestors of the Onge).
One should not be under the impression that the population ranging from the Middle East to north-western India was static except for the occasional outward migration. This population too was undergoing constant mutations and churn. Just as an illustration, take the male lineage known by geneticists as R1. This lineage emerged somewhere in the Persian Gulf–north India continuum, possibly Iran, before the last Ice Age. At some point, around 25,000 years ago, it gave rise to a western branch, R1b, and an eastern branch, R1a.18 The former would eventually find its way to Western Europe where R1b is today the most common lineage. In contrast, R1a (particularly a subgroup, R1a1a) would later become an important component of the genetic cocktail that scientists call the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ who are the second of the two major founder populations from whom most Indians have descended.
The Indian reader may be tempted here to think of the Ancestral South Indians (ASI) as the Dravidians and the Ancestral North Indians (ANI) as the Aryans. While I have nothing against the words themselves, one should be cautious about using the terms as they are often used in the context of bogus nineteenth-century racial theories. The ANI and ASI are just different genetic cocktails and not ‘pure’ races. Moreover, we are dealing here with Stone Age bands and not horse-drawn chariots, cities and iron weapons that were said to be part of the Aryan–Dravidian rivalry.
This is a very simplified and stylized account of how the Indian Ocean rim was populated by modern humans. In reality, there would have been back-and-forth movements, dead ends and near extinctions. Also note that the genetic and archaeological evidence is still flowing in and the narrative is not set in stone, but the new information fits together much better than unreliable theories based on linguistics.
A further word of caution is warranted here. We are still dealing with tiny bands of Stone Age hunter–gatherers. A number of factors decided who died out and who survived and flourished—availability of food, changing climate, disease, tribal wars, the decisions of leaders and pure chance. A small difference in circumstances at this stage would show up as a big difference in the population distributions of later times. This is why anyone using the genetic data on early humans to support grand theories of racial and cultural superiority is missing the point.
The Age of Ice
Most traditional accounts about the emergence of civilization roughly run along the following script. Farming is ‘discovered’ somewhere in the Middle East and then spreads quickly, often with the help of Neolithic migrants who awe the locals with this new technology. Overwhelmed by the awesomeness of agriculture, hunter–gatherers leave their traditional life in droves and take to cultivating wheat and barley. This switch to farming is seen to imply large improvements in the quality of life and consequently, steady increases in population. At some point, it gets crowded enough to allow the building of cities and the emergence of civilization. Wonderful story, but it is mostly untrue.
The last major Ice Age is key to understanding the sequence of events. The cycle of cooling started about 30,000 years ago and temperatures kept falling till the Ice Age peaked about 18–20,000 years ago. At the glacial maximum, one third of the Earth’s land surface was covered in ice (compared to less than an eighth today) and half of the oceanic surface.19 With so much water locked up in ice, sea levels dropped dramatically from 50 m below present-day levels 30,000 years ago to around 130 m below at the peak.
Falling sea levels, in turn, exposed large tracts of land. In South East Asia, Sundaland took over most of what is now the Gulf of Thailand and extended far into the South China Sea. The Ancestral South Indians would have witnessed very large tracts being opened up along the Indian coast, especially to the south-east. The Ancestral North Indians, who were newly coalescing into an identifiable group, would have been able to walk more than 150 kms out from today’s Gujarat coast.
The retreat of the sea, however, did not make life easier for our ancestors. Many places had become just too cold but, even in warmer latitudes, climate became a lot drier and many rivers and lakes dried up. Central Asia became a very cold, dry desert that could support few animals or humans. Further south, the monsoons were still active but much weaker than today. The Himalayas were covered in glaciers and north-western areas of the Indian subcontinent may have been steppe-like temperate grasslands. We have evidence that even places like Bengal were relatively dry at the peak of the Ice Age. In Africa, the Sahara expanded by around 500 kms along its southern edge while Lake Victoria almost entirely dried up. At its peak, the sands of the Kalahari desert extended almost to the plains of the Zaire River in central Africa.
As one can imagine, the sharp increase in aridity caused a great deal of turmoil. In many places, people were forced to abandon old hunting grounds and move closer to the remaining rivers. The Sahara savannah had so far supported a significant population but desertification forced many to shift to the Nile. Note that the arid conditions meant that the Nile was not the broad river of earlier and later times but a modest tangle of braided channels that may not have even reached the Mediterranean.20
Surrounded by desert, the people settling along the Nile ‘oasis’ became increasingly sedentary. The ‘oasis’ ran from Sudan to Cairo, around 800 kms, but was no more than a few kilometres wide. We have evidence that human population steadily increased over time, probably through a combination of local births and further inward migration. This must have increased the pressures on the system and we even have the earliest evidence of a battle between two groups. Given the growing pressure, around 15,000 years ago, we can see signs of organized food production in the Nile floodplain—not quite farms but the active management of a semi-wild ecosystem, distinct from being a nomadic hunter-gatherer. The evidence suggests that Nile people harvested catfish and tubers of wild nutgrass.
People in other parts of the world would have gone through a very similar experience and may have also attempted some form of farming. Researchers have recently uncovered the remains of a 23,000-year-old farming settlement near the Sea of Galilee in Israel.21 It appears that farming is a lot older than the traditional view that it was a Neolithic invention. It is more than likely that the Indian Ocean rim also had such pre-Neolithic farming communities.
One may be tempted to think that Egyptian civilization evolved directly from the Nile oasis people, but the actual course of events is much more complicated. After the glacial peak 18,000 years ago, the world began to warm up again. Rising sea levels began to inundate the coastlines while increased rainfall revived previously arid areas. By 12,500 years ago, Lake Victoria was full and the Sahara was again an inhabitable savannah. The combination of melting ice and increased rain also fed the rivers. On one hand, the return of a strongly flowing Nile may have washed away the carefully tended ecosystem of the ‘oasis’ phase but, on the other hand, the Sahara beckoned. Thus, the world’s first ‘farmers’ drifted back to being hunter–gatherers! This is why we find cave paintings of savannah animals in the middle of the Sahara at locations that would appear uninhabitable today.
The Indian Ocean rim also went through a similar shift. The coasts of Sundaland and India were flooded and seawater began to encroach into the Persian Gulf by 12,500 years ago. However, at the same time, previously arid areas became much wetter and more habitable. As with the Sahara, the desert zone that extends across Arabia into western India also became much more humid and capable of supporting hunter–gatherers.22 The northern latitudes also became much warmer as the glaciers retreated even as the monsoons became stronger in southern Asia. The combination of flooding coastlines and a warmer, wetter land mass led to a great deal of human migration into areas that had been previously uninhabitable.
From Cities to Farms
Then, in the midst of rising sea levels and all this migrating, the hunter–gatherers did something special—they built large monumental structures! In 1995, archaeologists digging a site called Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey made an astonishing discovery. As they dug, they found monumental pillared structures with elaborate carvings. The stone pillars were each 5–6 m high and weighed 7 tons. In a nearby quarry they even found a half-finished pillar weighing 50 tons. This would have been an important discovery by any standards, but what made it really special was the realization that it was 11,500 years old (i.e. 6000 years older than Stonehenge). In other words, these structures were built either by hunter–gatherers or by pre-Neolithic farming communities! We have no idea who these people were and why they built Göbekli Tepe. Possibly it was an important ceremonial or religious centre. Perhaps it also served as a trading hub.
The plot has thickened further as more such sites are being found around the world. A huge stepped pyramid has been discovered at Gunung Padang on Java, Indonesia. The layers were built at different times, but the oldest layers are at least as old as Göbekli Tepe. Yet again, we do not know what purpose it served and who built it.
Then, in 2001, a team from India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology found evidence of two large settlements while doing undersea sonar surveys in the Gulf of Khambhat, off the coast of Gujarat.23 Although this site has not been fully researched due to its depth, it is worth noting that it is at a location that would have been flooded more than 7500 years ago; so the settlements would have been built a lot earlier. It is likely there are several other such sites that are still undiscovered or are now under the sea. Whatever the reason for such constructions, there is no doubt that they required the cooperation of large numbers of people, and hunter–gatherer societies would have had to support those building and looking after these projects. This has led researchers like Yuval Noah Hariri to wonder if agriculture was invented to feed the workers and those who lived in these settlements. In other words, did the need to feed urban hubs lead to farming? Is it a coincidence that the wild varieties from which wheat was domesticated grew just a few miles from Göbekli Tepe?
We do not know all the answers but these new discoveries are challenging many well-established assumptions about the flow of human history and the origins of civilization. At the very least, we need to stop thinking of history as a smooth, linear transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic, and then from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The path of history is a lot more messy with different people adopting different technologies at different times, sometimes skipping a phase and occasionally retracing. Scholars may also need to reconsider what we mean by terms like ‘Neolithic’. Such terms often come with assumptions about social and economic structures that go beyond the use of a particular technology. I have continued to use such terms for convenience in this book, but readers should be aware that they have somewhat fluid meanings.
It was once thought that agriculture had a single point of origin in the Middle East and that migrants carried the knowledge to other places. We now know that both crops and animals were domesticated at multiple locations around the world. Sugar cane was domesticated by Melanesians in New Guinea. They may have also tamed banana although a separate species may have been independently domesticated in India or South East Asia. Rice and pigs were domesticated in China. Rice cultivation then spread quite quickly to South East Asia and to India. Sesame and cotton appear to have been first cultivated in India. West Africans learned to cultivate sorghum and African millet. Cows seem to have been domesticated in India and separately in the Middle East (the humped and non-humped varieties respectively). I am not even listing here the numerous crops that were domesticated entirely independently in the Americas.
It is no surprise that humans learned to farm since hunter–gatherers would have known quite a lot about plants and animals. The real question is, why did they bother to switch? By all accounts, agriculture did not improve the lives of people. It was risky business that required the upfront investment of a lot of effort while the returns were uncertain—the rains could fail, wild animals could destroy the crops and neighbouring tribes could steal the produce. Moreover, cultivation yielded a narrow variety of food compared to that available to hunter–gatherers. Most importantly, living in concentrated villages in close proximity to animals increased the likelihood of spreading disease. Analysis of human remains from Neolithic farming sites repeatedly shows that farmers were less healthy and had much shorter lifespans than their hunter–gatherer ancestors. This may explain why the Nile oasis people went back to hunting in the Sahara grasslands as soon as climate permitted them.
Whatever the original reason humans took to farming, it had one advantage—it produced more calories per unit area. A sedentary lifestyle may have also reduced the gap between births. This allowed for a big increase in human population even if the individual now had a lower quality of life. China’s population today exceeds 1.3 billion but 40 per cent of its males derive their genes from just three Neolithic ‘super-grandfathers’.24
After the Great Flood
Meanwhile, climate kept getting warmer and the coastlines kept getting inundated. In a last burst of flooding around 7000 years ago (i.e. 5000 BC), the Persian Gulf was completely inundated and came to look roughly like it does today. In India, the coastline shifted to turn Gujarat’s Saurashtra region into a peninsula (and briefly an island). Sri Lanka separated from the Tamil coast and became an island. Sundaland, already much diminished, now witnessed the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo take shapes that would be familiar to us.
Most ancient civilizations have a myth about the Great Flood. There is the well-known biblical story of Noah and his Ark. The Sumerians mention the Great Flood in the epic of Gilgamesh. The Indians have the legend about Manu who was warned about the coming flood by the god Vishnu. So he built a large ship and filled it with wise sages, seeds and animals. Vishnu, in the form of a fish, then guided Manu’s ship to safety. The survivors are said to have re-established civilization at the foothills of the Himalayas. Notice the similarity with the story of Noah. Indeed, many cultures around the world have a story about the Great Flood and one wonders if it is a memory of this period of climate change and coastal flooding.
All this flooding would have led to further migrations. Based on linguistic models, the current population of South East Asia was once thought to be descendants of migrants from Taiwan. However, genetic models now confirm that they already lived in northern parts of Sundaland and that they were probably dispersed by the floods. An interesting aspect of this group is the prevalence of a strong matrilineal streak. We do not know why this was the case but there may have been a phase during the transition to agriculture when the men were still mobile as hunters and herders while the women settled down to grow crops. This may have been especially true of rice-growing areas because rice requires greater investment in water management. The female line, being more stable, may have therefore become the social anchor. There is evidence that even Chinese clan names may have been matrilineal till the early Bronze Age.
Mind you, it was not just flooding but also shifting climate zones that affected the Neolithic people. After being habitable till 7500 years ago (i.e. 5500 BC), the Sahara steadily became more arid over the next thousand years. We see similar desertification across Arabia. As we shall see, the process of desertification would eventually spread east into western India.
Given these changes, we see migrations within and from the Indo-Iranian continuum. It appears that some groups, probably tired of all the flooding and desertification, took advantage of warmer conditions to push north. One such group carrying the R1a1a gene would make their way through Central Asia and eventually come to settle in Eastern Europe. This is why Iranians, Pakistanis and north Indians are more closely related to Eastern Europeans like Lithuanians and Poles than to R1b carrying Western Europeans who had separated much earlier.25 It also explains some of the ancient cultural and linguistic links between Europe and India.
Note, however, that the links relate to the Neolithic or very early Bronze Age, and not the Iron Age—and the flow is from the south to the north and not the other way around.26 In other words, this is not about some Iron Age ‘invasion’ of Iran and India from the steppes. To quote a paper by geneticist Peter Underhill and his colleagues: ‘it would exclude any significant patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, at least since the mid-Holocene period’.27 An independent study of Iranian genes also came to a similar conclusion: ‘none of the identified sub-branches support a patrilineal gene flow from western Eurasia through southern Asia ascribable to the diffusion of the Indo-European languages’.28
Analysis of the genetic mix of Afghans similarly came to the conclusion that except for Uzbeks and Hazaras (who are known to have come during the medieval period), most Afghan groups have been living in the general area since Neolithic times. Moreover, they were found to be closely related to north Indians and their evolution into separate tribes coincided with the Bronze Age Harappan civilization in north-western India. Again, there is no evidence of an Iron Age invasion or migration from Central Asia. Indeed, the 2012 study by Marc Haber et al. specifically states, ‘R1a1a-M17 does not support, as previously thought, expansion from Pontic Steppe bringing the Indo-European languages to Central Asia and India.’29
All these findings have been further confirmed by yet another study published in 2015. The study analysed the genes of 6600 men and found that the oldest strains of the R1a haplogroup are found in the Indian subcontinent (approximately 15,500 years old) compared to Eastern Europe (12,500 years old) and Northern Europe (6900 years old). This is again consistent with a post-Ice Age migration from the south to the north.30
So, if they are related, why do Lithuanians and Poles today look so different from modern Indians and Iranians? Firstly, remember that none of them is a ‘pure race’, and they have separately mixed with different streams of humanity over subsequent millennia. Secondly, the difference is mainly related to skin/hair tone which we know are very recent developments. The analysis of DNA extracted from the remains of European hunter–gatherers suggests that lighter skin may have spread among Europeans as recently as 5000 BC (i.e. after the migration) although I suspect some pre-existing north European populations may have become light-skinned much earlier.31
By 4500 BC, the flooding and desertification had pushed concentrations of people along the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates and the Tigris in Mesopotamia. Although still relatively wet, the Indian subcontinent saw clusters emerge along the Indus and the Saraswati Rivers. The stage was set for the next big step in human history—civilization.