Steppe Brothers

Two recent studies have sparked an academic and political debate on origins of early Indians

- Vaisakh E. Hari

IN JANUARY, researchers at the 4,500-year-old Rakhigarhi site of the Harappan civilisation discovered the remains of a man and a woman— presumed to be a couple—buried together, “facing each other in an intimate manner”. The way in which they were interred could be indicative of the gender equality in the society at the time, said Niraj Rai, head of the Ancient DNA Lab at Lucknow’s Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences.

Harappa, or the mature Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), spread over 2600 and 1900 BCE, is considered one of the largest urban societies of its time. Dholavira in Gujarat, Mohenjo Daro in Sindh and Rakhigarhi in Haryana were some of its major centres. In infrastructure like town planning and drainage systems, the IVC was second to none. It is considered largely peaceful, cosmopolitan, with distant trade ties, and no outward, overarching influence of religion. The burial sites at Rakhigarhi were austere, lacking the garishness of its close contemporaries like the Mesopotamian civilisation. It was one of those sites that yielded I6113—the woman whose 4,000-year-old remains yielded the genetic evidence necessary for a recent breakthrough in research on early Indian society. Two new, revelatory studies published on September 6 in the US journals Cell and Science throw light on the topic of ancient Indians.