The First Farmers of South Asia

Mani Manivannan, JoC Study Group, 8 March 2025 - 6:30 AM IST

Table of Contents

Introduction

Background

Gatherers or Farmers, how to tell

First farmers of India

Mehrgarh Mounds

Who were India’s first farmers

DNA Evidence

Recap

Questions?

Next Week

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Introduction

First Indians and Zagrosian herders from Iran planted the first seeds of an agricultural revolution that spread like wildfire across India’s north-western region, creating the necessary conditions for the birth of the world’s largest early civilization. We will discuss the story of these first farmers in today’s talk

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What the book is about - 1

What the book is about - 2

Background

“It is often during periods of climatic upheaval that we see new dramatic developments taking place in human history, proving once again that our species needs either fear (lack of resources) or greed (promise of plenty) to propel it forward.”

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Modern Humans

300 KYA - First Humans (Morocco)

180 KYA - Human fossil outside Africa

70 KYA - Successful OoA migration - ancestors of all non-African humans

65 KYA - OoA migrants reach India �OoA migrants reach Asia and Europe�40 KYA - Neanderthals extinct in Eur�45-20k - First Indians become “most of humanity” - replace other hominins

7000 BCE - First farmers in India

7000-3000 - Iranian Farmers reach India

7000 - 2600 BCE - Farming advances in Mehrgarh site (barley, wheat, dom animal)

7000 BCE - Rice harvest at upper Ganga

5500 - 2600 BCE - Early Harappan

Modern Humans Spread

Pizza Layer Model

Base - First Indians ( thick crust or thin crust)

Sauce - First farmers

Cheese - Steppe pastoralists

Toppings - Later migrants

Holocene Farming Experiments

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• Experiments in the Fertile Crescent in west Asia (today’s Iraq, Iran and the Levant), south Asia, Egypt and later China.
• Ultimately led to humankind taking to agriculture almost everywhere.
• Not all these experiments were successful;
• Not all those successful were sustainable; �- Experiments that did not succeed or sustain for long may not be traceable today.
• Agriculture finally took off in the Fertile Crescent and in India, Egypt and China over a transitionary period of 4000 or 5000 years between 9700 BCE and 5000 BCE, resulting in the human population explosion in a manner never seen before, leading to massive migrations that changed world demography in Europe, central Asia, south Asia, China and east Asia.

Gatherers or Farmers - How to tell

Domesticated Plants��Seeds no longer shatter when ripe, and they germinate far more easily and are larger.

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Plants no longer have to worry about spreading their seeds – a job that is now taken over by humans – the usual selection pressures that make seedpods self-shatter cease to operate. �Domesticated seeds of plants are often larger and germinate more easily.

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Domesticated animals

• become smaller in size
• show less aggression
• develop smaller brains and lose the more extravagant horns.
• Sexual dimorphism – where the male and female sizes differ significantly – slowly disappears.

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Humans select their animals for their ease of taming and lack of aggression. Animals

no longer have to compete with other animals of their species either for food or for mates lessening the selection pressures.

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Gatherers or Farmers - How to tell-2

At Mehrgarh:��Domesticated Plants and Animals

Built Houses

Ornaments and Bead Making

Grave goods

Evidence of imprints of cotton thread inside the holes of copper beads

Ceramic pottery period starting around 6000 BCE evolving from crude to sophistication��

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• Hunter-gatherers harvest wild crops rather than cultivate them.
• hunters usually target bigger animals in a herd to maximize their gains
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• Domesticated animals and plants is evidence of agriculturists
• presence of bones of relatively small subadult and adult animals in the trash deposits suggests the domesticated status of goats
• herders are likely to cull younger males.
• Trash will have less hunted animal remains and more domesticated

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Gatherers vs Farmers (Wild rice vs. Domesticated)

Wild rice (left column) contrasts with domesticated rice (right) in terms of how they grow (top row), how they are harvested (second row), and their yields (bottom row). As domestication progresses, the rice plants get taller and straighter, and more plants can fit into the same size plot, meaning they require more nutrients and water—and become more dependent on people. Image credit: Rabi Mohanty and Dorian Q. Fuller.

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Mehrgarh Location on the Map

Mehrgarh Mounds

When people live in a settlement for hundreds or thousands of years, the accumulated refuse and debris – especially bricks – cause the ground level to rise, forming mounds. The thickness of the deposits, therefore, can be a rough indication of how long a settlement was occupied, in comparison with other sites in similar circumstances.

Mehrgarh - Mother Goddess and Ceramic pot

Farming at Mehrgarh vs West Asia

West Asia

• Farming experiments began a few millennia earlier
• Several deadends
• Climate change forced new experiments or killed them����

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• Beginnings of Mehrgarh
• There is a gap between the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the lifestyle reflected in the excavation layers. Is there a missing link?
• Mehrgarhians start building the first mud-brick houses in the subcontinent and the first granaries as soon as they set up base
• there is almost instant start-up of farming and pastoralism, without the long lead times one observes in West Asia

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Who were the First Farmers Mehrgarhians

The region would have become significantly populated only when the climate changed, the deserts started turning green, the herbivores moved in looking for food and the carnivores followed them, looking for prey. And the humans, of course, followed all of them. So where could they have come from?����

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• Mehrgarh area desert like until 9700 BCE because of glacial age
• Mehrgarhians who farmed starting in 7000 BCE couldn’t have lived there longer than a few thousand years before that
• Were they First Indians migrating northest or Iranian Farmers from Zagreb region?

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Who were the First Farmers Mehrgarhians - 2

• Could be the first Indians migrating from Gangetic plains
• Could be Iranian farmers expanding into east
• Similarities with West Asian neolithic farmers hints at Iranian Farmers ancestry
• Need DNA evidence to resolve the puzzle
• But there are no ancient DNA available at Mehrgarh

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DNA evidence

• analysis of uniparental DNA (Y-chromosome or mtDNA) of present-day populations
• Uniparental DNA analysis looks at the haplogroups present in a population and analyses their family tree or phylogeny also maps their geographical distribution.
• Y-Chromosome and mtDNA
• whole genome sequencing of present-day populations
• DNA analysis of ancient human remains

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The first method: Y-chromosome and mtDNA

• 70 to 90 per cent of mtDNA haplogroups in Indian populations can trace their origin to the First Indians who arrived in India some 65,000 years ago.
• only 10 to 40 per cent of the Y-chromosome haplogroups in various Indian populations are descendant lineages of the First Indians.
• The 2017 paper by Marina Silva and others identified mtDNA haplogroups K2a5, U1a3a, H13a2a and R0a2 as Neolithic period migrations from west Asia, meaning they could be the mtDNA groups that came to India as part of farming-related migrations.
• The same study mentioned Y-chromosome haplogroups J2, L1a and L1c as the ones most likely to be associated with the spread of agriculture from west Asia.

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The second method: Whole genome data

• All populations of India today have some amount of west Eurasian ancestry, varying from 20 per cent to 80 per cent, depending on the group.
• But the conclusions of the 2009 and 2013 studies had political and cultural implications that was unpalatable to the right wing in India

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Cultural and Political Controversy 1

Cultural and Political Controversy 2

The third method: Ancient DNA

• ‘The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia’ paper posted on 2018
• The study was based on ancient DNA from 612 individuals. These ancient individuals came from many regions and periods: Iran and Turan
• This ancient DNA data was then compared and co-analysed with genome-wide data from present-day individuals – 1789 of them from 246 ethnographically distinct groups in South Asia.
• Comparative analysis using both ancient DNA and present-day DNA across regions and periods that allowed the study to arrive at conclusions about who moved from where and mixed with whom.
• So what did it find?

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What did Ancient DNA analysis find?

• It found that an Iranian agriculturist population from around the Zagros region had contributed significantly to the ancestry of the ‘Indus Periphery’ population at least by between 4700 BCE and 3000 BCE.
• The study defines the ‘Indus Periphery’ population as migrants from the Harappan Civilization who were residents in neighbouring cities that the Harappans had trade and cultural relations with – such as Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta.
• So that answers the question we started with: was there a migration of Iranian agriculturists into India? Yes, because ancient DNA shows that the Harappans harboured significant Iranian agriculturist ancestry.
• The direction of migration was clear. People had migrated from the Zagros region of Iran towards India.
• the latest period by which the mixing could have happened works out to between 4700 BCE and 3000 BCE. (Genetics hasn’t been able to work out a similar period for the earliest period by which mixing could have happened.)

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Where is Zagros mountain?

Questions?

Questions?

First Farmers of India

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Questions?

Next Week

Next Week

Early Indians

Prof. Raj Mutharasan takes on Chapter 3. The First Urbanites: The Harappans

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Gatherers vs Farmers