This theory that Homo Sapiens landed in India from Africa is being questioned after a series of significant discoveries.

Identity is an idea and a reality that one may despise the whole life but can never live without. We are taught in schools to look beyond identity. Our history classes injected the chemical of Aryan migration (through invasion and various means) and whenever we read or heard the word “Arya”, the first image that would come to our mind was that of invaders who came to India and occupied the subcontinent. As I grew older, my inquisitiveness grew too, to understand and know: Who am I? And where do I come from?

With the latest works (archaeological and genetic) in and around Rakhigarhi, Sinauli, etc, the Aryan invasion hypothesis surely died its deserved death. But another theory became prevalent that said that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa and by around some 70-50,000 years ago, a small group (possibly as few as 150 to 1,000 people), crossed the Red Sea. They travelled along the coastal route around the coast of Arabia and Persia until reaching India. This proposition was popularly called the Post Toba Theory.

The Out of Africa Theory

This theory that Homo sapiens landed in India from Africa appeared too convincing for me until a few questions crossed my mind. In fact, I came across peer reviewed papers in field of palaeo-anthropology and archaeology which raised serious debates to see the Modern Humans to have originated in Africa (Petraglia et al., 2010, Appenzeller, 2012, Blinkhorn and Petraglia, 2017). The scholars raised the red flag considering the absence of fossil remains from the key regions along the dispersal route.

As per the existing models, the modern human dispersals are primarily based on lithic assemblages, a few fossil remains and genetics. According to the most popular model (MIS 5), the modern humans left Africa around 120,000 years ago and colonised the rest of the whole world by 40,000 years ago. But the recent studies tell us that as per the fossil evidence from Apidima Cave in Greece (Harvati et al., 2019) and Misiliya cave in Israel (Hershkovitz et al., 2018) the modern human existence outside Africa goes older than 210,000 years ago. However, these findings do not yet ascertain the dispersal to South Asia earlier than 120,000 years ago.