Where do Indians come from? – Part 1

This is quite a strange question when you think about it at first, but quite interesting.

India has the second largest population in the world, and Indians are now spread all over the world. And that is not just today’s situation, even thousands of years ago, a large part of the world’s population actually lived on the Indian subcontinent!

So, there is a long and complicated story behind who our ancestors are and where they come from. And to make things even more interesting, new evidence is being found that changes this answer with each new discovery.

Show Notes

All clips and voices used in this podcast are owned by the original creators

Links to clips used in this episode —

• Who are our ancestors – Scroll – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBuZ9Kd0yRA
• Aryans Vs. Dravidians – Festival of Bharat – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge5i8XTfkJY

Full Transcript of Episode 49 –

SHOW INTRO

Question: Dhruv, us Indians make one of the largest communities in the world — yeh toh humein pata hai. So my question is, how did it all actually start? Where did we Indians come from? 

When you hear this at first, you might think this is a strange question. But think about it, it’s a great question. 

India has the second largest population in the world, and Indians are now spread all over the world… and that is the situation today, but did you know: even thousands of years ago, a large part of the world’s population actually lived on the Indian subcontinent! So of course, there’s a story behind how all this happened, who our ancestors were and where they came from. 

After years of debate, only recently (hal hee mein), we have actually found a concrete (thos), scientific answer to this question. And that’s what we’ll try to understand in today’s episode.

Welcome back to Maha Bharat, a Spotify Original podcast that explains how India works. This is an ATS STUDIO production, and I’m Dhruv Rathee.

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Who are Indians?

[We hear an audio clip claiming Harappans to be the ancestors of Indians]

Are Harappans our ancestors? What about Aryans?

[We hear an audio clip saying Aryans are invaders]

Accha, toh agar Aryans are invaders, then are Dravidians the original Indians?

[We hear an audio clip opposing the usage of the word Dravidans]

Wait…so are we descendants of Aryans or Dravidians or not? (hum aryan ka dradividian ke vansh se nahi aate)?

It’s safe to say one thing: the question – “who are Indians” is very old, and the answers have changed and evolved over time. 

This is because the technology and knowledge that helps us understand our past has also changed and evolved with time — like archeology, matlab finding old artefacts from the earth; linguistics yaani study of languages. As these methods evolved over time, so did our understanding of our own past. 

So today, we’ll go step by step. Suppose I give you the answer right away, chalo: that Aryans are our ancestors. Or Harappans are Aryans’ ancestors. Will you believe me? We need more proof, right? So we’ll start at the very beginning, from the first Indian people — actually, we’ll start even earlier than that!

And along the way, I’ll tell you just how historians and researchers have worked to prove, at every step, who our ancestors were. 

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Who was the first Indian? 

This is a story that is at least 65,000 years old — and I’m going to take a little detour here and give you a quick history lesson.

Roughly dekha jaye toh, this is more than 2000 generations ago…more than 2000 of our forefathers have lived since then! But if you think this is a long time, then let me tell you this: the history of modern Indians — this period of 65,000 years, is not even 0.1% of the duration of life on Earth! On our planet, life began around 3.8 billion — or 380 crore — years ago. 

But the first humans appeared on our planet about 70 lakh years ago. What happened before this? Well, around 3.8 billion years ago, the Earth was a cold, cold planet. There was no life on the lands. No plants, no animals. In fact, there was very little oxygen on the planet. And the most interesting part: many experts suggest that at this time, the Earth was actually purple!

Dheere dheere, life evolved on this planet — first in the ocean and then on land. Bacteria, algae, plants, trees. Millions of years passed.

Are you still with me? Right now, we’re about 250 million years back in history, before any modern civilisation or anything we recognise as human. 

At this time, dinosaurs roamed the earth — for 177 million years! A mass extinction event wiped out most of the dinosaurs, making way for smaller species, like mammals, to evolve and to survive on earth. 

Doston, mere yeh sab bolne ka matlab yeh hai, that none of this is a coincidence. Because of one or the other process on Earth, a certain species survived. For instance, because oxygen collected in our atmosphere, it formed the ozone layer around the earth and absorbed harmful rays from the sun. This enabled more species to survive. Similarly — and this is hard to believe, today — mammals, which are considered the most intelligent of all living creatures, were simply small, weak species on this planet. In fact, many of them lived underground, because on land they might be trampled by bigger animals. The only reason mammals were able to survive is because large dinosaurs died and became extinct!

One of these mammals, who survived, was an ape-like species, belonging to the tribe called hominid (ho-mi-nid).

Tribe matlab? In this context, a family of animals that had a common ancestor. 

Over time, members of this tribe evolved and split into different branches, like a family tree. Something like…imagine wheat, at the top of this tree. We make different products from wheat — bread, roti, noodles, and even beer. These products are on the several branches of the tree. They are very different from each other, but they have one common ancestor: wheat!

Similarly, one of these branches of the Hominid tribe has the chimpanzee, one has the gorilla. And another one, on another end of this family tree, has the hominina species…in other words, the ancestor of the human. This species resided in what is today Africa. 

You know what that means? You and I probably aren’t directly related to each other, but there’s one thing I know for sure: we have a common ancestor! But what happened next?

Over time, our ancestors eventually split into many species — like the Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus. These species evolved. From one of these came the Homo Sapien — that’ us! Homo matlab “the same” or similar, and Sapien matlab the wise, ya samajhdar. It’s easy to understand why we were named this — among all our ancestors and cousins, we are the smartest. We have evolved to develop features that have helped us — such as standing up on our two legs, opposable thumbs, a bigger brain, the ability to develop language. These features have helped us not only survive, but also make new discoveries and inventions.

Okay, so that was human evolution.

Did you know that we were able to collect all this information only about two hundred years ago? Of course, archeologists and anthropologists — matlab, experts that study and try to find out how human life developed — discovered bits and pieces of this story. But these were all tied together only when…well, only when Charles Darwin took a cruise around the world.

Doston, at this point, you might be wondering why we’re talking about the evolution of humans, when our question has to do with India. This is because the answer to our question today actually lies in evolution and migration! Haan, these are big words, but all they mean is that you and I are here because our ancestors moved around and developed new methods to survive against difficulties. And this is not just a human tendency…all animals survive like this.

And after all, where we came from goes far back, farther than just our Indian subcontinent. So let’s see how we got there. 

Where were we? Charles Darwin…yes, a name you might have heard of, right? Hua yeh tha, ki in 1836, Charles Darwin travelled in a ship called the HMS Beagle, making a voyage across South America and Australia and the islands around them. Actually, he had been taken on the ship for his interest in geology. But as he went to new places, he got interested in the plants and animals there. He also noticed some strange facts. For instance, when he was at the Galapagos Islands, he saw the same species of a turtle had different physical features on different islands. Similarly, different birds of the same species had slightly different features, like the length of a beak for example. This was unusual…why would birds of the same species be different like this?

He worked on the answer to this question for twenty years. And at the end, he had the answer: natural selection. 

He said that species develop unique features that help them adapt to and survive easily in their environment . Like: some of the  birds he saw developed long beaks because they needed to pick seeds out from a cactus which has thorns, so the long beak helped. 

Eventually, over millions of years, this sort of evolution in their features can even lead to the development of a completely new species. 

And that’s how the Humans evolved.

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Humans are a very curious tribe. Not only that, they are perseverant too. This meant that even though Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa, they were keen to move around and explore new lands, even if it was dangerous. How do we know this?

First of all, our planet looked very different millions of years ago. In fact, it was just one giant mass of land, jisko hum Pangea kehte hai. Dheere dheere, it began to break and pieces of land started to drift away. The piece of land that is India actually broke off from Africa and merged into Asia with such force, that the collision caused the Himalayas to be formed! So, by the time humans came around, the continents looked similar to what we know today. We were in Africa, but we wanted to find out what the rest of the world looked like. So around 1 lakh years ago, we started to migrate to parts of Asia and Europe. 

There are some really interesting stories about how we migrated to different parts of the world and why. For instance, the Americas — yaani, the two continents of North and South America. Scientists have recently discovered that the first group of people to migrate to North America was through a bridge that was formed between the two continents during the ice age. You see, when the ice age began and water in the oceans began to form glaciers, the water level in the oceans decreased and a bridge formed between continents! 

About 20,000 years ago, some humans crossed this bridge into the Americas. Eventually, they became isolated from the rest of the continents. The ice sheets melted into oceans, which is why this bridge doesn’t exist anymore. With more discoveries of ancient tools and weapons, and better estimates of how old they are, this theory might be disproved, but this is a very popular theory of how migration to America started.

Okay, but here’s the most interesting fact in this story: why did they migrate? Not to find more food or resources…Europe and Asia had enough of that! They migrated simply because they were curious. 

So, now we know how humans evolved, moved around and settled down. Now, we finally come to India.

The group of Homo Sapiens that migrated to the Indian subcontinent were called the first Indians… 

[A viewer/guest asks a question]: But what does the first Indian actually mean? Jahan tak mujhe samajh aya, India as a country did not exist yet. So I’m wondering, how do we define who an “Indian” was…or who was the first of them? (unme se sabse pehla kaun tha?)

[Dhruv speaks]: That’s a great question. Let me answer by borrowing from a book called Early Indians, written by journalist Tony Joseph. He uses reports from DNA evidence to tell us just where we came from, but before all of that, he asks the same question: yeh “Indian” kisko bula sakte hai?

He specifies two definitions: one, the first humans to enter our subcontinent. Well, we can agree with that, right? The first people to come to India, understand the country, make it their home. And then he also adds a second factor: the first Indians should also be the people that we are directly related to.

The interesting fact is that the answer to these two questions are different. Mera matlab hai, that the first people to step foot into the Indian subcontinent can be different from our direct ancestors. This is because over the years, we have seen multiple waves of migration into India. 

We just talked about human migration — so we know that for some or the other reason, we have always migrated. During the ice age, we were curious. Later on, we needed to escape from the harsh climate. Then, find more food, to escape war, and to conquer new lands. Migration is an old habit of ours, and you can see it in India, too. 

We know that the governments and kingdoms always changed their capitals in India — from Pataliputra in Bihar to Delhi to Kolkata. Why? Because kings and their people migrated to a place that had more resources, like fertile soil. In other cases, people have migrated out of India too — did you know that in the 5th Century, 12,000 Indian musicians were invited by a Persian king to settle in Iran? And off they went. The fact that there are words for “foreigners” in our Arthashastra texts suggests that India has always had migrants! 

I would answer the question like this: the First Indian marched into India from Africa more than 65,000 years ago, and years after that new populations settled down in our country. It is this new and mixed population that became our ancestors. 

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In the Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, a team of archaeologists and anthropologists started digging up an archeological site. Doston, it’s not unusual to find fossils, utensils, tools or coins underground. These are often remains that tell us about civilizations and societies that existed years ago. But this time, the scientists found something different: ash (raankh)! 

This ash was 74,000 years old. And what could cause a huge amount of ash to be buried underground? A volcanic eruption! That’s right: around 75,000 years ago, a volcano erupted in what is today Lake Toba, in Indonesia. The theory is that the ash from this eruption caused a long winter and the lava wiped out a large population of Asia. The ash also settled in parts of India, including this archeological site. Which is why it was named Jwalapuram — the city of fire! 

But the ash isn’t the most interesting part of this story. Under the ash, the scientists found hundreds of different types of stone tools! What we found from these tools was that they were used by ancient humans nearly 75,000 years ago. And most interestingly: these tools were very similar to the ones found in parts of Africa and Europe…matlab? This just proved that the same group of humans from Africa had migrated to different parts of the world. They made or carried with them the same stone tools.

This is an example of archeological evidence that proves where our ancestors have come from. 

There is a newer method (nayi taknik) for this too: ancient DNA. Matlab?

The DNA from the skeletons found at these sites is used to determine where they came from and whether they are our descendents. Using both these technologies, we have come to a solid conclusion: the first community that was indigenous (Bharat ke pehle swadeshi) to India was the African migrants. 

What is important for us to know is that these migrants came to our country in groups, settling down in different parts of the country. 

They built new tools, learnt how to survive in a new environment and gradually spread out across the country. A large population of these migrants were in South India — here, the tribe evolved and survived for many years. The scientists also call the descendants of these migrants Ancient Ancestral South Indians or AASI. Some of these people travelled downwards to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Aaj ke din mein, the Onga tribe in the Andaman Islands is the closest to these African migrants, because here, the tribe isolated itself from the rest of India and did not mix with other migrants.

In the rest of the country, our African ancestors mixed with new populations. But this doesn’t mean our African roots have vanished — scientists have discovered that more than half of the DNA of nearly all Indians, is the African migrant DNA! We are all descendants of this group — the First Indians. 

But there is more to this story, and we are not yet done with the answer. So for the first time in this podcast, I am answering this question in 2 parts. In this episode, I took you back to the start of how human migration caused different groups of people to move to different continents, and one such group came to the Indian sub-continent. The First Indians survived here for almost 50,000 years. 

In the next episode, we find out what happened next. How did the First Indians, a tribe of hunter-gatherers from a land far away, develop new societies, languages, religions…and made our country the India we know today and finally became our ancestors!