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Introduction

India is a country remarkable for its diversity; biological and human. The biological diversity owes itself to the country's position at the trijunction of the African, the northern Eurasian and the Oriental realm; its great variety of environmental regimes, and its relative stability of biological production. It is this biological wealth that has attracted to the subcontinent many streams of people at different times, from different directions; bringing together a great diversity of human genes and human cultures. Whereas in other lands the dominant human cultures have tended to absorb or eliminate others, in India the tendency has been to isolate and subjugate the subordinated cultures, thereby augmenting cultural diversity. This tendency to nurture diversity has been favoured by the diversity of the country's ecological regimes [Gadgil and Guha, 1992].

People migrate because of pulls from their destination and pushes in their homeland, often propelled along by some technological advantage. Thus in 16th century Europeans came to India in search of spices, pushed out by the little ice age that had gripped Europe, equipped with superior seagoing vessels and guns. That migration is well documented and understood; but it is the many earlier ones that have brought to India the bulk of human genes and cultural traits. It is our purpose in this paper to elucidate what we can of these many earlier migrations.

Role of innovations

People have of course migrated out of India as well, but these out-migrations have been on a much smaller scale, and mostly over the last three centuries. This is related to the fact that India has never been the site of any significant technological innovations. A series of important innovations have, over the years taken place outside of India, innovations which have given an edge to people in control of these innovations, propelling major migrations [Habib, 1992].

In chronological order the most relevant of these include:

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Table of contents

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Peopling of India, Demographic History, Global Genetic History, Mitochondrial DNA Base Sequences


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