Ugra

In 2014, a naturalist and two historians posited a theory about a major zoological motif of the Indian subcontinent. ....that the Lion was a exotic alien brought to India around the time of Alexander's invasion over the Iranian Plateau. They published a book about it.

This is the new paper tying Eastern Scandinavian ancestry as a vector for Palaeo-Germanic. This infographic from the paper (lead author below) is an overview of their theory landscape. More thoughts on this later.

Pre-Columbus contacts with the New World across the oceans has been an on-off topic for many decades now. Lots of erratic datapoints from various places are available (check Wiki page for them). This paper brings another datapoint to that debate - I wouldn't be surprised if some Bronze Age seafarers made that journey.

Another "Portuguese crop exchange" factoid falls by the wayside - as a team of researchers find signatures of peanut compounds on 2500 year old pottery shards in South India. The team eliminated other contenders - like cinnamon, grapes - with absence criteria.

Evidence of milk-boiling and possibly peanut processing practices at Keeladi and Gottiprolu discovered. The researchers used chromatography and spectrometry along side NDT.

It is only recent that the word "cyclone" was coined - in the 19th century based on the Greek word kýklos. The Indian term is cakravāta - चक्रवात.

Jorwe people (1400 BCE) obtained gold, ivory, and serpentine from Karnataka; they traded for copper ore from the Ahar culture in Rajasthan, or from Amreli district in Gujarat. Amazonite was obtained from Gujarat; hematite, marine fish, and shells were obtained from the Konkan coast. In exchange, Deccan Chalcolithic people were supplying pottery at the intra‐regional level. Copper and pottery were both supplied to Karnataka. Copper tools and ornaments were supplied to hunting‐gathering communities (Dhavalikar, 1981–1983; 1988–1989)

An ethnoarchaeological research finding from the Deccan Chalcolithic (2000 BCE) suggests that round dwellings were the residence of labourers while rectangular structures were the homes of landowners (Dhavalikar et al).

The intensity of environmental determinism in the Indian context is extremely high and it shows up in expected places - like Indo-China relations and some unexpected areas - like tax institutionalism. Passable terrain inside the subcontinent allows efficient state formation and rent extraction. The state is backed by the strongest possible factor - geography.

The art in this series of posts is "ligne claire" - a style pioneered by Georges Prosper Remi (Hergé), the famous Belgian creator of Tintin. To see it applied to the theme of IVC is infinite child-like joy.

One of the consistent iconographic themes from the Indian Bronze to the Historic Age is the lack of a spatial ground plane in carvings, reliefs and stone work. The characters are floating in a non-perspective space and the observer's sense of meaning is derived subjectively.