The rest might have been cremated, or their bones simply left uncovered and thus scattered over time. But because of the Arian invasion or migration, whichever, subsequent Indus history was lost. by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system. Instead, farming started in South Asia through local hunter-gatherers adopting farming. Niraj Rai, a geneticist who was a visiting fellow in Reich’s lab, also set up an ancient-DNA lab at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, India, where I6113’s DNA was extracted. “We had to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze the sample really hard, more than we’ve done in any other sample we’ve ever tried,” says Reich, who is also a senior author of the second paper. Scientist have successfully sequenced DNA from a skeleton belonging to the Indus Valley civilization for the first time, shedding light on origins of modern Indians. No DNA from any human being is an indication of what language they spoke. It’s the largest number of ancient genomes reported in a single paper, all made possible by an ancient DNA “factory” the geneticist David Reich has built at Harvard. They represent a unique mixture of ancestry related to ancient Iranians and ancestry related to Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers. In all of the Indus Valley Civilization, there are very few burials that could contain ancient DNA. Prof. Shinde is an archaeologist, and asserting his belief on the basis of ancient DNA evidence is straying far outside his academic competence. There are lines as well as indentations on... "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," says senior author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 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. IMAGE: This is a photograph of a red slipped ware globular pot placed near the head of the skeleton that yielded ancient DNA. Cell, Shinde and Narasimhan et al. Elusive DNA. The sampled individual, most likely a woman based on her DNA, was buried among dozens of ceramic bowls and vases in an Indus site known as Rakhigarhi, about 150 kilometers northwest of … and Who are we?—questions that also have deep political undercurrents. By Asian Scientist Newsroom Ancient DNA Gives A Peek Into South Asian Ancestry Researchers have sequenced millennia-old DNA from an individual belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization, showing that modern Indians are likely to have descended from this ancient culture. The scientists studied the DNA from the Indus Valley Civilization, while the Aryan migration is said to have happened during the fall of this ancient cvilization. These two ancestral groups then mixed as well, giving rise to the great diversity of ethnic groups in South Asia. The findings also offer a surprising insight into how agriculture reached South Asia. But the team’s confidence in its results was bolstered when the researches found that I6113 was genetically similar to 11 people from the 523-genome paper who were buried not in South Asia, but in what is now Iran and Turkmenistan. According to another paper by a few of the same authors a few months ago, inhabitants of the Indus Valley … ... How ancient DNA … Go back far enough, and both sides trace to the Indus Valley civilization, which appears to be the single largest source of ancestry for modern South Asians. No DNA from any human being is an indication of what language they spoke. The cities of the Indus Valley Civilization were cosmopolitan places, which also makes it harder to generalize from one genome. NEW YORK – Two new ancient DNA studies have provided a refined look at historical population dynamics in parts of Asia and the Middle East, particularly involving the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization — a group centered in the northwestern portion of South Asia some 3,900 to 4,600 years ago that contributed significant ancestry to present-day South Asians. Archaeological evidence suggests people traveled between these regions as well. A pair of newly published papers use ancient DNA to shed light on the Indus Valley civilization and the entire history of people in South and Central Asia. (Moorjani completed her doctorate in Reich’s lab and is a co-author on this paper.). Throwing fresh light on the Indus Valley Civilisation, a study of DNA from skeletal remains excavated from the Harappan cemetery at Rakhigarhi argues that the hunter-gatherers of … “This is not the end.” He expects more ancient DNA to come. Reich says: "While each of the individual datasets did not produce enough DNA, pooling them resulted in sufficient genetic data to learn about population history.". Still, more cemetery samples would be better than just one. Genetic studies to date seemed to add weight to this theory by showing that Iranian-related ancestry was the single biggest contributor to the ancestry in South Asians. Razib Khan reports on his new website about an article by Tony Joseph, Who built the Indus Valley civilisation?, itself referring to the potential upcoming results of a genetic analysis project involving Rakhigarhi, the biggest Harappan site.. But this new study shows that 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. "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," says Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist at Deccan College, Deemed University in Pune, India, and the chief excavator of the site of Rakhigarhi, who is first author of the study. We read about it in our textbooks,” says Priya Moorjani, a computational biologist at the University of California at Berkeley. New article on The Caravan, Indus Valley People Did Not Have Genetic Contribution From The Steppes: Head Of Ancient DNA Lab Testing Rakhigarhi Samples, by Hartosh Singh Val. Elusive DNA. The discovery of the double helical structure of the DNA by the Watson and “The cemeteries of the Indus civilization do not represent the people of the Indus civilization. And then, it disappeared. Shinde et al. The Indus Valley has been the backdrop for several historic and prehistoric population movements between South Asia and West Eurasia. A mainstream view in archaeology has been that people from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East--home to the earliest evidence of farming--spread across the Iranian plateau and from there into South Asia, bringing with them a new and transformative economic system. He told me his book, published last December, is already in its seventh printing. One of the new papers out this week, published in Cell, offers the first-ever look at a genome from an individual from the Indus Valley Civilization.Finding DNA from this part of the world is extremely rare because hot and humid climates aren’t ideal for DNA preservation. That I6113 gets her own paper is a testament to both the technical difficulty of sequencing her DNA and the importance of the Indus Valley civilization. I realised that there is no Indus Valley sample in it. “The end of the civilization was quite mysterious.” No one alive today is sure who the people of the Indus Valley civilization were or where they went. In monsoon season, water seeps into ancient bones in the ground, degrading the old genetic material. 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. The second study focuses on just a single genome from the Indus Valley civilization: I6113, a woman who died more than 4,000 years ago. This suggests that farming did not, as many have thought, spread to South Asia through the migration of people from the Near East. "This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.". "The insights that emerge from just this single individual demonstrate the enormous promise of ancient DNA studies of South Asia. Of course, this is a lot to rest on a single genome. The absence of steppe DNA markers in the samples indicates that, at that point in time, there had been no intermingling between the steppe pastoralists and the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Indus Valley Civilization flourished alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the early society remains shrouded in mystery A photograph of a red … Her skeleton was the only one—out of more than 100 samples the researchers tested from 10 different Indus Valley–civilization sites—that yielded ancient DNA, but even then it was contaminated and of poor quality. In this study, Reich, post-doctoral scientist Vagheesh Narasimhan, and Niraj Rai, who established a new ancient DNA laboratory at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, India, and led the preparation of the samples, screened 61 skeletal samples from a site in Rakhigarhi, the largest city of the IVC. report the first genome-wide data from an ancient individual from the Indus Valley Civilization in South Asia. More than 5,000 years ago, the people of the Indus Valley had planned cities with running water — even household toilets, and roads that would put the Romans to shame, more than 2000 years before Rome was founded. Read: The mystery of ‘Skeleton Lake’ gets deeper. "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," he says. This was the Harappan (or Indus Valley) civilisation, which thrived in what is now north-western India and Pakistan around the same time as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. It appears to date to before the advent of farming in the Fertile Crescent. Researchers have successfully sequenced the first genome of an individual from the Harappan civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). The team made over 100 attempts to sequence the sample. The Indus Valley Civilisation ancient DNA data from the Haryana site of Rakhigarhi, which was supposed to be released last month, should add to … Even before publication, rumors were swirling in India about what the ancient DNA would show, and how it would play into the politics of the Hindu-nationalist ruling party. From 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, other people descended from the Indus Valley civilization mixed with people of steppe-pastoralist ancestry, who likely brought horses and the Indo-European languages now spoken on the subcontinent, to form a group that has been called Ancestral North Indians. are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! Unlocking Ancient DNA. It has clearly shown that no invasion ever took place from the West, and verifies that natives of the Indus valley civilization progressed into the Vedic period. EurekAlert! Vasant Shinde, an archeologist at Deccan College whose team excavated I6113, says the attempts to get ancient DNA from Indus Valley–civilization sites have been a years-long learning process. 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. All this, contained in a half-inch wisp of an ear bone. : "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers" https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5. In 2016, archaeologists and scientists from India and South Korea found these two "very rare" skeletons in a Harappan (or Indus Valley) city - what is … The two studies piece together a history of how the people of the Indus Valley civilization are related to South Asians today. There were many theories about the genetic origins of the people of the IVC. The absurdity of asserting what language the Indus Valley people spoke from ancient DNA is obvious. is a service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. J. The team ultimately tried to sequence DNA from I6113’s ear bone more than 100 times, each time yielding a tiny dribble of genetic data. view more, Credit: Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of its time and covered a vast territory. EurekAlert! Mark Kenoyer, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was not an author of either study, cautions that only a small number of people who lived in these cities were buried in cemeteries—probably elites. Visit: http://www.cell.com/cell. Their genetic similarity to the Rakhigarhi individual makes it likely that these were migrants from the IVC. DNA study suggests that the Indus valley culture spoke an early Dravidian language Were the Harappans, the ancient people of the Indus Valley civilisation, the source of Vedic Hinduism? “This is beginning,” Shinde says. This is contradicted by ancient DNA that finds the population history in India itself contains far more mixing and migration. 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. It had agriculture and planned cities and sewage systems. Even 5,000 years ago, they had urban centers and towns with baked brick houses and an elaborate underground drainage system. "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," Shinde says. We report an ancient genome from the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). A prominent MP even attacked Reich when the preprint came out, tweeting out an article titled, “There Are Lies, Damned Lies and (Harvard’s ‘Third’ Reich and Co’s) Statistics.” Reich, who has experienced how fraught talking about genetics and identity can be, acknowledged the political interest in his work, but declined to get into it. The Indus Valley Civilisation ancient DNA data from the Haryana site of Rakhigarhi, which was supposed to be released last month, should add to this picture of the ancestry of South Asian populations. So by the time archeologists and geneticists finally got DNA out of a tiny ear bone from a 4,000-plus-year-old skeleton, they had already tried dozens of samples—all from cemeteries of the mysterious Indus Valley civilization, all without any success. For Reich, Shinde, and their team, these findings are just the beginning. Does anyone know the coordinates for the Indus Valley samples or anywhere I could find information on … What’s intriguing about I6113’s DNA is what she lacks: any of the steppe ancestry that is widespread in contemporary South Asians. They represent one community,” he says. 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. Burial I6113 was the only one that yielded ancient DNA from the Indus Valley civilization.Vasant Shinde The climate of South Asia is not kind … Cell (@CellCellPress), the flagship journal of Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that publishes findings of unusual significance in any area of experimental biology, including but not limited to cell biology, molecular biology, neuroscience, immunology, virology and microbiology, cancer, human genetics, systems biology, signaling, and disease mechanisms and therapeutics. The findings appear September 5 in the journal Cell. However, the genetic structure of present-day populations from Northwest India is poorly characterized. Gathering ancient DNA from the Indus Valley is an enormous challenge, Vagheesh Narasimhan, one of the leading authors of the new … These 11 people were also “outliers” in their own burial sites. The Indus Valley Civilization is as mysterious as Atlantis, except that we know the Indus Valley Civilization was very real. They do not reuse excavation instruments from burial to burial. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com. 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. Burial I6113 was the only one that yielded ancient DNA from the Indus Valley civilization. EurekAlert! “The Indus Valley civilization has been an enigma for South Asians. A single sample showed promise: it contained a very small amount of authentic ancient DNA. Scientists Can Now Pull the DNA of Ancient Humans Out of Cave Dirt, An Ancient Case of the Plague Could Rewrite History, rumors were swirling in India about what the ancient DNA would show, how fraught talking about genetics and identity can be. "No" is the implication of genetic findings made during an 2015 excavation in Haryana's Rakhigarhi, whose results are expected to feature in the journal Science. It surpassed its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, in size. Hindu nationalists, as Joseph has written, believe that Aryans—who originated in India and spread through Europe and Asia—are the source of Indian civilization. The team thinks they may have been migrants or the children of migrants from the Indus Valley civilization. Read: Ancient DNA is rewriting human (and Neanderthal) history. The Rakhigarhi samples belonged to individuals who lived approximately 4,600 years ago, during the peak of the Indus Valley Civilisation. It may have arisen independently in South Asia or spread through cultural contact. 617-417-7053 The Indus Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization, flourished 4,000 years ago in what is now India and Pakistan. Indus Valley DNA I have recently been using the the Global25 PCA chart to see modern DNA compared to ancient. The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. Researchers have successfully sequenced the first genome of an individual from the Harappan civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). This work was supported by the NCP fund of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India, Deccan College, Deemed University, Government of Haryana the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, an Allen Discovery Center grant, and the John Templeton Foundation.D.R. The absurdity of asserting what language the Indus Valley people spoke from ancient DNA is obvious. press@cell.com Context: A study of DNA from skeletal remains excavated from the Harappan cemetery at Rakhigarhi argues that the hunter-gatherers of South Asia- people from Indus Valley Civilisation, who then became a settled people, have an independent origin. Carly Britton Cracking the DNA code of Indus Valley Genetics & Cytology Abstract Introduction The quest of creation is quest of human mind from dawn of the Civilization on the earth. Ancient DNA has captured the public imagination precisely because it promises an answer to questions like Where did we come from? Results of the analysis of DNA samples of skeletons that were dug out from Rakhigarhi – a site of the Indus Valley civilization in Haryana, have proven the ‘Aryan invasion’ theory wrong. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 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. Their findings have implications for the origins and spread of farming and Indo-European languages in the region and the makings of the South Asian gene pool. "Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today," says Reich. Gathering ancient DNA from the Indus Valley is an enormous challenge, Vagheesh Narasimhan, one of the leading authors of the new research and a postdoctoral fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School, Live Science because the hot, humid climate tends to degrade DNA rapidly. At its peak, the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) stretched from what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan all the way to the northwestern part of India. The research team behind I6113 is trying to sequence more bones from the Indus Valley civilization. The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North … Instead, she appeared to have a mix of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer and Iranian-related ancestry.  @CellPressNews, Copyright © 2021 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Association for the Advancement of Science, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30967-5. The first study is a sweeping collection of 523 genomes—300 to 12,000 years old—from a region spanned by Iran, Russia, and India. After the decline of the civilization 4,000 years ago, people with a genetic makeup similar to I6113 mixed with people of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry to form what has been called Ancestral South Indians. It is hot and it rains. The climate of South Asia is not kind to ancient DNA. 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.". The preprint generated controversy, too, especially the finding that many Indians have ancestry from steppe pastoralists. provides eligible reporters with free access to embargoed and breaking news releases. The authors declare no competing interests. To prevent contamination with modern DNA, team members now wear gowns and masks even while excavating in the field. In India, ancient DNA has generated intense interest, says Tony Joseph, the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From. By comparing the results with modern South Asians’ genomes, the study showed that South Asians today descended from a mix of local hunter-gatherers, Iranian-related groups, and steppe pastoralists who came by way of Central Asia. Answering questions about the ancient people of the Indus Valley was in fact the primary reason Reich founded his own ancient DNA laboratory in 2013. (Further complicating things, Nazis co-opted the term Aryans to mean something different, a master race of European origin.) “That would be like taking a single sample from Tokyo and trying to generalize about the whole ancestry of Japan,” Reich admits. Hot, fluctuating climates like those found in many parts of lowland South Asia are detrimental to the preservation of DNA. 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