© Hindustan Times
A Mohenjo-daro seal.
A Mohenjo-daro seal.
Ever since the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the early 1920s, the civilisation was considered almost as old as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The finding was announced at the "International Conference on Harappan Archaeology", recently organised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Chandigarh.
Based on their research, BR Mani, ASI joint director general, and KN Dikshit, former ASI joint director general, said in a presentation: "The preliminary results of the data from early sites of the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggest that the Indian civilisation emerged in the 8th millennium BC in the Ghaggar-Hakra and Baluchistan area."
"On the basis of radio-metric dates from Bhirrana (Haryana), the cultural remains of the pre-early Harappan horizon go back to 7380 BC to 6201 BC."
Excavations had been carried out at two sites in Pakistan and Bhirrana, Kunal, Rakhigarhi and Baror in India.
If their dating is of finds from land excavations then they could be older than this date and this is where they moved to after their former city was inundated. As this article states marine archaeology is only some 50 years old. 'Who would have thought a city that could be older than the Harappan civilization could be lying beneath water right off the coast of Mahabalipuram? ..........have discovered an extensive area with a series of structures that clearly show man made attributes, at a depth of 5-7 meters offshore of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu. ........The scale of the submerged ruins, covering several square miles and at distances of up to a mile from shore,....' '“Between 17,000 years ago and 7000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our ancestors lived in,” he says. “Great ice caps over northern Europe and north America melted down, huge floods ripped across the earth, sea-level rose by more than 100 meters, and about 25 million square kilometers of formerly habitable lands were swallowed up by the waves.' A lot more and older yet to be discovered. [Link]At a paleolithic settlement on Malta can be seen tracks in the rocks from sledges or wheels leading down beneath the waves and beneath the sea is the rest of their extensive village. Much is based on evidence revealed thus far.