Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It is striking that, during the period between 50,000 and 100,000 years
ago, only the remains of Neanderthals and no unequivocal traces of modern
humans have been found in the whole vast region to the north and west of the
Tigris-Euphrates valley. The Neanderthals seem to have disappeared from
this region about 50,000 years ago. And we know that modern humans must
have passed through Neanderthal territory, or somehow dodged around it,
during that time. The mitochondrial DNA story provides strong evidence
that only one small group of modern humans made it through.
Once the modern humans managed to get past this formidable barrier,
the logical route to follow would have been down the Tigris and Euphrates,
then along what are now the coasts of Iran and Pakistan to the mouth of
the Indus. This route, much of it along a dry, rocky, and forbidding coast,
must have posed severe challenges, but any more northerly route would
have been even more dii cult. We do not know when they accomplished
this feat, except that it had to be at least 50,000 years ago. Once the Indus
was reached, it was relatively easy to travel down India's verdant west coast
to its southern tip.
The extent of the Great Migration
Some groups from this Great Migration stayed behind as others, more
adventurous or more foolhardy, moved on. We fi nd descendants of some of
these populations that stayed behind still living in southern India and in the
northern Andaman Islands.
Southern India is a palimpsest of tribal groups and identities, and
although anthropologists have long known that this mix of dif erent human
types had a long history, it was not until the advent of mitochondrial DNA
and whole-genome analysis that it became clear how long and complex this
history really is. 7
Although many members of southern India's aboriginal groups have
recently moved to the cities, some have stayed behind in remote regions to
which they had been driven by later waves of migrants. One of these is the
Nilgiri Hills, the dramatically isolated mountainous plateau that lies at the
 
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