Ancient Human & Indian History ( stories from last 500,000 years)

Let's start the ancient history topic with these facts-Earth's age is 4.54 billion, dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago (there was 150 km crater created after KT extinction event around gulf of Mexico & dinosaurs lived for 165M years), Himalayas are 40M years old. Let's talk about apes- new world monkeys evolved around-26M years ago, chimp like ape Sahelanthropus existed around 7M year ago, then came the common ancestor of human & chimpanzee which existed around-6M year ago and apes started walking on 2 legs- around 3M years ago. 

1st Hominins existed around- 4M years ago named Australopithecus, the genus Homo dates back to about 2.5 to 2.8 million years. Homo habilis were the first species with homo name around 2.5M years and they left Africa 1.8M year ago. Another homo species around that time was Homo erectus (bone ex: Nariokotome boy)-they existed around 1.8M years ago, had smaller brain and long legs. Finally, the origin of our species (homo sapiens) is believed to be around 550,000 to 750,000 years ago and 700,000-30,000 years ago Neanderthals existed. Also, surprisingly, some earlier form of cooking was invented approximately 1.5M years ago.

Now, the sub-species of Homo sapiens- Homo sapiens sapiens/modern humans are believed to have evolved sometime between 160,000 and 90,000 years ago and later in Europe these two species coexisted for around 10,000 years (40,000-30,000 years ago), if these things sound really old then lets jump to relatively less ancient events, one of which was Toba eruption which occurred at the present location of Lake Toba in Indonesia, about 75,000 ± 900 years ago according to potassium argon dating which places it around 74,000-72,000 BC, after that the Homo sapiens in Africa were said to have survived by developing sophisticated social, symbolic and economic strategies that enabled them to eventually re-expand and populate Asia and specifically the Indian western coast. 200k years ago-6 human species existed and around 8000 BC all other species died out.

Now, around 55,000 BC huge migration started from India towards west, the evidence for that is the haplogroup F-M89 lineage- whose origins are tracked to India & 90% of non-African males have this haplogroup F-M89 lineage and another evidence for the same is the R1A1A haplogroup, whose origin is determined around 22,000 to 25,000 year ago in India and lot of western research papers also support this idea- this is the link for a Nature journal paper. First humans who settled in Europe were also around this time 40-45000 years ago 

The ancient history topic is incomplete without the mention of the last Ice age, which was around 20,000-14,000 BC and in around 11,000 BC, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and giant bears, died out. Agriculture was discovered around 9,500 BC the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax – were cultivated in the middle east. Also, for timeline-the Pyramid of Djoser, is widely believed to be the oldest pyramid in the world, dates back to around 2630 BC.

Now, lets talk about archaeological evidences- In Bhirrana, Harayana, India lies the oldest archaeological evidence found in India which is as old as 7500 BC and also, the oldest literature in the world is believed to be the Rigveda and the evidence to prove it is it has the reference of Sarasvati river flowing which according to scientific evidence dried around 6000 BC so Rigveda is at least as old as 6000 BC.

Now, talking about the Indian influence on Europeans- Pythagoras (570-495 BC) came to India according to western sources & when he went back to Greece he became vegetarian and started teaching in Gurukul style, also in 9th century CE when the Romani language originated it is believed that it originated from Sanskrit, because the Abbasid caliphate took Indians to Europe & then they settled in Romania eventually (research on this done by author Ian Hancock). Another example for this is Eratosthenes (lived around 200 BC) who was a notable librarian at Alexandria and there he read all the work by Indian scientists & later, the great library was destroyed around 40-48 BC by Julius Ceaser.

Also, if we talk about Indian influence in Asia- around 400 AD a person named Buddhabhadra created kung fu (more on him here) and another example from south east asia is of the Chola dynasty (300 BC 1200 AD)- whose most notable King Suryavarman II built Angkor wat in present day Cambodia, which is the world's largest religious site even today.

Before Europeans started coming to India- misfortunes for Indians started happening from 1200 CE starting with the source of great historic and scientific knowledge- Nalanda university, which was burnt by Turkish Muslim invaders who were called Mamluks and according to sources Nalanda university had 9 million manuscripts at that time and the amount of books was so huge that it continued to burn for many weeks.

Also, let's talk about economics of pre-colonial time now- around 1000 AD, according to Maddison’s calculations, China and India together contributed 50.5% of world GDP and by 1600, that share had gone up to 51.4%, with China accounting for 29% and India 22.4% of world GDP. A hundred years later, China’s GDP had fallen but India’s went up to 24.4% of world output. By 1820, however, India’s share had fallen to 16.1%, if we compare this to recent times- US had contributed 16% of the world GDP in 2019. Also, an estimate from some sources is that British took 45 trillion from India in 200 years of colonial rule.