According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago.[1] However, the earliest known human remains in India date to 30,000 years ago. Settled life, which involves the transition from foraging to farming and pastoralism, began in Greater India around 7,000 BCE. At the site of Mehrgarh, presence can be documented of the domestication of wheat and barley, rapidly followed by that of goats, sheep, and cattle.[2] By 4,500 BCE, settled life had spread more widely,[2] and began to gradually evolve into the Indus Valley Civilization, an early civilization of the Old world, which was contemporaneous with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. This civilization flourished between 2,500 BCE and 1900 BCE in what today is Pakistan and north-western India and was noted for its urban planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage, and water supply.[3]In the early second millennium BCE, persistent drought caused the population of the Indus Valley to scatter from large urban centers to villages. Around the same time, Indo-Aryan tribes moved into the Punjab from regions further northwest in several waves of migration. The resulting Vedic period was marked by the composition of the Vedas, large collections of hymns of these tribes whose postulated religious culture, through synthesis with the preexisting religious cultures of the subcontinent, gave rise to Hinduism. The concept of Varna, a social grouping system which divided people into different groups based on their occupations and abilities, such as priests, warriors, merchants, and tradesmen, was created during this time. Towards the end of this period, around 600 BCE, after the pastoral and nomadic Indo-Aryans spread from the Punjab into the Gangetic plain, large swaths of which they deforested to pave way for agriculture, a second urbanization took place. The small Indo-Aryan chieftaincies, or janapadas, were consolidated into larger states, or mahajanapadas. The urbanization was accompanied by the rise of new ascetic movements in Greater Magadha, including Jainism and Buddhism. These movements gave rise to new religious concepts[4], which opposed the growing influence of Brahmanism and the primacy of rituals, presided by the Brahmin priests, that had come to be associated with Vedic religion.[ - Study24x7
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02 Nov 2020 10:48 AM study24x7 study24x7

According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago.[1] However, the earliest known human remains in India date to 30,000 years ago. Settled life, which involves th...

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