BackgroundColor

Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.^[25][26][27] Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity.^[28] Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE.^[29] By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest,^[30][31] unfolding as the language of the Rigveda, and recording the dawning of Hinduism in India.^[32] The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions.^[33] By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism,^[34] and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity.^[35] Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin.^[36] Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity,^[37] but also marked by the declining status of women,^[38] and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief.^[g][39] In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.^[40