Who are we Indians? Where did we come from? To tell us the story of our ancestry, journalist Tony Joseph goes 65,000 years into the past – when a band of Homo sapiens first made their way from Africa into the Indian subcontinent. These were the First Indians. Citing recent DNA evidence, he traces the subsequent large migrations of modern humans into India – of a people related to early farmers of Iran who mixed with the First Indians at the latest between 5400 BCE and 3700 BCE and of the ‘Arya’ between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE, among others. As Joseph unravels our past, he takes head-on some of the most controversial and uncomfortable questions of Indian history: Who were the Harappans? Are north Indians genetically different from south Indians? When did the caste system emerge? A hugely significant book, Early Indians bravely puts to rest several fierce debates on the ancestry of modern Indians.

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