Indus cities rose—and scattered—before the Vedas
Modern humans likely reached the subcontinent between about 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Settled farming took root by 7000 BCE at sites such as Mehrgarh. The Indus Valley Civilisation then flowered between roughly 2500 and 1900 BCE before drought emptied its great cities.
Hominins may have entered South Asia as early as two million years ago; stone tools at Riwat in Pakistan and Homo erectus or heidelbergensis fossils from the Narmada Valley (about half a million years old) mark deep prehistory. Tim Dyson judges modern humans “virtually certain” in the northwest by 55,000 years ago, though the oldest fossils found so far are only about 30,000 years old. By 7000 BCE communities at Mehrgarh prepared fields, selected grains, and domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and oxen. The Bronze Age Indus world—one of the Old World's three early cradles—may have held up to five million people at its peak, with brick cities, roadside drains, metallurgy in copper and bronze, and an undeciphered script at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira, and related sites.
Persistent drought early in the second millennium BCE pushed urban populations into villages. From about 1800–1500 BCE Indo-Aryan groups moved into the northwest in waves; the Vedic period (about 1500–500 BCE) composed the Vedas, stratified society through varna, and spread into the Ganga plain. Around 600 BCE a second urbanization consolidated janapadas into mahajanapadas and saw Jainism under Parshvanatha and Mahavira and Buddhism under the Buddha take shape alongside emerging Hindu traditions.
Chandragupta Maurya toppled the Nandas to found the Maurya Empire; Ashoka's remorse after the Kalinga War and turn toward Buddhist nonviolence became legendary. After 185 BCE the Mauryas fell; Indo-Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, and Kushans followed in the northwest before the Gupta Empire (4th–6th centuries CE) reunited much of the north in a classical “golden age.” Later millennia brought the Delhi Sultanate (from 1206), the Mughal peak as a global manufacturing power, Maratha ascendancy, Company rule, the 1857 rebellion, the British Raj, and 1947 independence with partition into India and Pakistan.
Source: History of India
