According to latest report by a group of our scientists has revealed a new insight into the Indus Valley civilization. A team of scientists from Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Institute of Archaeology, Deccan College Pune, and IIT Kharagpur have found that Indus Valley civilization is at least 8000 years old; that is 2500 years older than what was previously thought.
The new findings now entails that Indus Valley civilization was older than Egyptian (between 7000BC and 3000BC) and Mesopotamian civilization between 6500BC and 3100BC.
A detailed study was carried out on pottery fragments and animal bones from the Bhirrana in Haryana using carbon dating methods. ‘Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) method was also used.’ The findings and evidence from the study have been published in Nature magazine.
“Based on radiocarbon ages from different trenches and levels the settlement at Bhirrana has been inferred to be the oldest in the Indian sub-continent,” read the article.
It is to be noted here that about five million people lived in one million square miles in the Valley of Indus River. The pottery and metal samples recovered from the location show the craftsmanship of the people.
“Our study pushes back the antiquity to as old as 8th millennium before present and will have major implications to the evolution of human settlements in Indian sub-continent,” Anindya Sarkar, a professor at the department of geology and geophysics at IIT Kharagpur, told International Business Times.
The Indus Valley civilization is considered as one of the oldest human settlements that have well-planned constructions; where wells were constructed to channelize water to houses and waste water was channeled into main streets.
Earlier, it was believed by the researchers that the civilization got wiped out after the Indus River dried up due to climate change. But the new study says that climate change could not be the reason for the end of the civilization.
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“Increasing evidence suggest that these people shifted their crop patterns from the large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species of small millets and rice in the later part of declining monsoon and thereby changed their subsistence strategy,” the scientists wrote.
Changing the crops may have led to de-urbanization as it was not necessary to have large food storage facility.
“Because these later crops generally have much lower yield, the organized large storage system of mature Harappan period was abandoned giving rise to smaller more individual household based crop processing and storage system and could act as a catalyst for the de-urbanization of the Harappan civilization rather than an abrupt collapse,” they said.
The article first published on www.lafdatv.com
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