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Did The Harappan Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years?

259 points by fillskills 12y ago

VLM 12y ago
That was an interesting and well written article. I also found the comments interesting and like how the author interacted with the commenters. Unfortunately I can not provide any significant constructive criticism to improve it, as it is extremely good. Could we talk about presentation? On the good side, no 90s era re-imagining of the splash screen that has to be ignored and scrolled past to see the text... I like that. Another good side is no scroll bar hijacking where click hold the scroll bar in the lower half of the article makes the page flip downwards unusably, I hate sites that do that and will go out of my way to avoid them. On the bad side, lets look at the first 5 seconds of user experience. The site renders with 3 pixs, a large artists interpretation of the Harappan (cool), a smaller strange landscape with a only slightly tinier headline "Imagine What It Looked Like Before the Collapse" (to save you time, it has nothing to do with the Harappan although that headline would be a cool follow up story) and, I kid you not, "The Origin of the Speculum Is Just As Creepy As You Imagined". I would suggest fine tuning that a little bit. Especially the last bit. Unless there's a Harappan connection to the speculum (which I guess is possible?)
xerophyte12932 12y ago
If i remember my history, most historians agree that the harappans were wiped out by the Aryans from Central Asia. the Harappans were farmers, where as the Aryans were hunters and soldiers. The south-asian subcontinent was then ruled by the Aryans who laid the foundation of modern day Indians
- cubancigar11 12y ago
  That is largely discredited theory. It was devised by British, and it is well accepted that they were rather looking for a way to explain how 'India' always had outsiders.
  - geekam 12y ago
    It has not been discredited, yet. It has been challenged. You should see the latest paper on this subject that used gneetics - Characterizing the genetic differences between two distinct migrant groups from Indo-European and Dravidian speaking populations in India[1] [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120727/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120727/
    - hacknack 12y ago
      The study you point to seem to have flaws like comparing a very narrow set of group, driving to conclusions about colour tones etc. They try to punch hole in David Reich paper by saying the size per group was not significant, but this is flawed as the number of group was diversely large i.e 30 compared to 2 in this study. They do not try to point flaws in previous works as well. Read this article for the original set of studies that led to the discrediting of AIT http://www.newslaundry.com/2014/08/11/indiana-jones-and-the-troublesome-aryans/ http://www.newslaundry.com/2014/08/11/indiana-jones-and-the-...
    - Ar-Curunir 12y ago
      No, most historians agree that the decline of the Harappan civilization and the arrival of the Aryans is separated by around 500 years. The Aryan 'Invasion' Theory is one that was concocted by the British and is not actually based on any scientific evidence. The wide consesus now is that it was more of a slow migration than a invasion. Regarding the linked paper, there is no concrete evidence that Harappan was a Dravidian language.
    - thevardanian 12y ago
      No. It's been challenged, and the characterized genetic differences between the two populations, while existing, does not point to any recent history signifying a cultural divide. This intermingling between the so called ANI ("Aryans"), and ASI ("Dravidians") genetic markers between the two population is not a recent phenomenon, and in fact at this point the two populations do not in any way point to a cultural difference as the time frame for the intermingling of these genetic traits predates much of the cultural connotations that "aryan", and "dravidian" denote, not to mention the very concepts are genetically irrelevant today, because of the intermingling that began around 4200 years ago making the two groups sharing a common genetic make up. [1] The India of today is fundamentally uniform, and shares a common shared genetic makeup throughout all the tribes, castes, and geographies. So the idea that somehow these genetic differences point to a cultural divide is bunk, because fundamentally the cultural divid postdates the genetic intermingling. Furthermore that common shared genetic makeup is not a recent phenomenon, because the genetics of India has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. So whatever genetics that exists in India today, whether that's isolated, or mixed, has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. [2] The R1a1a gene that's commonly referred to in these instances that drive the Aryan, and the Dravidian divide theory is a gene marker that points to a population that many argue proves the idea of Aryan invasion, or at least migration, as the R1a1a is a common genetic marker in Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and other Eastern European genetics, and not in India. That alone is a weak argument, as the question then is who had the gene first, and who migrated where. A closer, and higher resolution look at genetics gives a different picture. The Europeans carrier of the R1a1a gene have a further M458 mutation of the R1a1a gene that's virtually nonexistent in Asia. Since the M458 mutation is estimated to have occurred at least 8000 years ago it seems that something happened to divide the populations that carried the common R1a1a gene, but the reason of that divide is yet to be empirically established. Thus this genetic marker explains at best a shared ancestry between Europeans, and Indians, not some Aryan invasion theory. The R1a1a genetic marker is not a common genetic trait among Europeans, west Iranians, or throughout central Asia, but found commonly in South Asia. [3] So no. The Aryan invasion theory is thoroughly debunked as Imperial bias to subjugate, and justify their economic plunder over a people. [1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-div... [2] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-new-research-debunks-aryan-invasion-theory-1623744 http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-new-research-debunks-ar... [3] http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a.html http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a....
- FlyingSnake 12y ago
  There is no evidence that there ever was an 'invasion' from Central Asia. There was certainly a migratory pattern from Central Asia but without wars. Due to the climate change the people moved inland towards other river systems.
tempodox 12y ago
I really dislike those “Did X do Y?” article titles. It's like they're saying, “If you even assume the answer could be Yes, you're the idiot we're looking for”. I know not every article with such a title is written with that attitude, but it still sucks.
- JacobAldridge 12y ago
  In case you're not already familiar with it, Betteridge's Law of Headlines is one I reference often [1]. "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
r0h1n 12y ago
As an Indian I can only add that I simultaneously feel a sense of pride (at how advanced the Indus Valley civilization was) and shame (at the fact that modern India is still rediscovering concepts like well-planned cities and sewage/water supply 2000 years later). I live in a fairly well-off suburb of south Bangalore that has NO municipal sewage or water supply. Mine isn't an isolated case either as large parts of Bangalore have neither. Also, large parts of Gurgaon, arguably India's largest new city. So how do we make by? Apartment communities have their own sewage & waste water treatment plants; rain-water harvesting; private garbage disposal (we segregate into multiple categories); drinking water brought in by water tankers that pump ground water (which the law doesn't really protect).
- virmundi 12y ago
  From a certain perspective I feel the same way about present day India. Half the food supply is eaten by rodents. Religious ideas cause the main river to be infectious. But I have hope that they will actually do something different than the West. Centralized water supplies require a lot of money and upkeep. They lose water to evaporation. Central sewers and water are nice, but can lead to safety issues if the water pressure drops. I would like to see India expand modern waste management ideas like composting toilets and local water collection. Depending on where the city is located a combination of ground water and rain water could provide 70-80% of the water needs. Recycling of potable to non-potable water could help stretch that even more. To me India feels rather Confederate in its organization. I wonder if that would allow regional governors more autonomy to experiment with new ideas and techniques.
- Harris1246 12y ago
  4500 years later, not 2000 years. But India is not alone. Europe also experienced civilization reversion. As did East Asia. As did the Americas.
  - r0h1n 12y ago
    Sorry, my bad. Can you explain "civilization reversion"?
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Just to state the obvious, which might not be so obvious to everybody: looking at the big picture, over billions of lives and thousands of years? War is not such a bad thing. I'm not trying to just be randomly contrarian. I'm serious. When I look at all the Europeans went through, starting with Greece and ending with the takeover of the New World, it was conflict after conflict. Terrible time to live. But through all of that experience the Europeans learned to have something resembling "competitive improvement", where folks could have huge egos, dogmatic religions, a quest for progress, and seek to make a difference in the world -- without war. Took a lot of war to figure that out, and we're still working on parts of it, but the lesson is clear: a certain level of creative destructive chaos is something to be demanded and never surrendered. Peaceful harmony is the way of plants, not mankind. We're here to challenge each other to move forward (without war, of course, but it we have to keeping failing to figure out where the boundaries are)
- netcan 12y ago
  War is a part of human history that rolls into pre-human times. It's impossible to remove it from history and try to speculate about the results. It would be like trying to remove pairing or family ties from the equation. In any case, war is what causes things like the dark ages. When the way to gain wealth is to steal it, it doesn't pay to create and people stop. When exchanges between groups are generally violent, all other contact such as trade and cultural exchanges stop. The way violence has been kept at bay enough to let civilisation advance has been violence. Empires which are a big centralized ball of violence were usually how civilisation happened because they provided a big enough sphere within which war was minimal. Islands of relative peace.
- FlyingSnake 12y ago
  > Peaceful harmony is the way of plants, not mankind. Indus valley civilization survived and prospered for around 1500-2000 years, without wars. IMO this is a proof that peaceful harmony works.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    That assertion is what the parent questions. Repeating the assertion as if it were fact does not actually prove anything.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
No. Neither did the Mayans. There has always been a strain of utopianism in the study of ancient history that tries desperately to fit radically implausible social critiques into areas we are ignorant of. It is the sociological or anthropological equivalent of the "God of the gaps" approach in the hard sciences, which disingenuously begs the question "Does God exist?" by insisting that anything we can't positively and fairly certainly explain by physical causes must be due to the Big Guy in the Sky. In the case of magically peaceful civilizations, the most extreme instance was the Maya, who up until the last quarter of the 20th century were presumed to have "solved the problem of war", unlike we nasty brutish and short moderns. Then we learned to read their writing, and discovered they were incredibly violent and war-prone, just like every other human civilization: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-05-27/news/8601310832_1_temple-walls-torture-new-history http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-05-27/news/8601310832_... The similarity between the article's claims about the Harappan civilization to the myths about the Maya are so striking that I've got to say the author and editor are both pretty far out of their depth to have not mentioned it. So my prediction is that contrary to the article's closing complex question, we won't ever find out how the Harappan civilization avoided war, because they didn't. When their writing is eventually translated there will be the "surprising" revelation that their highly ordered civilization was heavily regulated by highly organized violence at all scales, just like every other one we know anything detailed about. As a river civilization, state control of irrigation may have played a significant role in social control, but violence underpinned it, and warfare was the largest-scale expression of that violence. Lack of evidence of sacked cities is evidence that they didn't sack cities, not that they didn't engage in war. Maybe they simply killed all the inhabitants in a more organized way. They were, after all, highly organized. In general, it is more likely that the gaps are filled with things similar to well-studied cases than completely and entirely at odds with them. These mysterious people are deeply fascinating and were clearly extremely accomplished, but the odds are they had basic sociological similarities to everyone else.
- ashark 12y ago
  I took a poli-sci class covering war a(n increasingly long) while back. The professor devoted a huge amount of time[1] to disproving the notion of the peaceful "noble savage" and assigned Keeley's War Before Civilization[2], which is, I gather, still one of the best accessible texts about war in prehistory. May be of interest to anyone wanting to read a book-length exploration of the topic. TL;DR: it corroborates tjradcliffe's claim that the Harappan almost certainly regularly engaged in all kinds of violence, including organized warfare. It would be a huge find if it could actually be proven that they didn't. [1] Way too much time, IMO, since I don't think the idea informed the thinking of his students the way it may have in earlier decades. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization [edit] missing word, formatting
zeteo 12y ago
> Every city was surrounded by a wall This by itself indicates warfare. City walls are huge, costly infrastructure projects that require serious justification for both construction and maintenance. For instance, in contemporary Mesopotamia cities only began to build walls with the emergence of serious warfare at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900 BC). > scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction As the main evidence in the article this is unimpressive. Warfare does not usually result in the mass destruction of cities. E.g. Medieval England had endemic warfare for centuries but London, Bristol etc. didn't get burned down. Factors such as siege methods and building materials also make a big difference in how cities are affected by warfare.
- jeltz 12y ago
  Indeed, the article just casually mentioned city walls without countering the obvious that city walls are normally built in an environment with warfare. City walls is something you do not build unless you really have to. We stopped building them once they stopped being cost effective.
  - Gravityloss 12y ago
    I didn't read this article, but they were mentioned in the Geo magazine some years ago. The walls were thought to be for protection from the river flow.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      To those who have seen the remains of structures exposed to floodwater, this will seem unlikely. The way to deal with floods, if you must live on the floodplain, is to build levees, berms, dikes, etc. Huge piles of rock and dirt, miles long and scores of yards wide, stacked and compacted by hordes of zero-skill labor. Not tiny little stone walls, crafted by masons who would have been among the most skilled artisans a Stone-Age society could have.
- discardorama 12y ago
junto 12y ago
This might be a stupid question, but surely basing their theory on simply studying the buried bodily remains would be somewhat pointless if the Harappans burnt their dead?
- chippy 12y ago
  I'd imagine that there would be evidence of cremation
throwaway283719 12y ago
I take slight issue with this quotation - > Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout. Maybe a street grid seems ordinary if you live in a large city in the US, but most European cities don't have gridded streets (and I don't think it's the norm in many other places in the world either).
- davidw 12y ago
  > most European cities don't have gridded streets The Romans built towns on a grid too. You can see that in the very center of many Italian towns, like the one I live in: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,11.875002,18z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x477eda5841ab30cf:0xc18236edaa1a2e2c https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,1... No, it's not a perfect grid any more, but it's still visible - not bad for a couple of thousand years.
- allendoerfer 12y ago
  Except when some monarch built one for fun. Like Mannheim [0]. Can't get more gridded than that. [0]: https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschland/@49.4869063,8.4649963,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4797cc24518e3f45:0xb1e4fe7aa406e687 https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschlan...
  - twic 12y ago
    Meanwhile, in Karlsruhe: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.014667,8.4076456,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47970648a2e07809:0xb6fc55734cb7ee7f https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.0...
ajarmst 12y ago
Almost certainly not. Stephen Pinker has a whole book discussing not only why not, but why some people are willing to ignore both evidence and reason in order to believe it anyway: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344 http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...)
- astazangasta 12y ago
  Unfortunately Pinker is as guilty of just-so stories and easy essentialism as those he criticizes. What fraction of modern Americans are dying in wars again? Be wary of 'human nature'. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-natu...
  - sudont 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
  - Harris1246 12y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - narag 12y ago
    The idea that people can't be forced to arbitrary behaviour is not the same as the idea that people's minds are rigid. Also modern war is not what it used to. You need huge organization, funds and convincing people to risk their lives. Except maybe in the USA, that patriotic feeling is no longer prevalent in first world countries. And that with professional armies. What happened last time you had forced draft? Was it Vietnam? You'd need a huge amount of money for propaganda that would fire back anyway. A sensible percentage of population sees the (usually economic) interests through the justifications.
tokenadult 12y ago
Poor research produces a poor article, below the standard we should expect here on Hacker News. In one example, the article author writes, "It's also during this time that we begin to see markings that look like writing on pottery. Over a period of just a couple of centuries, these crude marks evolved quickly into an alphabet that we still can't decipher." First of all, "alphabet" is surely the wrong word, as that refers to a specific kind of writing system that the Harappan script most likely was not. Indeed, there is considerable controversy over whether the Harrapan script is writing at all, that is a representation of language, rather than proto-writing, for example markings of ruling families or the like. (Those are stages of development of not-yet-writing attested in other centers of ancient civilization.) As the article correctly notes, there is no evidence of a successor civilization to the Indus Valley civilization, so at the very least we have no sure evidence of any linguistic affiliations of any use of Harappan script for writing. The attested later historical development of writing in India (which flourished at the time of the emperor Ashoka) is based on script forms from the ancient Near East. AFTER EDIT: As usual, I would be happy to hear a rationale for the disagreement that is evidently being expressed regarding this comment. Please show your capacity to teach me (and onlookers) something. I'll mention here that I have studied a variety of other languages (those are disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), including Chinese, and I have made specialized study of the origins of writing around the world. That's my basis for judging the plausibility of various claims about the ancient Harappan inscriptions. A book on that topic I highly recommend, because it is written by very knowledgeable historical linguists, is The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. There has been a little bit of new work on Harappan inscriptions since that book was published, with several claims and counterclaims by competing scholars, but no settled demonstration that the Harappan inscriptions are writing at all, and certainly no settled demonstration of what they are writing about, if anything (as the article submitted here acknowledges). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/dp/0195079930 http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...
- cw0 12y ago
  I had the same thoughts as you while reading the article and I can only imagine you are being downvoted by nationalists who aren't happy at the suggestion that the Harappans weren't writing Sanskrit epics on their pots.
carsongross 12y ago
A more interesting and relevant thing to study would be how modern Switzerland managed to avoid war in the bloodiest century the world had ever seen. It's like the miracle no one wants to notice.
- ovulator 12y ago
  Is it really? Finance the most likely aggressor (Germany), don't fight for them. Then be of no strategic importance for any other invading army. No one wants to march their army over the alps to get somewhere.
  - ajarmst 12y ago
    Don't forget "be armed to the teeth and express a willingness to violently respond to any intrusion into your territory". It's pretty much standard lex talionis strategy, which has been around as long as humans have formed groups.
- trhway 12y ago
  may be just like Sweden - just say "No" to war and declare to be neutral. Well, it worked for almost 2 centuries until "The accession to the European Union in 1995 meant that neutrality as a principle was abolished." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality)
- cbd1984 12y ago
  People noticed how much Nazi gold ended up in Swiss bank accounts, how mountainous Switzerland is, and how useless it is tactically and strategically. They largely stopped wondering about Swiss neutrality during WWII after noticing all that.
asadlionpk 12y ago
Being a resident of South Asia, it makes me sad that we aren't taking any care of these historical locations.

259 points by fillskills 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

That was an interesting and well written article. I also found the comments interesting and like how the author interacted with the commenters. Unfortunately I can not provide any significant constructive criticism to improve it, as it is extremely good. Could we talk about presentation? On the good side, no 90s era re-imagining of the splash screen that has to be ignored and scrolled past to see the text... I like that. Another good side is no scroll bar hijacking where click hold the scroll bar in the lower half of the article makes the page flip downwards unusably, I hate sites that do that and will go out of my way to avoid them. On the bad side, lets look at the first 5 seconds of user experience. The site renders with 3 pixs, a large artists interpretation of the Harappan (cool), a smaller strange landscape with a only slightly tinier headline "Imagine What It Looked Like Before the Collapse" (to save you time, it has nothing to do with the Harappan although that headline would be a cool follow up story) and, I kid you not, "The Origin of the Speculum Is Just As Creepy As You Imagined". I would suggest fine tuning that a little bit. Especially the last bit. Unless there's a Harappan connection to the speculum (which I guess is possible?)

xerophyte12932 12y ago

If i remember my history, most historians agree that the harappans were wiped out by the Aryans from Central Asia. the Harappans were farmers, where as the Aryans were hunters and soldiers. The south-asian subcontinent was then ruled by the Aryans who laid the foundation of modern day Indians

cubancigar11 12y ago
That is largely discredited theory. It was devised by British, and it is well accepted that they were rather looking for a way to explain how 'India' always had outsiders.
- geekam 12y ago
  It has not been discredited, yet. It has been challenged. You should see the latest paper on this subject that used gneetics - Characterizing the genetic differences between two distinct migrant groups from Indo-European and Dravidian speaking populations in India[1] [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120727/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120727/
  - hacknack 12y ago
    The study you point to seem to have flaws like comparing a very narrow set of group, driving to conclusions about colour tones etc. They try to punch hole in David Reich paper by saying the size per group was not significant, but this is flawed as the number of group was diversely large i.e 30 compared to 2 in this study. They do not try to point flaws in previous works as well. Read this article for the original set of studies that led to the discrediting of AIT http://www.newslaundry.com/2014/08/11/indiana-jones-and-the-troublesome-aryans/ http://www.newslaundry.com/2014/08/11/indiana-jones-and-the-...
  - Ar-Curunir 12y ago
    No, most historians agree that the decline of the Harappan civilization and the arrival of the Aryans is separated by around 500 years. The Aryan 'Invasion' Theory is one that was concocted by the British and is not actually based on any scientific evidence. The wide consesus now is that it was more of a slow migration than a invasion. Regarding the linked paper, there is no concrete evidence that Harappan was a Dravidian language.
  - thevardanian 12y ago
    No. It's been challenged, and the characterized genetic differences between the two populations, while existing, does not point to any recent history signifying a cultural divide. This intermingling between the so called ANI ("Aryans"), and ASI ("Dravidians") genetic markers between the two population is not a recent phenomenon, and in fact at this point the two populations do not in any way point to a cultural difference as the time frame for the intermingling of these genetic traits predates much of the cultural connotations that "aryan", and "dravidian" denote, not to mention the very concepts are genetically irrelevant today, because of the intermingling that began around 4200 years ago making the two groups sharing a common genetic make up. [1] The India of today is fundamentally uniform, and shares a common shared genetic makeup throughout all the tribes, castes, and geographies. So the idea that somehow these genetic differences point to a cultural divide is bunk, because fundamentally the cultural divid postdates the genetic intermingling. Furthermore that common shared genetic makeup is not a recent phenomenon, because the genetics of India has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. So whatever genetics that exists in India today, whether that's isolated, or mixed, has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. [2] The R1a1a gene that's commonly referred to in these instances that drive the Aryan, and the Dravidian divide theory is a gene marker that points to a population that many argue proves the idea of Aryan invasion, or at least migration, as the R1a1a is a common genetic marker in Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and other Eastern European genetics, and not in India. That alone is a weak argument, as the question then is who had the gene first, and who migrated where. A closer, and higher resolution look at genetics gives a different picture. The Europeans carrier of the R1a1a gene have a further M458 mutation of the R1a1a gene that's virtually nonexistent in Asia. Since the M458 mutation is estimated to have occurred at least 8000 years ago it seems that something happened to divide the populations that carried the common R1a1a gene, but the reason of that divide is yet to be empirically established. Thus this genetic marker explains at best a shared ancestry between Europeans, and Indians, not some Aryan invasion theory. The R1a1a genetic marker is not a common genetic trait among Europeans, west Iranians, or throughout central Asia, but found commonly in South Asia. [3] So no. The Aryan invasion theory is thoroughly debunked as Imperial bias to subjugate, and justify their economic plunder over a people. [1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-div... [2] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-new-research-debunks-aryan-invasion-theory-1623744 http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-new-research-debunks-ar... [3] http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a.html http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a....
FlyingSnake 12y ago
There is no evidence that there ever was an 'invasion' from Central Asia. There was certainly a migratory pattern from Central Asia but without wars. Due to the climate change the people moved inland towards other river systems.

tempodox 12y ago

I really dislike those “Did X do Y?” article titles. It's like they're saying, “If you even assume the answer could be Yes, you're the idiot we're looking for”. I know not every article with such a title is written with that attitude, but it still sucks.

JacobAldridge 12y ago
In case you're not already familiar with it, Betteridge's Law of Headlines is one I reference often [1]. "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

r0h1n 12y ago

As an Indian I can only add that I simultaneously feel a sense of pride (at how advanced the Indus Valley civilization was) and shame (at the fact that modern India is still rediscovering concepts like well-planned cities and sewage/water supply 2000 years later). I live in a fairly well-off suburb of south Bangalore that has NO municipal sewage or water supply. Mine isn't an isolated case either as large parts of Bangalore have neither. Also, large parts of Gurgaon, arguably India's largest new city. So how do we make by? Apartment communities have their own sewage & waste water treatment plants; rain-water harvesting; private garbage disposal (we segregate into multiple categories); drinking water brought in by water tankers that pump ground water (which the law doesn't really protect).

virmundi 12y ago
From a certain perspective I feel the same way about present day India. Half the food supply is eaten by rodents. Religious ideas cause the main river to be infectious. But I have hope that they will actually do something different than the West. Centralized water supplies require a lot of money and upkeep. They lose water to evaporation. Central sewers and water are nice, but can lead to safety issues if the water pressure drops. I would like to see India expand modern waste management ideas like composting toilets and local water collection. Depending on where the city is located a combination of ground water and rain water could provide 70-80% of the water needs. Recycling of potable to non-potable water could help stretch that even more. To me India feels rather Confederate in its organization. I wonder if that would allow regional governors more autonomy to experiment with new ideas and techniques.
Harris1246 12y ago
4500 years later, not 2000 years. But India is not alone. Europe also experienced civilization reversion. As did East Asia. As did the Americas.
- r0h1n 12y ago
  Sorry, my bad. Can you explain "civilization reversion"?

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

Just to state the obvious, which might not be so obvious to everybody: looking at the big picture, over billions of lives and thousands of years? War is not such a bad thing. I'm not trying to just be randomly contrarian. I'm serious. When I look at all the Europeans went through, starting with Greece and ending with the takeover of the New World, it was conflict after conflict. Terrible time to live. But through all of that experience the Europeans learned to have something resembling "competitive improvement", where folks could have huge egos, dogmatic religions, a quest for progress, and seek to make a difference in the world -- without war. Took a lot of war to figure that out, and we're still working on parts of it, but the lesson is clear: a certain level of creative destructive chaos is something to be demanded and never surrendered. Peaceful harmony is the way of plants, not mankind. We're here to challenge each other to move forward (without war, of course, but it we have to keeping failing to figure out where the boundaries are)

netcan 12y ago
War is a part of human history that rolls into pre-human times. It's impossible to remove it from history and try to speculate about the results. It would be like trying to remove pairing or family ties from the equation. In any case, war is what causes things like the dark ages. When the way to gain wealth is to steal it, it doesn't pay to create and people stop. When exchanges between groups are generally violent, all other contact such as trade and cultural exchanges stop. The way violence has been kept at bay enough to let civilisation advance has been violence. Empires which are a big centralized ball of violence were usually how civilisation happened because they provided a big enough sphere within which war was minimal. Islands of relative peace.
FlyingSnake 12y ago
> Peaceful harmony is the way of plants, not mankind. Indus valley civilization survived and prospered for around 1500-2000 years, without wars. IMO this is a proof that peaceful harmony works.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  That assertion is what the parent questions. Repeating the assertion as if it were fact does not actually prove anything.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

No. Neither did the Mayans. There has always been a strain of utopianism in the study of ancient history that tries desperately to fit radically implausible social critiques into areas we are ignorant of. It is the sociological or anthropological equivalent of the "God of the gaps" approach in the hard sciences, which disingenuously begs the question "Does God exist?" by insisting that anything we can't positively and fairly certainly explain by physical causes must be due to the Big Guy in the Sky. In the case of magically peaceful civilizations, the most extreme instance was the Maya, who up until the last quarter of the 20th century were presumed to have "solved the problem of war", unlike we nasty brutish and short moderns. Then we learned to read their writing, and discovered they were incredibly violent and war-prone, just like every other human civilization: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-05-27/news/8601310832_1_temple-walls-torture-new-history http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-05-27/news/8601310832_... The similarity between the article's claims about the Harappan civilization to the myths about the Maya are so striking that I've got to say the author and editor are both pretty far out of their depth to have not mentioned it. So my prediction is that contrary to the article's closing complex question, we won't ever find out how the Harappan civilization avoided war, because they didn't. When their writing is eventually translated there will be the "surprising" revelation that their highly ordered civilization was heavily regulated by highly organized violence at all scales, just like every other one we know anything detailed about. As a river civilization, state control of irrigation may have played a significant role in social control, but violence underpinned it, and warfare was the largest-scale expression of that violence. Lack of evidence of sacked cities is evidence that they didn't sack cities, not that they didn't engage in war. Maybe they simply killed all the inhabitants in a more organized way. They were, after all, highly organized. In general, it is more likely that the gaps are filled with things similar to well-studied cases than completely and entirely at odds with them. These mysterious people are deeply fascinating and were clearly extremely accomplished, but the odds are they had basic sociological similarities to everyone else.

ashark 12y ago
I took a poli-sci class covering war a(n increasingly long) while back. The professor devoted a huge amount of time[1] to disproving the notion of the peaceful "noble savage" and assigned Keeley's War Before Civilization[2], which is, I gather, still one of the best accessible texts about war in prehistory. May be of interest to anyone wanting to read a book-length exploration of the topic. TL;DR: it corroborates tjradcliffe's claim that the Harappan almost certainly regularly engaged in all kinds of violence, including organized warfare. It would be a huge find if it could actually be proven that they didn't. [1] Way too much time, IMO, since I don't think the idea informed the thinking of his students the way it may have in earlier decades. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization [edit] missing word, formatting

zeteo 12y ago

> Every city was surrounded by a wall This by itself indicates warfare. City walls are huge, costly infrastructure projects that require serious justification for both construction and maintenance. For instance, in contemporary Mesopotamia cities only began to build walls with the emergence of serious warfare at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900 BC). > scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction As the main evidence in the article this is unimpressive. Warfare does not usually result in the mass destruction of cities. E.g. Medieval England had endemic warfare for centuries but London, Bristol etc. didn't get burned down. Factors such as siege methods and building materials also make a big difference in how cities are affected by warfare.

jeltz 12y ago
Indeed, the article just casually mentioned city walls without countering the obvious that city walls are normally built in an environment with warfare. City walls is something you do not build unless you really have to. We stopped building them once they stopped being cost effective.
- Gravityloss 12y ago
  I didn't read this article, but they were mentioned in the Geo magazine some years ago. The walls were thought to be for protection from the river flow.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    To those who have seen the remains of structures exposed to floodwater, this will seem unlikely. The way to deal with floods, if you must live on the floodplain, is to build levees, berms, dikes, etc. Huge piles of rock and dirt, miles long and scores of yards wide, stacked and compacted by hordes of zero-skill labor. Not tiny little stone walls, crafted by masons who would have been among the most skilled artisans a Stone-Age society could have.
discardorama 12y ago

junto 12y ago

This might be a stupid question, but surely basing their theory on simply studying the buried bodily remains would be somewhat pointless if the Harappans burnt their dead?

chippy 12y ago
I'd imagine that there would be evidence of cremation

throwaway283719 12y ago

I take slight issue with this quotation - > Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout. Maybe a street grid seems ordinary if you live in a large city in the US, but most European cities don't have gridded streets (and I don't think it's the norm in many other places in the world either).

davidw 12y ago
> most European cities don't have gridded streets The Romans built towns on a grid too. You can see that in the very center of many Italian towns, like the one I live in: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,11.875002,18z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x477eda5841ab30cf:0xc18236edaa1a2e2c https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,1... No, it's not a perfect grid any more, but it's still visible - not bad for a couple of thousand years.
allendoerfer 12y ago
Except when some monarch built one for fun. Like Mannheim [0]. Can't get more gridded than that. [0]: https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschland/@49.4869063,8.4649963,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4797cc24518e3f45:0xb1e4fe7aa406e687 https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschlan...
- twic 12y ago
  Meanwhile, in Karlsruhe: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.014667,8.4076456,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47970648a2e07809:0xb6fc55734cb7ee7f https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.0...

ajarmst 12y ago

Almost certainly not. Stephen Pinker has a whole book discussing not only why not, but why some people are willing to ignore both evidence and reason in order to believe it anyway: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344 http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...)

astazangasta 12y ago
Unfortunately Pinker is as guilty of just-so stories and easy essentialism as those he criticizes. What fraction of modern Americans are dying in wars again? Be wary of 'human nature'. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-natu...
- sudont 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- Harris1246 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- narag 12y ago
  The idea that people can't be forced to arbitrary behaviour is not the same as the idea that people's minds are rigid. Also modern war is not what it used to. You need huge organization, funds and convincing people to risk their lives. Except maybe in the USA, that patriotic feeling is no longer prevalent in first world countries. And that with professional armies. What happened last time you had forced draft? Was it Vietnam? You'd need a huge amount of money for propaganda that would fire back anyway. A sensible percentage of population sees the (usually economic) interests through the justifications.

tokenadult 12y ago

Poor research produces a poor article, below the standard we should expect here on Hacker News. In one example, the article author writes, "It's also during this time that we begin to see markings that look like writing on pottery. Over a period of just a couple of centuries, these crude marks evolved quickly into an alphabet that we still can't decipher." First of all, "alphabet" is surely the wrong word, as that refers to a specific kind of writing system that the Harappan script most likely was not. Indeed, there is considerable controversy over whether the Harrapan script is writing at all, that is a representation of language, rather than proto-writing, for example markings of ruling families or the like. (Those are stages of development of not-yet-writing attested in other centers of ancient civilization.) As the article correctly notes, there is no evidence of a successor civilization to the Indus Valley civilization, so at the very least we have no sure evidence of any linguistic affiliations of any use of Harappan script for writing. The attested later historical development of writing in India (which flourished at the time of the emperor Ashoka) is based on script forms from the ancient Near East. AFTER EDIT: As usual, I would be happy to hear a rationale for the disagreement that is evidently being expressed regarding this comment. Please show your capacity to teach me (and onlookers) something. I'll mention here that I have studied a variety of other languages (those are disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), including Chinese, and I have made specialized study of the origins of writing around the world. That's my basis for judging the plausibility of various claims about the ancient Harappan inscriptions. A book on that topic I highly recommend, because it is written by very knowledgeable historical linguists, is The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. There has been a little bit of new work on Harappan inscriptions since that book was published, with several claims and counterclaims by competing scholars, but no settled demonstration that the Harappan inscriptions are writing at all, and certainly no settled demonstration of what they are writing about, if anything (as the article submitted here acknowledges). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/dp/0195079930 http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

cw0 12y ago
I had the same thoughts as you while reading the article and I can only imagine you are being downvoted by nationalists who aren't happy at the suggestion that the Harappans weren't writing Sanskrit epics on their pots.

carsongross 12y ago

A more interesting and relevant thing to study would be how modern Switzerland managed to avoid war in the bloodiest century the world had ever seen. It's like the miracle no one wants to notice.

ovulator 12y ago
Is it really? Finance the most likely aggressor (Germany), don't fight for them. Then be of no strategic importance for any other invading army. No one wants to march their army over the alps to get somewhere.
- ajarmst 12y ago
  Don't forget "be armed to the teeth and express a willingness to violently respond to any intrusion into your territory". It's pretty much standard lex talionis strategy, which has been around as long as humans have formed groups.
trhway 12y ago
may be just like Sweden - just say "No" to war and declare to be neutral. Well, it worked for almost 2 centuries until "The accession to the European Union in 1995 meant that neutrality as a principle was abolished." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality)
cbd1984 12y ago
People noticed how much Nazi gold ended up in Swiss bank accounts, how mountainous Switzerland is, and how useless it is tactically and strategically. They largely stopped wondering about Swiss neutrality during WWII after noticing all that.

asadlionpk 12y ago

Being a resident of South Asia, it makes me sad that we aren't taking any care of these historical locations.