The Asian Age

Indus Valley people migrated from one place to another

When experts looked at remains from the ancient city of Harappa, located in what is known today as the Punjab province of Pakistan, individual­s’ early molars told a very different story than their later ones, meaning they had not been born in the city whe

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Washington: Ancient people in the Indus Valley apparently did not stay put, as was previously thought, a team of US and Indian researcher­s has found by examining 4,000- year- old teeth.

When tooth enamel forms, it incorporat­es elements from the local environmen­t, the food one eats, the water one drinks, the dust one breathes, researcher­s said. When the researcher­s looked at remains from the ancient city of Harappa, located in what is known today as the Punjab province of Pakistan, individual­s’ early molars told a very different story than their later ones, meaning they had not been born in the city where they were found. The text of the Indus Valley Civilisati­on remains undecipher­ed, and known and excavated burial sites are rare. The new study illuminate­s the lives of individual­s buried more than 4,000 years ago in those rare grave sites by providing a novel comparison of the dental enamel and chemical analyses of the water, fauna and rocks of the time, using isotope ratios of lead and strontium.

In its heyday, Harappa held a population of 50,000, although the number of individual­s represente­d by skeletal remains across the entire culture area totals in the hundreds.

“The idea of isotope analysis to determine the origin of individual migrants has been around for decades. But what people haven’t been doing is looking at the different tooth types, essentiall­y, snapshots of residents during different times of individual­s’ lives,” said Benjamin Valentine from the University of Florida. The researcher­s, including Vasant Shinde and Veena Mushrif- Tripathy, from the department of archaeolog­y, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Pune discovered that the people in the Harappa grave sites were not born there, but migrated there from the hinterland­s.

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