Genome of nearly 5000-year-old woman links modern Indians to ancient civilization.

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Ancient DNA from the Indus Valley Civilization was found in this individual buried at India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site.Vasant Shinde
▼ At roughly the same time that ancient Egyptians were constructing their first great pyramids and Mesopotamians were building monumental temples and ziggurats, the Harappans of South Asia—also known as the Indus Valley Civilization—were erecting massive baked brick housing complexes and cutting elaborate canal systems. The civilization’s abrupt downfall remains one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. Now, for the first time, scientists have analyzed the genome of an ancient Harappan. The findings reveal little about why the society collapsed, but they illuminate both its past and its continuing genetic legacy in modern Indians.
“The Indus Valley Civilization has been an enigma for a long time,” says Priya Moorjani, a population geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved with the study. “So it’s very exciting to … learn about [its] ancestry and history.”
The Indus Valley Civilization emerged sometime around 3000 B.C.E. and had collapsed by about 1700 B.C.E. During its height, it stretched across much of what is today northwestern India and parts of eastern Pakistan. It is alternatively known as the Harappan civilization, after the first of its sites to be excavated in Punjab province in Pakistan beginning in the 1820s. Along with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was among the world’s first large-scale urban agricultural societies, boasting somewhere between 1 million and 5 million inhabitants across five central cities.
Although hundreds of skeletons from the Indus Valley have been uncovered, the region’s hot climate rapidly destroys the genetic material that has been instrumental in tracing the history of other early civilizations.
In recent years, however, scientists have learned that the petrous bone of the inner ear contains an unusually high quantity of DNA, allowing them to locate usable genetic material even in otherwise degraded skeletons. A team led by geneticist David Reich at Harvard University and archaeologist Vasant Shinde at Deccan College in Pune, India, decided to try the promising technique with Indus specimens. They sampled more than 60 skeletal pieces, including numerous petrous bones, before they were able to extract ancient DNA from one. Then they had to sequence the sample more than 100 times to piece together a relatively complete genome.
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chanakyakripa

The genetic mutation 13910T that is responsible for milk digestion in adulthood has been found in the genome mapped from Rakhigarh skeleton, as well as other present day people of Europe, northern & western india (in general) & Iran. Sequencing Haplogroup wise, it's postulated the harapan people had a mixture of people from Iran area, which probably happened due to trading interactions. And haplogroup analysis also shows that the direction of travel was from iran area and not reverse way.This genomic analysis  also denotes that the harappan people were the early Indians, who spread all over indian subcontinent after the fall of the civilization. If only we could decipher the harapan script!!!!!!!!