The residents of Mehrgarh who raised the first mud-brick homes of two or three rooms may not have realized it then, but they were laying the foundati… - Tony Joseph

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The residents of Mehrgarh who raised the first mud-brick homes of two or three rooms may not have realized it then, but they were laying the foundation for the first efflorescence of civilization in South Asia, called the Harappan Civilization, or the Indus Valley Civilization. It took about 4500 years or over 150 generations, for those humble mud-brick abodes to turn into the urban structures of a Harappa or a Mohenjo-daro or a Dholavira and there must have been many twists and turns along the way. But once agriculture took root, and modern humans started creating a surplus that they could save and invest, the wheels of history started spinning fast - which would, of course, lead to the invention of the wheel itself!

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About Tony Joseph

Tony Joseph (born 12 March 1963) is an Indian journalist and former editor of Businessworld magazine. He is also the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (2018).

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Additional quotes by Tony Joseph

No human community is of exceptional status relative to others. None are children of God, or chosen people, unless all are. And none of us live upon the centre of the earth more than we live on its periphery, since we live on the surface of a globe. Nations as we understand them today are no older than a few centuries, and we are all interconnected - genetically, culturally and historically - far more than we imagine. And even 'time immemorial', it turns out, can increasingly be pinned down, dated, analysed and grasped. And when we do that, we get a far better understanding of our society and culture, and what went into their making.

Witzel quotes the surveys made by the Pakistani archaeologist Muhammad Rafiq Mughal which showed there were settlements on the Pakistani side of the Sarasvati even as late as 1500 BCE, suggesting that the river was still flowing then, well after the decline of the Harappan Civilization.

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The best way we can define ourselves is as a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its traditions and its practices from a variety of heredities and migration histories. The Out of Africa migrants, the fearless pioneering explorers who reached this land around sixty-five millennia ago and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population; those who arrived from West Asia and contributed to the agricultural revolution and the building of the Harappan Civilization which then became the crucible for new practices, concepts and the Dravidian languages that enrich much of our culture today; those who came from east Asia, bringing with them new languages and plants and farming techniques; and those who migrated here from central Asia, carrying an early version of what would become a great language, Sanskrit, and all its associated beliefs and practices that have reshaped our society in fundamental ways; and those who came even later seeking refuge or for conquest or for trade, and then chose to stay - all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call Indian. We are all Indians. And we are all migrants.

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