24-Oct-2020: Evidence of dairy production in the Indus Valley Civilisation

The year 2020 marks 100 years of discovery of Indus Valley Civilisation, and a new study has shown that dairy products were being produced by the Harappans as far back as 2500 BCE.

By analysing residues on ancient pots, researchers show the earliest direct evidence of dairy product processing, thus throwing fresh light on the rural economy of the civilisation. The studies were carried out on 59 shards of pottery from Kotada Bhadli, a small archeological site in present-day Gujarat.

When we talk about Harappans, we always refer to the metropolitan cities and the big towns. But we have no idea of the parallel economy — agro-pastoral or rural. We know they had great urban planning, trading systems, jewellery making. But we don't have any idea how the common masters were living during the Harappan times, their lifestyle and how they were contributing in the larger network.

The team used molecular analysis techniques to study the residues from ancient pottery. Pots are porous. So as soon as we put any liquid form of food, it will absorb it. The pot preserves the molecules of food such as fats and proteins. Using techniques like C16 and C18 analysis we can identify the source of lipids.

It is very difficult to pinpoint whether the Harappans made curd and cheese. Traces were seen in cooking vessels indicating that milk may have been boiled and consumed. Residues were found in a bowl showing that either heated milk or curd could have been served. There are also remains of a perforated vessel, and similar vessels were used in Europe to make cheese. So it is possible that they were further processing milk into different forms.

The team was also able to show which type of animals were being used for dairy production. They studied the tooth enamel from fossils of cattle, water buffalo, goat and sheep found in the area. Cows and water buffalo were found to consume millets, while sheep and goats ate nearby grass and leaves. A preliminary study suggested that most of the cattle and water-buffalo died at an older age, suggesting they could have been raised for milk, whereas the majority of goat/sheep died when they were young, indicating they could have been used for meat.

The Harappans did not just use dairy for their household. The large herd indicates that milk was produced in surplus so that it could be exchanged and there could have been some kind of trade between settlements. This could have given rise to an industrial level of dairy exploitation.

The most fascinating thing about the Indus Valley Civilisation is that it is faceless — there is no king, no bureaucratic organisations, but there are these very close regional interactions between settlements, a symbiotic relationship of give and take that helped the civilisation survive for so long.

6-Sep-2019: First ancient DNA from Indus Valley civilization links its people to modern South Asians.

Researchers have successfully sequenced the first genome of an individual from the Harappan civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). The DNA, which belongs to an individual who lived four to five millennia ago, suggests that modern people in India are likely to be largely descended from people of this ancient culture. It also offers a surprising insight into how farming began in South Asia, showing that it was not brought by large-scale movement of people from the Fertile Crescent where farming first arose. Instead, farming started in South Asia through local hunter-gatherers adopting farming.

The Harappans were one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient world and a major source of Indian culture and traditions, and yet it has been a mystery how they related both to later people as well as to their contemporaries.

The IVC, which at its height from 2600 to 1900 BCE covered a large swath of northwestern South Asia, was one of the world's first large-scale urban societies. Roughly contemporary to ancient Egypt and the ancient civilizations of China and Mesopotamia, it traded across long distances and developed systematic town planning, elaborate drainage systems, granaries, and standardization of weights and measures.

Hot, fluctuating climates like those found in many parts of lowland South Asia are detrimental to the preservation of DNA. So despite the importance of the IVC, it has been impossible until now to sequence DNA of individuals recovered in archaeological sites located in the region. Even though there has been success with ancient DNA from many other places, the difficult preservation conditions mean that studies in South Asia have been a challenge.

Researchers screened 61 skeletal samples from a site in Rakhigarhi, the largest city of the IVC. A single sample showed promise: it contained a very small amount of authentic ancient DNA. The team made over 100 attempts to sequence the sample. While each of the individual datasets did not produce enough DNA, pooling them resulted in sufficient genetic data to learn about population history.

There were many theories about the genetic origins of the people of the IVC. They could resemble Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers or they could resemble Iranians, or they could even resemble Steppe pastoralists--all were plausible prior to the ancient DNA findings.

The individual sequenced here fits with a set of 11 individuals from sites across Iran and Central Asia known to be in cultural contact with the IVC, discovered in a manuscript being published simultaneously (also led by Reich and Narasimhan) in the journal Science. Those individuals were genetic outliers among the people at the sites in which they were found. They represent a unique mixture of ancestry related to ancient Iranians and ancestry related to Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers. Their genetic similarity to the Rakhigarhi individual makes it likely that these were migrants from the IVC.

It's a mix of ancestry that is also present in modern South Asians, leading the researchers to believe that people from the IVC like the Rakhigarhi individuals were the single largest source population for the modern-day people of India. Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today. This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.

The lineage of Iranian-related ancestry in modern South Asians split from ancient Iranian farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers before they separated from each other--that is, even before the invention of farming in the Fertile Crescent. Thus, farming was either reinvented locally in South Asia or reached it through the cultural transmission of ideas rather than through substantial movement of western Iranian farmers.

The Harappans built a complex and cosmopolitan ancient civilization, and there was undoubtedly variation in it that we cannot detect by analyzing a single individual. The insights that emerge from just this single individual demonstrate the enormous promise of ancient DNA studies of South Asia. They make it clear that future studies of much larger numbers of individuals from a variety of archaeological sites and locations have the potential to transform our understanding of the deep history of the subcontinent.

31-Aug-2020: Rare Renati Chola era inscription unearthed

A rare inscription dating back to the Renati Chola era has been unearthed in a remote village of Kadapa district in Andhra Pradesh.

The inscription was written in archaic Telugu. It was assigned to the 8th century A.D. when the region was under the rule of the Chola Maharaja of Renadu. The inscription also throws light upon the priority given to morality in those days.

The Telugu Cholas of Renadu (also called Renati Cholas) ruled over the Renadu region, the present-day Kadapa district. They had the unique honour of using the Telugu language in their inscriptions belonging to the 6th and 8th centuries. The inscriptions at Gandikota at Jammulamadugu and Poddatur are proof of this fact.