Rakhigarhi

The site

Rakhigarhi consists of several mounds beside the dry bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra, covering an area that makes it one of the largest known Indus settlements and possibly the largest in India. Excavation, conducted intermittently since the 1960s and more intensively from the 1990s, has found the standard features — planned streets, brick drains, a fortified sector, craft working areas for beads and shell, and a cemetery.

Much of the site lies beneath and around two modern villages, which has limited what can be dug and has put parts of it at risk.

The genome

In 2019 a team published a genome sequenced from a skeleton in the Rakhigarhi cemetery — the first ancient DNA recovered from an Indus individual, the region's climate having destroyed genetic material at every previous attempt.

The result showed an ancestry combining Iranian-related farmer lineages with South Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry, and — the finding that drew attention — no detectable Steppe pastoralist ancestry, which enters the South Asian genetic record later.

Interpretation

The finding has been read in opposite directions. Those arguing for a migration of Indo-Aryan speakers into the subcontinent after the Indus period take it as consistent with their position: Steppe ancestry is absent from the Indus individual because it had not yet arrived. Those arguing for indigenous origins have taken the absence of Steppe ancestry in an Indus skeleton as evidence against migration.

The authors' own reading, and the general position in the field, is the former. It is worth stating that a single genome from one individual carries limited weight in either direction, and that further sequencing from the region is the thing that would settle it.