Is India Home to the Oldest Civilisation?

The discoveries of the Indus Valley Civilisation are now well-documented. It is also believed that the ruins of Harappa were first located when a British Engineer, John Brunton accidentally stumbled upon some bricks close to a railway line being laid to connect Lahore and Karachi towns in 1856. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Sir John Marshall carried out excavations at the site to fix a time-zone of 3250-2750 BC when civilization at the Indus Valley flourished. It is generally agreed upon that civilization took shape sometime between 8000 and 4000 BC.

There have been several theories on when and where did the oldest civilization take root. The most popular one is that it all began in what has come to be known as the 'cradle of civilisation', Mesopotamia, primarily because some human settlement has been sourced to the region during the Neolithic age which dates back to 7000 BC. However, concrete evidence points to the fact that civilization flourished in the region during the times of the ancient Sumerians, roughly coinciding with the Bronze age, which in turn, ran concurrent with the mature Harappan period during 3100-1900 BC. The rise of dynastic Egypt in the Nile Valley occurred in approximately 3200 BC, which is concurrent with the same age as the Sumerians and some of the oldest, but pre-civilized settlement relics found in China again date back to about 7000 BC.

In the North-West part of the sub-continent, the revolution is believed to have occurred somewhere around 8000-7000 BC when the use of metallic objects and agriculture for livelihood began. Based on the excavations carried out by a French Archaeologist, Jean-Francois Jarrige in 1974 around the Indus Valley region and from remnants of the pottery, the tools, as well as the human and animal bones, it has been concluded that even during the pre-Harappan period, some form of civilization existed in the Kachi plains of Baluchisthan, specifically the region of Mehrgarh dating back to 7000-6500 BC, arguably the earliest urban site identified that pre-dates all others in substantial measure. Another evidence of a ‘lost river civilisation’ was found in 2001, when marine archaeologists detected signs of an ancient submerged settlement in the Gulf of Khambhat off the West coast of India in Gujarat and carbon dating of one of the wooden samples has fixed the period to 7500 BC.

So could it be that the most ancient forms of civilization existed in this part of the world? If one takes into account that life on earth has existed over 2 lakh years of which the pre-historic age dates back to the best accuracy of about 10000 to 8000 BC, it is hard to establish facts as incontrovertible truths, based on research that at best stretches over a few decades. But the fact remains that no form of civilization pre-dating 7000 BC that is representative of organized community living, has been identified with a level of certainty as yet and some of the ones that did seem to have existed during the period have been sourced to the sub-continent.