Did The Harappan Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years?
io9.com
io9.com
There has always been a strain of utopianism in the study of ancient history that tries desperately to fit radically implausible social critiques into areas we are ignorant of.
It is the sociological or anthropological equivalent of the "God of the gaps" approach in the hard sciences, which disingenuously begs the question "Does God exist?" by insisting that anything we can't positively and fairly certainly explain by physical causes must be due to the Big Guy in the Sky.
In the case of magically peaceful civilizations, the most extreme instance was the Maya, who up until the last quarter of the 20th century were presumed to have "solved the problem of war", unlike we nasty brutish and short moderns. Then we learned to read their writing, and discovered they were incredibly violent and war-prone, just like every other human civilization: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1986-05-27/news/8601310832_...
The similarity between the article's claims about the Harappan civilization to the myths about the Maya are so striking that I've got to say the author and editor are both pretty far out of their depth to have not mentioned it.
So my prediction is that contrary to the article's closing complex question, we won't ever find out how the Harappan civilization avoided war, because they didn't. When their writing is eventually translated there will be the "surprising" revelation that their highly ordered civilization was heavily regulated by highly organized violence at all scales, just like every other one we know anything detailed about.
As a river civilization, state control of irrigation may have played a significant role in social control, but violence underpinned it, and warfare was the largest-scale expression of that violence. Lack of evidence of sacked cities is evidence that they didn't sack cities, not that they didn't engage in war. Maybe they simply killed all the inhabitants in a more organized way. They were, after all, highly organized.
In general, it is more likely that the gaps are filled with things similar to well-studied cases than completely and entirely at odds with them. These mysterious people are deeply fascinating and were clearly extremely accomplished, but the odds are they had basic sociological similarities to everyone else.
TL;DR: it corroborates tjradcliffe's claim that the Harappan almost certainly regularly engaged in all kinds of violence, including organized warfare. It would be a huge find if it could actually be proven that they didn't.
[1] Way too much time, IMO, since I don't think the idea informed the thinking of his students the way it may have in earlier decades.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
[edit] missing word, formatting
As soon as I saw it, I wondered how I had ever handled the scenario but nothing came to mind. Perhaps I just ignored it and would have written "a (increasingly long) while back".
I don't like that part of my post, on reflection. Complexity to no real purpose, and the words miss the meaning I intended. Obviously it's increasingly long ago. Sloppy writing.
Mainstream archaeology's inability to accept these are proto
Hindu/vedic people is staggering. So much evidence, so much
conjecture... of course a culture followed it - it's called
"India". The colonial biases in Indology need to stop. The seals,
the standard measurements, the maths, etc - all are now present
in India today.
Most of Indology was written by colonial brits and germans in the
1800s who had a vested interest in suppressing's India's
knowledge and heritage. It has to stop.[1]
Having said that, let me ask the following:
1) Historically, have there been systemic pro-European biases in Indology research and scholarship?
2) Is this bias unique to Indology and not found in say Egyptology or Oriental studies or the study of other great civilizations of yester era?
3) Is there a generally well studied consensus among Indologists, about the origin of Indic peoples and the emergence of their society & culture?
4) I know Indo-European languages are generally well studied. So do linguists and phonologists generally agree on which proto-language(s) gave rise to the rest?
5) What is a good introductory text (or tome) that all students of Indology are assigned in universities across the world, the authority & veracity of which is generally uncontested?
[1] http://io9.com/mainstream-archaeologys-inability-to-accept-t...
The historiography of India is a very complicated issue, in large part because of lack of written records in key phases of the development of civilization and religion in India, and also because historical claims about India are tightly bound up in political claims about current Indian politics. A Google search on "Indian historiography" (a search I just did) will disclose some of the competing claims.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Hindus-Alternative-History-Wendy-Donig...
I have to admit that I never actually got around to reading the book although I did follow the events surrounding its release in India, which brings me to the question at hand.
The question of historiography of India.
Is India's history and the study of that history, really so murky that it is uniquely mired in so much debate, that any form of consensus, at least among objective outsiders and non-stakeholders, cannot be arrived at?
Surely the Indian subcontinent could not be the only place where scant archaeological evidence and written records remain. Historians do construct rudimentary historical narratives - albeit however poor and discontinuous - from similarly poor records, elsewhere. Don't they?
This leads to the more troubling question of the state of historiography at large.
Is the writing of history largely political, even in this day?
Is it groomed by the prevailing norms, mores and sentiments of society?
Is academia - whether in the West or elsewhere - still a forbidding place for contrarians and detractors ?
If enough institutional power is brought to bear on the historical study of a certain region, people of that region and the culture of that region, could the history of that region be - for all intents and purposes - be whitewashed?
I know historical revisionism and self-censorship - in some quarters of Western academia - has been in full vogue for quite some time.
If a relatively secular and democratic India, poses these problems for scholars, I can easily imagine whole departments & institutes at prestigious academies of higher learning, engaged in the study of even more problematic places like the Middle East (for reasons of hurting Islamic sentiments), China (for reasons of risking bristling a rising economic power) and Africa (for reasons of regret, for the ravaging the continent has endured at the hands of Western powers), being persuaded to cast their findings in a more positive light - or at least in less negative light - should they want their research be continually well funded through grants and bequests, from benefactors both public and private.
It greatly saddens and irks me at the same time, to ask this because I fear that my thoughts and suspicions, might actually be validated.
Are we still living through the effects of a post-colonial interpretation of historiography ?
In 2014 ? Really ?
[1]
Wendy Doniger's book is a tribute to Hinduism's complexity, not an insult
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/wendy-d...
India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/india-c...
Wendy Doniger and the Hindus
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/wendy-d...
Title aside, I think the book's main point is relevant to claims that any group of people in contact with other groups of people were, to any substantial extent, peaceful. I'm not saying it's "aliens built the pyramids" implausible—I don't want to overstate the case against it—but it's the sort of claim that ought to prompt disbelief by default.
In particular I brought up that book since this civilization sits just on the other side of prehistory (do correct me if I'm wrong), which allows many of the same gaps in knowledge that historically produced this exact sort of speculation—the "god (peaceful, harmonious ancestors) of the gaps" that tjradcliffe mentioned.
My guess is that, to the extent that it's true, it represents a kind of local "Pax Harappan", and that farther from their core territory they fought and killed at what would be, by modern standards, considered shockingly often, though it's possible they were less warlike than many of their contemporaries, which would be a worthwhile find on its own. A prolonged period of low-violence in their core territories could represent remarkable stability, certainly. The linked article doesn't provide much to go on, though, so it's hard to say without more extensive reading.
I didn't see a single art warfare ever or a soldier's sword or any war-weapon like thing at all. I've been reading about Indus civilisation since I was 10 but in almost all the time, I came to conclusion that Indus Civilisation was one of the most peaceful era of all that area (I'm not comparing that time with now but relative to other parts of the world at that time).
It is very unfortunate that India & Pakistan has most of the cities as unplanned, dirty & polluted even though they have some of the most fascinated civilisation buried behind their backyard.
Wow that is fascinating. If I may ask have you visited the sites in both India and Pakistan? I think a majority of the sites are in Pakistan and being Indian that is not going to be easy any time soon
Most of the remains of the Indus Civilization are in Pakistan.
One of the oldest known sites of early Harrapan culture is not mentioned in the article is Mehrgarh [1] and belongs to Neolithic period (6500 BCE to c. 2500 BCE).
I think the best way to proceed is to do neither (assuming they were peaceful or liked war) but just explore what is there.
There is also a confusion between war and violence. I presume "war" could be fighting with neighbours (other tribes, cultures) but violence could be internal -- brutal sacrifices, punishments, infanticide, and so on.
Another flaw or rather double standard I see in the argument is that you claim we/others imbue or fill the gaps of unknowns with "Gods" -- "Oh those irrational people believing Higgs boson is God" before we discovered that it isn't. But then you do the same -- you assume there were wars even though you admit there is lack of proof that there was any (understanding writings, discovering sacked cities) .
I agree with your position, but in my view your summary of some well-considered theological positions undermines your on-topic points. To be sure, there are people with shallow appreciation of the metaphysical implications of the exploration of nature, but people with more rich views are easy to find and the typical viewpoint is probably more reasonable than you give credit to.
I hope you would consider being more measured and even-handed in your critiques of other viewpoints, especially when any responses would be off-topic.
Thanks.
> I thought tjradcliffe might consider phrasing his comments more courteously next time.
That actually was my more courteous phrasing :-)
But I appreciate your civility, and in retrospect I should have left out "disingenously", which is needlessly inflamatory and distracting. I'll edit the comment to remove it. [Edit: unfortunately I guess there is a time-limit on the editability of comments, which has passed, so it'll have to stand as a permanent monument to my inherent irritability.]
However, I do believe "the God of the Gaps" is an instance of question-begging: people who use it attempt to build the assumption "anything that cannot be explained by current physics must be assigned to God" into the mutually accepted context of the argument. They assume--and ask their opponent to assume--what they are setting out to prove, which is what "question begging" is.
This is very much the mode of argument used by people promoting peaceful ancient civilizations, which only crop up in areas of ignorance, and which have a tendency to be proven false when more information becomes available--the Maya are not unique in this regard, but merely the most prominent example. This makes the point relevant to the article under discussion.
I'll plug my book here as you sound like the kind of reader I was aiming for: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/... , which as well as engaging in some egregiously speculative biology was written in part as a (hopefully) respectful attempt to engage intelligent and humane believers with alternative viewpoints on the relationship between science, religion, scripture and God (which was a struggle for me... I'm not an inherently respectful person, and clearly have more work yet to do.)
HN has built-in time delays that get longer for deeper threads.
I'll forgo rebutting except to say that "science or it doesn't exist" (not that you believe it) only works if you have a fully materialist viewpoint, which is another form of begging the question. It also precludes the possibility that the Creator likes internally his physical reality internally consistent.
I mention that to say that I think a bit of humility about the limits of our "proof" helps us treat each other better. Which has to happen if we're going to have productive conversation.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
P.S. You might know where the term God of the Gaps came from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps#Criticism
but your defense of them with no evidence given
is exactly the same but in the opposite direction
Anyway, the underlying questions about the role of God in nature and reality (and the exploration of it through science) are essentially metaphysical questions. Many people take materialism (all reality is physical, people are just fizzing bags of chemicals) as a first principle. Some of these people then dismiss other viewpoints as irrational.
A different position would be that proving God exists is hard to impossible and to prove materialism is true is not any easier. Again, it's all metaphysical and a result of what first principles you start from. In a monotheistic view, scientific exploration and discovery only explain how the Designer created things. Even filling in gaps (like the fossil record) doesn't disprove God's existence, it could instead be showing that He created an internally consistent universe. Even old fossils cannot disprove God because He could have created the universe on Nov. 5, 1955 as if it had started with a big bang a long time ago.
My point is that, like any metaphysical question, there is no definitive answer that can be reached from physical evidence.
...so I think we should give each other some slack by keeping things civil. This includes forgoing pot shots that can't fairly be responded to.
1. OK, so I digressed a little in hopes of convincing people to be more courteous. I'm not sure how to create a space on HN to discuss the religion and science topic. I'm happy to move this discussion elsewhere if people are interested and if the whole thing results in mutual understanding (as opposed to the typical polemics).
EDIT: Wikipedia's summary on some ideas is serviceable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_a... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_a... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_a... ...and there are summaries of the interaction between science and different religions linked from that page.
I'm not sure it's possible to derail a conversation here, they just naturally splinter into multiple aspects and tangents, which take differing amounts of time to run to their conclusion. An strong argument can probably be made about how the larger conversations on a page may reduce involvement in some other conversations, but I'm not sure I buy that it's necessarily a bad thing without careful consideration of the pros and cons, and wouldn't classify it as derailment.
Yes, you have to be a power-user on HN to not be derailed. Not a UX person, are you?
This is also the problem with the Skeptic movement, in that it's fundamentally about discouraging people from reading books.
(And note that I'm not saying the other person is probably right, only that you're probably wrong.)
Where do you get the idea that scepticism is about discouraging people from reading books?
The problem is that skeptics themselves are wrong as often as not. And worse, the people reading these blog posts and articles never figure it out because they've bought into the idea that the original sources aren't worth reading. And the skeptics know this, so often they wildly distort the arguments of the original authors since they know they can rack up millions of pageviews from people who will never be the wiser.
Worse still, these people claim to be well-educated, when in reality they're basically destroying the Internet and undermining democracy. One site that I think gets it right is Amazon, because when people leave 1-star (or 5-star) reviews of a book without having actually read it or are wildly misrepresenting the ideas within, it's at least significantly easier (if not always easy) to tell this because of the surrounding context. But in general, while the ideas that skeptics profess to believe may be laudable, ultimately the whole worldview is like a game of telephone; even if the original analysis of any given subject was correct, once it's filtered through a dozen people who don't read books listening to other people who don't read books, all that's left is hollow dogma.
The raison d'être for democracy, and to an extent the internet, is the assumption that self-appointed experts' views can and should be challenged, and a challenge in the form of a several hundred word takedown of the author's alleged misuse of statistics in chapter five hardly constitutes metaphorical book burning. People that give up on buying a book (or believing anything it says) after reading the first snarky article probably aren't the audience the author was after anyway... unless the original author was specifically targeting the easily swayed. In which case it's the skeptic blogger who's the one most likely writing in good faith, complete with a public comment plugin and an affiliate link to further aid those who want to make up their own mind.
N.B I'm reading Graeber's much criticised "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" right now partly because it seems to provoke internet judges into pulling apart his fact-checking (and yeah, they're right on all counts... it's ambitious enough in scope to be interesting even to those who can't stand Graeber's politics, and yet trivially easy to pull apart if you're remotely familiar with parts of the subject matter even if you think he's making good points). The layman is much better off reading it whilst considering the possibility Graeber's anecdotes and understanding might have been stretched to his limits at points.
I'll be the first to admit that negative book reviews are highly useful, and most don't even fall within the realm of the Skeptic community. E.g. economics isn't an issue that the skeptic community has much interest in. (Which really says something about the skeptic community in and of itself.)
The issue is when you get scientists who spend years researching some issue, and then bunch of jackasses come along and publish a bunch of articles criticizing their methodology without having read the paper or having any idea what the methodology even was. That sort of behavior is endemic in the Skeptic community, and whether it's rational or not it absolutely does discourage people from actually learning stuff that might better themselves or society. I'd give specific examples, but it's so ubiquitous it's not even worth it; most people just don't notice because again, they haven't read the actual stuff that's being criticized.
At any rate, I wasn't defending God of the Gaps as much as pushing back on culture of polemics.
The basis for which to draw non-war status is the absence of ash, suggesting burning to the ground. That is a large leap. Applying this same standard, we could technically say the Egyptians never engaged in war as there are no ashen layers. Also, the Romans would be said to have engaged in war because of Nero's folly. The correct conclusion would be the simpler: The town/civilization was strong enough to avoid being sacked or designed well enough to avoid complete burning.
Walls are used to reduce the success of surprise attacks, provide a fortified position to defenders, and provide a means of access regulation; if there is no war, what is their purpose. This echos what Zeto says.
My reading of James C. Scott's work on Southeast Asia leads me to suspect a highly-organized state that controlled irrigable valley lands would wage war in order not to kill, but rather to enslave/enserf. (The various kingdoms of what would later become Thailand and Burma he writes about were after the Harrapan, but seem to have been similarly situated.) TFA actually mentions "So the Harappans appear to have been a very diverse lot", which may or may not be credible but is certainly consistent with the regular conscription of agricultural labor from afar. The idea is that in such a situation labor is the limiting resource, not land, water, or military might. The "nobility" always want to have more people at work in the fields than they can really control. Regular promotion of civic-minded peasants to military or bureaucratic service helps to ensure not just that their families will remain peaceable but that more families will be available to work soon.
Of course Scott documents this process more comprehensively for the societies he studies than would be possible for this much more ancient society.
This by itself indicates warfare. City walls are huge, costly infrastructure projects that require serious justification for both construction and maintenance. For instance, in contemporary Mesopotamia cities only began to build walls with the emergence of serious warfare at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900 BC).
> scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction
As the main evidence in the article this is unimpressive. Warfare does not usually result in the mass destruction of cities. E.g. Medieval England had endemic warfare for centuries but London, Bristol etc. didn't get burned down. Factors such as siege methods and building materials also make a big difference in how cities are affected by warfare.
The walls were thought to be for protection from the river flow.
Heck, often they're repelled just by the sight of fire or a solitary guard.
More often than not the less-timid ones just scavenge human scraps, return, and start to hang out. This is how dogs became domesticated many thousands of years ago...
I live in a fairly well-off suburb of south Bangalore that has NO municipal sewage or water supply. Mine isn't an isolated case either as large parts of Bangalore have neither. Also, large parts of Gurgaon, arguably India's largest new city.
So how do we make by? Apartment communities have their own sewage & waste water treatment plants; rain-water harvesting; private garbage disposal (we segregate into multiple categories); drinking water brought in by water tankers that pump ground water (which the law doesn't really protect).
Centralized water supplies require a lot of money and upkeep. They lose water to evaporation. Central sewers and water are nice, but can lead to safety issues if the water pressure drops.
I would like to see India expand modern waste management ideas like composting toilets and local water collection. Depending on where the city is located a combination of ground water and rain water could provide 70-80% of the water needs. Recycling of potable to non-potable water could help stretch that even more.
To me India feels rather Confederate in its organization. I wonder if that would allow regional governors more autonomy to experiment with new ideas and techniques.
But India is not alone. Europe also experienced civilization reversion. As did East Asia. As did the Americas.
Can you explain "civilization reversion"?
It's not as if Britain imported or invented India's extremes of social stratification. Ultimately it takes more than skilled silk weavers and a flair for building palaces to allow large scale industrial organization.
http://www.samurai-archives.com/tme.html
"What followed, from 1867 to 1912, remains unparalleled in history.
...
... the scientific and industrial revolutions had raged around the blissfully unaware Japanese. This had to change for Japan to compete in the modern world. Accordingly, the oligarchs set the nation upon a course of modernization which would produce dramatic results. The first step was to foster a sense of nationalism and unity."
Interesting that "nationalism and unity" have been observed during many "leaps forward" in other countries too.
AFTER EDIT: As usual, I would be happy to hear a rationale for the disagreement that is evidently being expressed regarding this comment. Please show your capacity to teach me (and onlookers) something. I'll mention here that I have studied a variety of other languages (those are disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), including Chinese, and I have made specialized study of the origins of writing around the world. That's my basis for judging the plausibility of various claims about the ancient Harappan inscriptions. A book on that topic I highly recommend, because it is written by very knowledgeable historical linguists, is The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. There has been a little bit of new work on Harappan inscriptions since that book was published, with several claims and counterclaims by competing scholars, but no settled demonstration that the Harappan inscriptions are writing at all, and certainly no settled demonstration of what they are writing about, if anything (as the article submitted here acknowledges).
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...
Pinker is a great writer, and he's exposed a lot of people to new ideas. Many of those ideas are extremely bad and have little basis in evidence. He's also in dangerous territory alongside assholes like Charles Murray and the Thornhills.
A final note, as I think we're both growing bored with this, but if you find accusations of logical fallacy so tedious, perhaps avoid making statements like "He's also in dangerous territory alongside assholes like Charles Murray and the Thornhills."
I'd like to know because if you don't like them then they are probably worth reading.
Except maybe in the USA, that patriotic feeling is no longer prevalent in first world countries. And that with professional armies. What happened last time you had forced draft? Was it Vietnam?
You'd need a huge amount of money for propaganda that would fire back anyway. A sensible percentage of population sees the (usually economic) interests through the justifications.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
> Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout.
Maybe a street grid seems ordinary if you live in a large city in the US, but most European cities don't have gridded streets (and I don't think it's the norm in many other places in the world either).
The Romans built towns on a grid too. You can see that in the very center of many Italian towns, like the one I live in:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,1...
No, it's not a perfect grid any more, but it's still visible - not bad for a couple of thousand years.
Like Mannheim [0]. Can't get more gridded than that.
[0]: https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschlan...
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.0...
I'm not trying to just be randomly contrarian. I'm serious.
When I look at all the Europeans went through, starting with Greece and ending with the takeover of the New World, it was conflict after conflict. Terrible time to live. But through all of that experience the Europeans learned to have something resembling "competitive improvement", where folks could have huge egos, dogmatic religions, a quest for progress, and seek to make a difference in the world -- without war. Took a lot of war to figure that out, and we're still working on parts of it, but the lesson is clear: a certain level of creative destructive chaos is something to be demanded and never surrendered. Peaceful harmony is the way of plants, not mankind. We're here to challenge each other to move forward (without war, of course, but it we have to keeping failing to figure out where the boundaries are)
Bwuh? Plants do not live in peaceful harmony. They just fight in ways that are not immediately obvious to the naked human eye, mostly involving things that we humans would consider serious violations of the Geneva convention. But they are as vicious as any animal, just differently.
I frequently have to rip out bindweed (which has killed many of my plants) and tormentil (which has taken over much of my lawn). That's just the stuff that _is_ immediately obvious.
This is a time lapse video of a vine climbing onto a tree http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9MV5CgPgIQ
I remember another time lapse video of a plant crushing a smaller plant against the floor, but I can't find it now.
Edit: Another video about fig trees killing other trees: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCUtpmwacoE
In any case, war is what causes things like the dark ages. When the way to gain wealth is to steal it, it doesn't pay to create and people stop. When exchanges between groups are generally violent, all other contact such as trade and cultural exchanges stop.
The way violence has been kept at bay enough to let civilisation advance has been violence. Empires which are a big centralized ball of violence were usually how civilisation happened because they provided a big enough sphere within which war was minimal. Islands of relative peace.
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape
or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and
able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great
army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves.
But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons,
epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and
sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be
still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and
with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the
world.
This was 1798 mind you when he wrote that, and much has been written that shows that food production increases in line with population growth [1]
It is certainly true that the Great War WWI and WWII have had a devastating effect on the European psyche and therefore tolerance to outright conflict, especially over the last 70 years.
Nowadays, the effort is to make that one dominant power enforcing peace Europe itself.
That neatly side-steps the Malthusian catastrophe, something which I'm sure drives the current crop of Malthusians to tears.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics
They don't call themselves Malthusians as such, but their ethics can only be understood by assuming a Malthusian premise.
Some people actually are disheartened by the idea that humans might be able to find a sustainable way without a massive die-off:
Indus valley civilization survived and prospered for around 1500-2000 years, without wars. IMO this is a proof that peaceful harmony works.
It's like the miracle no one wants to notice.
"The accession to the European Union in 1995 meant that neutrality as a principle was abolished." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality)
The India of today is fundamentally uniform, and shares a common shared genetic makeup throughout all the tribes, castes, and geographies. So the idea that somehow these genetic differences point to a cultural divide is bunk, because fundamentally the cultural divid postdates the genetic intermingling. Furthermore that common shared genetic makeup is not a recent phenomenon, because the genetics of India has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. So whatever genetics that exists in India today, whether that's isolated, or mixed, has for the past 60,000 years been relatively the same. [2]
The R1a1a gene that's commonly referred to in these instances that drive the Aryan, and the Dravidian divide theory is a gene marker that points to a population that many argue proves the idea of Aryan invasion, or at least migration, as the R1a1a is a common genetic marker in Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and other Eastern European genetics, and not in India. That alone is a weak argument, as the question then is who had the gene first, and who migrated where. A closer, and higher resolution look at genetics gives a different picture. The Europeans carrier of the R1a1a gene have a further M458 mutation of the R1a1a gene that's virtually nonexistent in Asia. Since the M458 mutation is estimated to have occurred at least 8000 years ago it seems that something happened to divide the populations that carried the common R1a1a gene, but the reason of that divide is yet to be empirically established.
Thus this genetic marker explains at best a shared ancestry between Europeans, and Indians, not some Aryan invasion theory. The R1a1a genetic marker is not a common genetic trait among Europeans, west Iranians, or throughout central Asia, but found commonly in South Asia. [3]
So no. The Aryan invasion theory is thoroughly debunked as Imperial bias to subjugate, and justify their economic plunder over a people.
[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Aryan-Dravidian-div...
[2] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-new-research-debunks-ar...
[3] http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a....
So, basically the whole concept of North Vs South India divide with Southern Indians holding on to this information is incorrect since Indian subcontinent is pretty uniform for about 60,000 years.
The Aryan 'Invasion' Theory is one that was concocted by the British and is not actually based on any scientific evidence. The wide consesus now is that it was more of a slow migration than a invasion.
Regarding the linked paper, there is no concrete evidence that Harappan was a Dravidian language.
Could we talk about presentation?
On the good side, no 90s era re-imagining of the splash screen that has to be ignored and scrolled past to see the text... I like that. Another good side is no scroll bar hijacking where click hold the scroll bar in the lower half of the article makes the page flip downwards unusably, I hate sites that do that and will go out of my way to avoid them.
On the bad side, lets look at the first 5 seconds of user experience. The site renders with 3 pixs, a large artists interpretation of the Harappan (cool), a smaller strange landscape with a only slightly tinier headline "Imagine What It Looked Like Before the Collapse" (to save you time, it has nothing to do with the Harappan although that headline would be a cool follow up story) and, I kid you not, "The Origin of the Speculum Is Just As Creepy As You Imagined". I would suggest fine tuning that a little bit. Especially the last bit. Unless there's a Harappan connection to the speculum (which I guess is possible?)