Many years ago the Prague-based International Romani Union, a Unicef-registered Category-2 organisation with the United Nations, had launched an international research into the origins of the gypsies of the world. As I had written a few pieces on them they contacted me.

That is when I became good friends with Fayyaz Bibi, a ‘Changar’ beggar standing at the Sanda Road crossing as I headed to work across the Ravi. Every day we would talk and she became very friendly. I knew full well that she was an ‘original inhabitant’ of our land, who lived on their land before any Aryan, and/or Dravidian incursions. Sadly, our colonial mind-set classifies them as ‘aborigines’, a sort of ‘inferior’ race, just as similar populations in the Americas and Australia were once classified. That they were eventually considered human must have been a setback for these exploiters. Surely now it is seen as a derogatory term. Today polite people refer to them as ‘original Americans’ or ‘original Australians’ as the case may be. It is about time that we also start referring to these unfortunate people as the ‘original inhabitants’ of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

I am aware that our feudal rulers, especially those from rural Sindh and southern Punjab, parade themselves as ‘original’ inhabitants, yet they connect invariably in one way or another to Arabia. To them it is a matter of pride, a sort of feeling of piety and ‘superiority’ of sorts, however misplaced that notion may be. But surely time will sort them out, as will the probability of universal education.

Now let me return to Fayyaz Bibi and the Romani Union research, which has taken over 20 years to complete, with Lahore and its Changar tribe on the banks of the River Ravi contributing just 50 samples to a 150,000 sample survey. The results have been dramatic. One set of findings is that the inhabitants of the Indus Valley, i.e. the original inhabitants who still live along the rivers and now mostly work or beg in the big cities that touch the rivers, are part of, firstly, all the gypsies in the world. But much more importantly they are part of the strand that migrated from Africa over 60,000 years ago. Amazingly, the DNA of these river dwellers matches, not exactly but very closely, the ‘original inhabitants’ of Australia.

However, new research tells us that these people reached there when the Sunda and Sahul Shelves were still dry, and when reaching the huge Australian land mass by foot was very much possible. Since the Romani Union research, a number of other scientists have been at work, and as the science of DNA analysis gets more refined, we have amazing results being thrown up by different institutions and scientists.

When modern humans migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago, a group of their descendants reached Australia around 10,000 years later. It had been assumed that they, and their DNA, remained isolated for 50,000 years until British colonists arrived in 1788. However, a new and exciting study has now found evidence that Australian Aborigines interbred with people from the sub-continent around 4,500 years ago.

A team led by Prof. Mark Stoneking, a molecular anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, tested the DNA of 344 people from Australia, both original and of European stock, from Papua New Guinea, from Indonesia, from India, from up the Indus up to Lahore, along the Indian coast and also along the Chinese coast. Their discovery is now shaping the way people think about the original inhabitants of the world.

The findings state that these original migrants from Africa diverged almost 36,000 years ago. But as Prof Stoneking states in a study that the “greatest surprise has been the connection between original Australians and original inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent. His study shows that 11 per cent of the genetic mix of original Australians is derived from the inhabitants of the Indian coast and up the Indus and its tributaries. Computer simulations showed inter-breeding taking place 141 generations ago with each generation being counted at 30 years. This takes the connection back 4,230 years.

Prof Stoneking in an interview said: “We have a pretty clear signal from looking at a large number of genetic markers from all across the genome that there was contact between India and Australia somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.” Amazingly, the appearance of Australian dingoes and microliths (or fine tools) appear in Australia in this time period, and that the dingo is almost similar genetically to the Indian wolf - our ‘janglee’ dogs. Mind you the dingo is not native to Australia.

This brings this research to an interesting blockade. If the Indian sub-continental people and the original Australian people co-habited, how come no DNA of the middle ground people, that is Indonesians, is found in both Australian and Indian original inhabitants. This is where the famous 1947 Kon-Tiki Expedition of Thor Heyerdahl came to mind. In our youth my father provided us with the first book on the subject to come to Lahore and we fell in love with the possibility of reed rafts crossing the Pacific to make a South American-Polynesian Islands connection.

Amazingly, Prof Stoneking brings up the distinct possibility of Indus Valley Civilisation era river crafts leaving the river tributaries to sail to faraway lands directly by sea. Is this possible? It seems a far cry. But then the mere fact that the genetic mix discovery of the people of our land and the original inhabitants of Australia without both having any Indonesia or Papua New Guinea traces suggests that the people of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were moving on the seas to faraway places a mere 2,600 to 4,500 years ago.

The discovery of dredged canal docking facilities along our rivers proves that in all probability this movement was very much possible, just as in the Bronze Age the figurines discovered along the archaeological sites in Pakistan point suggest sea trade from Egypt, Crete, Arabia and faraway Australia. As a measure of precaution one cannot claim this to be correct, but the signs are very much there. Much more anthropological and archaeological research is needed to nail this probable possibility.

Is this co-incidence at its imaginative best? The point is that scientific fact, irrefutable as it is, points to just two possibilities. One that the sub-continental connect was by land only 40,000 years plus ago, or that sea trade of the people of the Indus Valley brought to Australia a mix of humans and animals. It is amazing how DNA research is opening up the world of possibilities. We know that the gypsies of the world, be they in the Americas or Europe or Egypt all originated from the lands that are mostly today Pakistan. We now have a feel for the original inhabitants of Australia being part of our land. This needs experts to dwell on this matter. Our ancient land deserves to be understood free of the prejudices and racial and caste beliefs that hamper an understanding of ourselves.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2019