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Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

4 prehistoric migrations shaped India's population: Book - The Economic Times - https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/4-prehistoric-migrations-shaped-indias-population-book/articleshow/67299719.cms?utm_source=whatsapp_pwa&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialsharebuttons


"Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From" by Tony Joseph looks at how and when modern humans first arrived in India; what evidence they left behind; who their descendants are today; who else followed them as migrants to this land; how and when farming started and the world's largest civilisation of its time was built; when and why this civilisation declined; and what happened next.

The first modern humans arrived in India around 65,000 years ago as part of an Out of Africa migration that populated the entire world ultimately. The genetic lineage of these first migrants that the book calls ‘First Indians' still dominate the Indian population and accounts for 50-65 per cent of the Indian ancestry today.

The second major migration happened 9000 to 5000 years ago, when agriculturists from the Zagros region of Iran moved into India's northwestern part and mixed with the First Indians and helped speed up the farming experiments that were already beginning in the subcontinent.

The third major migration happened from southeast Asia around 2000 BCE, when farming-related migrations originally starting from the Chinese heartland overran south-east Asia and then reached India, bringing the Austroasiatic family of languages, such as Mundari and Khasi spoken in the eastern and central parts of the country.

The last major migration between 2000 and 1000 BCE brought central Asian pastoralists, who spoke Indo-European languages and called themselves Aryans, to India.

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