Archaeological findings in Indus Valley could rewrite Indian identity
Archaeological findings in Indus Valley could rewrite Indian identity
Samanth Subramanian
May 26, 2015 Updated: May 27, 2015 09:28 AM
NEW DELHI // When Niraj Rai travels to Pune on Wednesday to pick up DNA samples from 4,000-year-old human skeletons, he will set in motion a process that might resolve Indian history’s most fiercely debated question: Who were the ancient Indians?
So far, the archaeological remains of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished across north-western India and Pakistan between 3,300 and 1,700BC, have provided few clues about the people who lived there, their ethnic or racial background, the language they spoke, or the religion they followed.
Mr Rai, a geneticist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, will be working with samples from four Indus Valley skeletons that are now at Pune’s Deccan College, in its well-regarded archaeology department.
Until they were excavated in January and February, the human remains — two male, one female, and one child — lay in a cemetery not far from the village of Rakhigarhi, in Haryana, about 150 kilometres from Delhi.
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