In his book Early Indians, author Tony Joseph focuses on the ancestral history of the people living in the Indian subcontinent today. Clearly, there is a lot of ground to cover, and the story begins in Africa, 300,000 years ago, where the earliest remains of Homo Sapiens have been found. What happens after that? This short list of chronological events excerpted from the book will tell you the story.
~ 180,000 years ago: The age of the earliest modern human fossil found outside of Africa – at a rock shelter in Misliya in north Israel.
~ 70,000 years ago: Geneticists calculate that the earliest successful Out of Africa migration happened around this time. This migration was termed successful because these migrants are the ancestors of all of today’s non-African populations. These migrants are likely to have taken the Southern Route that would have brought them from modern-day Eritrea and Djibouti to Yemen.
~ 65,000 years ago: These migrants reach India and are faced with a robust population of archaic humans. They perhaps take both an inland sub-Himalayan route and a coastal route, to keep themselves out of the way of other Homo species who dominated the central and southern India, and then move across the Indian subcontinent into south-east Asia, east Asia and Australia.
~ 60,000-40,000 years ago: The descendants of Out of Africa migrants populate central Asia and Europe over this period.
~ 40,000 years ago: Neanderthals go extinct in Europe, with the Iberian peninsula in south-western Europe (Portugal and Spain) being their last refuge and stand.
~ 45,000-20,000 years ago: The First Indians, the descendants of the Out of Africa migrants in the subcontinent, start using Microlithic technology, and their population increases dramatically in central and eastern India. South Asia becomes the place where ‘most of humanity’ lives.
~ 16,000 years ago: Modern humans reach the Americas.
~ 7000 BCE: In a village that is today called Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Hills in Balochistan, a new agricultural settlement begins that would ultimately become one of the largest habitations of its period between the Indus and the Mediterranean.
~ 7000-3000 BCE: Migration of Iranian agriculturalists from the Zagros region to south Asia leads to their mixing with the descendants of the First Indians. Indus Valley Civilisation also grows during this period.
2000-1000 BCE: Multiple waves of Steppe pastoralist migrants from central Asia into south Asia, bringing Indo-European languages and new religious and cultural practices.
Kalampedia 