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A review by lpm100
Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph
challenging
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors...."
5/5 stars
"A dense, multi-disciplinary book of abductive reasoning that is sure to make many people uncomfortable."
*******
Of the book:
-276 pages of prose
-4 chapters, and epilogue, a summary, and FAQs
-85 reference sources, about 1 every 3 pages
*******
The number of sources here is fewer than many books on said topic, but Joseph does a yeoman's work of actually going through and reading all of these obscure papers and stapling them together into a fairly readable narrative.
In a way, more is less; sometimes trying to create a narrative arc around too much data creates a long and boring book. (This book was 274 pages, but Tony Joseph co-authored another book about the same topic that was 650 pages long and just came out this year.)
There's also some journalistic work here around: the relationships of the scientists, the dates of their findings, and some of the political pushback when trying to release certain findings.
And yet: in spite of its smaller number of sources, the book still feels like drinking water through a fire hose.
The author does deliberately choose repetition in order to help us remember so many of these numerous and disparate facts.
With that in mind, I will just give some impressionistic observations as well as selected interesting concrete facts found in the text.
This book is a riff on:
1. "Who We Are And How We Got Here," by David Reich.
It shows the story of something like: Population A is in one place, and Population B comes to mix with it creating Population C. Sometimes there is back-mixing or incomplete mixing to create a gradient of levels of admixture. (West Eurasians from around Turkey and Iran mixed in varying degrees with North and South Indians.)
2."The 10,000 Year Explosion," that human evolution accelerated with the advent of agriculture, although it was just as regional.
People have been in (what is now called) India for an extremely long time. Something like 65,000 years after leaving Africa. And the genetic diversity there is greater than any place in the world outside of Africa (genetic diversity and population age are directly proportional).
It is a bit more studyable than Africa because it has a longer literary tradition and is not so thinly populated.
3. Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations." The Harappan civilization, like many others, was one that just disappeared for mysterious reasons.
The 4 major chapters are arranged around successive layers of migration to India.
1. Migrations out of Africa (65,000 years ago) create the "First Indians."
2. First Indians mixed with herders from around what is now Iran to create early civilization. (10,000-8,000 BCE)
3. Harappan civilization shows up about 5,000 years after this. (2600BCE)
4. The latest migrants (Arya) were warriors and pastoralists from the Asian Steppe that amalgamated their languages and religious customs with the existing Harappan traditions (2000 BCE).
All the same: First Indian ancestry is still 50 to 65% of most population groups. (The comparable figure in many parts of Europe is about 6%.)
The caste system came into being about 2,000 years ago, and the theretofore free mixing between the Indian groups stopped and the populations started to diverge. ("The difference between people in a single Indian village is two to three times that between North and South Europeans," p.259)
*******
The book spends most of its time triangulating between: molecular genetics of populations, archeologic, linguistic and climatologic data.
And it does make sense that these are all four necessary to reconstruct the past.
-Archeology is blind to genetic reality
-Genetics is blind to timing of population replacements/miscegenation. It's also blind to environmental influences.
-Climate data can give us an idea of what happened when - - what COULD have happened when.
-Linguistics can prove common origin / interaction between populations, but it can't tell us when. It's also incomplete, because most language was unwritten up until recently (say, 5000 years ago).
And between these four disciplines, whatever is left after you have eliminated everything else must be the explanation.
No matter how uncomfortable or improbable.
And even just the methodology is useful to know, because there are way too many specific cases and way too much information for somebody who is not a specialist in the field to be able to have it at his fingertips.
Other observations:
1. Population genetics is just as political as it is scientific:
a. (p.91). Sanskrit and The Vedas cannot be the singular source of Indian culture if the Harappan civilization predated either of them. Before the Indian people would collaborate, the non-indian people had to change the names of the basis populations to "Ancestral North Indian" and "Ancestral South Indian."
b. (p.21). China seems to have a lot of holdouts that Chinese people took a separate evolutionary path from archaic humans.
2. There's huge genetic diversity, as well as about 780 different languages (22 of them are recognized in the Constitution).
3. Religion plays an important part in all societies transitioning through phases. Even if it's never the same story twice. In this case, the temple owns a lot of land and extract productive surplus and decide it's allocation. (Sacrifices and offerings to god.) They also seem to have ways of bringing people together in large numbers for cooperation.
4. The Harappan language has not been deciphered after a century of work (although it took several centuries to decipher Egyptian). It's amazing that a civilization which covered one third of India has only been rediscovered within the past several decades after vanishing without a trace for several thousand years.
5. Southern Indians tend to refuse to speak Hindi and also don't watch North Indian television, but this book puts it into a new light. It is not that they are backward and intransigent, it is just that they are the minority remnant of a very much older Indian cultural substrate.
6. Even though India is a multi-source civilization, it stabilized probably about 4,000 years ago (the last migrants were in 2000 BCE). Other immigrants have arrived --Jews, Paris, Syrians-- but they were too small to make an impact.
6. The caste system started probably about 19 centuriea ago, and free mixing stopped at around 100 CE (p.224). And even as big as the country got, and is, it is different to China in that there are a very large number of small inbred populations vis-a-vis the Chinese, that have been mixing freely for thousands of years (p.228).
What specific facts are going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable?
1. Some races of people (that exist as of a moment in time) really are more productive than others and they come to wipe out their competitors. All these conquests detailed in the Tanakh of Israelites conquering surrounding people may be dramatic and literary--but it is hardly new, and therefore not unique.
2. Sexual selection is a ruthless process, and there are a small number of winners and huge number of losers.90% of women have been after 10% of men for many thousands of years; that would explain the way that Yamnaya males left behind so many children and how they sidelined so many of the local males. (In this case, it is Iberian males. p.183).
3. The Nazis were wrong that Aryans were Nordic, and the Indians were and are wrong that they were a pure race. (They were mixed-raced pastoralists from the Eastern European steppe.)
4. Intra-racial competition is a real thing--and some people really are losers in these contests.
a. South Indians are direct descendants of much older populations (p.212--the further south, the blacker), but they have been pushed back over many thousands of years by North Indians containing Steppe ancestry.
b. Ashkenazim probably did not even exist 1500 years ago, but in the last several centuries they have come to dominate Judaism both in and out of the land of Israel.
c. The "Talented Tenth" envisioned by WEB DuBois was mostly mulatto.
5. If some ethnicity wants to talk about keeping its race "pure" (and Asian Indians are quite big on this), what you define as pure depends on your starting point.
6. Tribal Indians are the same thing as the other 92% of indians.
Verdict: This book was worth the read and the time, though it was not necessarily an easy read. Worth it at the second hand price of about $10.
Vocabulary:
Yamnaya
Corded Ware
Denisovans
steatite
sindoor
lots
Brahmana period (BCE 900-700)
"Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors...."
5/5 stars
"A dense, multi-disciplinary book of abductive reasoning that is sure to make many people uncomfortable."
*******
Of the book:
-276 pages of prose
-4 chapters, and epilogue, a summary, and FAQs
-85 reference sources, about 1 every 3 pages
*******
The number of sources here is fewer than many books on said topic, but Joseph does a yeoman's work of actually going through and reading all of these obscure papers and stapling them together into a fairly readable narrative.
In a way, more is less; sometimes trying to create a narrative arc around too much data creates a long and boring book. (This book was 274 pages, but Tony Joseph co-authored another book about the same topic that was 650 pages long and just came out this year.)
There's also some journalistic work here around: the relationships of the scientists, the dates of their findings, and some of the political pushback when trying to release certain findings.
And yet: in spite of its smaller number of sources, the book still feels like drinking water through a fire hose.
The author does deliberately choose repetition in order to help us remember so many of these numerous and disparate facts.
With that in mind, I will just give some impressionistic observations as well as selected interesting concrete facts found in the text.
This book is a riff on:
1. "Who We Are And How We Got Here," by David Reich.
It shows the story of something like: Population A is in one place, and Population B comes to mix with it creating Population C. Sometimes there is back-mixing or incomplete mixing to create a gradient of levels of admixture. (West Eurasians from around Turkey and Iran mixed in varying degrees with North and South Indians.)
2."The 10,000 Year Explosion," that human evolution accelerated with the advent of agriculture, although it was just as regional.
People have been in (what is now called) India for an extremely long time. Something like 65,000 years after leaving Africa. And the genetic diversity there is greater than any place in the world outside of Africa (genetic diversity and population age are directly proportional).
It is a bit more studyable than Africa because it has a longer literary tradition and is not so thinly populated.
3. Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations." The Harappan civilization, like many others, was one that just disappeared for mysterious reasons.
The 4 major chapters are arranged around successive layers of migration to India.
1. Migrations out of Africa (65,000 years ago) create the "First Indians."
2. First Indians mixed with herders from around what is now Iran to create early civilization. (10,000-8,000 BCE)
3. Harappan civilization shows up about 5,000 years after this. (2600BCE)
4. The latest migrants (Arya) were warriors and pastoralists from the Asian Steppe that amalgamated their languages and religious customs with the existing Harappan traditions (2000 BCE).
All the same: First Indian ancestry is still 50 to 65% of most population groups. (The comparable figure in many parts of Europe is about 6%.)
The caste system came into being about 2,000 years ago, and the theretofore free mixing between the Indian groups stopped and the populations started to diverge. ("The difference between people in a single Indian village is two to three times that between North and South Europeans," p.259)
*******
The book spends most of its time triangulating between: molecular genetics of populations, archeologic, linguistic and climatologic data.
And it does make sense that these are all four necessary to reconstruct the past.
-Archeology is blind to genetic reality
-Genetics is blind to timing of population replacements/miscegenation. It's also blind to environmental influences.
-Climate data can give us an idea of what happened when - - what COULD have happened when.
-Linguistics can prove common origin / interaction between populations, but it can't tell us when. It's also incomplete, because most language was unwritten up until recently (say, 5000 years ago).
And between these four disciplines, whatever is left after you have eliminated everything else must be the explanation.
No matter how uncomfortable or improbable.
And even just the methodology is useful to know, because there are way too many specific cases and way too much information for somebody who is not a specialist in the field to be able to have it at his fingertips.
Other observations:
1. Population genetics is just as political as it is scientific:
a. (p.91). Sanskrit and The Vedas cannot be the singular source of Indian culture if the Harappan civilization predated either of them. Before the Indian people would collaborate, the non-indian people had to change the names of the basis populations to "Ancestral North Indian" and "Ancestral South Indian."
b. (p.21). China seems to have a lot of holdouts that Chinese people took a separate evolutionary path from archaic humans.
2. There's huge genetic diversity, as well as about 780 different languages (22 of them are recognized in the Constitution).
3. Religion plays an important part in all societies transitioning through phases. Even if it's never the same story twice. In this case, the temple owns a lot of land and extract productive surplus and decide it's allocation. (Sacrifices and offerings to god.) They also seem to have ways of bringing people together in large numbers for cooperation.
4. The Harappan language has not been deciphered after a century of work (although it took several centuries to decipher Egyptian). It's amazing that a civilization which covered one third of India has only been rediscovered within the past several decades after vanishing without a trace for several thousand years.
5. Southern Indians tend to refuse to speak Hindi and also don't watch North Indian television, but this book puts it into a new light. It is not that they are backward and intransigent, it is just that they are the minority remnant of a very much older Indian cultural substrate.
6. Even though India is a multi-source civilization, it stabilized probably about 4,000 years ago (the last migrants were in 2000 BCE). Other immigrants have arrived --Jews, Paris, Syrians-- but they were too small to make an impact.
6. The caste system started probably about 19 centuriea ago, and free mixing stopped at around 100 CE (p.224). And even as big as the country got, and is, it is different to China in that there are a very large number of small inbred populations vis-a-vis the Chinese, that have been mixing freely for thousands of years (p.228).
What specific facts are going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable?
1. Some races of people (that exist as of a moment in time) really are more productive than others and they come to wipe out their competitors. All these conquests detailed in the Tanakh of Israelites conquering surrounding people may be dramatic and literary--but it is hardly new, and therefore not unique.
2. Sexual selection is a ruthless process, and there are a small number of winners and huge number of losers.90% of women have been after 10% of men for many thousands of years; that would explain the way that Yamnaya males left behind so many children and how they sidelined so many of the local males. (In this case, it is Iberian males. p.183).
3. The Nazis were wrong that Aryans were Nordic, and the Indians were and are wrong that they were a pure race. (They were mixed-raced pastoralists from the Eastern European steppe.)
4. Intra-racial competition is a real thing--and some people really are losers in these contests.
a. South Indians are direct descendants of much older populations (p.212--the further south, the blacker), but they have been pushed back over many thousands of years by North Indians containing Steppe ancestry.
b. Ashkenazim probably did not even exist 1500 years ago, but in the last several centuries they have come to dominate Judaism both in and out of the land of Israel.
c. The "Talented Tenth" envisioned by WEB DuBois was mostly mulatto.
5. If some ethnicity wants to talk about keeping its race "pure" (and Asian Indians are quite big on this), what you define as pure depends on your starting point.
6. Tribal Indians are the same thing as the other 92% of indians.
Verdict: This book was worth the read and the time, though it was not necessarily an easy read. Worth it at the second hand price of about $10.
Vocabulary:
Yamnaya
Corded Ware
Denisovans
steatite
sindoor
lots
Brahmana period (BCE 900-700)