The largest ever study of ancient human remains has revealed most people in India today are descended from the once vast Indus Valley Civilisation.

DNA has been analysed, for the first time ever, from a person that lived in this society and found modern Indians are all likely descended from this singular culture.

The woman, buried at Rakhigarhi, the capital of the ancient culture has painted a rich tapestry of the origins of Indian people.

Her DNA also revealed, helped by DNA from 524 other never before-studied ancient individuals, new secrets on the origins of language and farming in the region.

It agreed with previous studies which stated that Indo-European languages — such as Hindi, Bengali, Persian, Russian and English — likely flooded south and central Asia via migrants from the Eurasian Steppe.

Not, as some experts claimed, from farmers migrating out of present-day Turkey.

The other breakthrough comes from the long-standing debate of how farming originated in India.

It found it was not brought by large-scale movement of people from the Fertile Crescent where farming first arose.

Instead, farming started in South Asia through local hunter-gatherers adopting the practice.

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The largest ever study of ancient human remains has revealed most people in India today are descended from the once vast Indus Valley Civilisation. A woman, buried at Rakhigarhi (blue), the capital of the ancient culture has painted a rich tapestry of the origins of Indian people.Pictured in red, other notable Indus settlements

The first sequenced genome from an archaeological site associated with the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation came from this woman buried at the city of Rakhigarhi, the capital of the ancient culture

The research is the result of two studies published in Science and Cell which assessed the impact of this newly tapped genetic resource.

It expands the current database of published ancient genomes by about 25 per cent and has provided physical evidence of the South Asian ancestry.

Vast amounts of research has been done on regions further north in central Asia as well as east towards China and even west, in Eurasia.

However, the hot, fluctuating climate is detrimental to the preservation of DNA and had made identifying the origin of Indus Valley people impossible.

'Even though there has been success with ancient DNA from many other places, the difficult preservation conditions mean that studies in South Asia have been a challenge,' says senior author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

But excavations at the largest known town of the Indus Valley Civilisation, called Rakhigarhi, the authors found one with a hint of ancient DNA.

The woman died thousands of years ago and the tiny fragments of DNA were difficult to process.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE INDUS' CITIES? The Indus Valley Civilisation possessed considerable skills when it came to town planning and building. The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are laid out in grids, with individual homes supplied with water from wells and waste water diverted to covered drains. This is perhaps the world's first known sanitation system. Some houses had two storeys, a bath and a courtyard. The needs of citizens were catered for with municipal buildings, marketplaces, dockyards, granaries, warehouses and protective walls to shield inhabitants from floods and attack. Unlike in other early human civilisations, no evidence of temples or palaces have been found, yet evidence suggests the Indus had a social hierarchy. It's thought most city dwellers were traders or artisans, with elaborate pottery, beads and metalwork recovered. Advertisement

Pictured, a red slipped ware globular pot placed near the head of the skeleton that yielded ancient DNA. There are lines as well as indentations on the upper right side, just below the rim. The indentations on the body of the pot could be examples of ancient graffiti and/or 'Indus script'.

More than 100 attempts were made on the ancient genetic material, and not one produced a full set of data.

However, the summation of all the efforts provided enough information to reach meaningful conclusions.

Dr Reich says: 'While each of the individual datasets did not produce enough DNA, pooling them resulted in sufficient genetic data to learn about population history.'

Her remains matched DNA of people also found, studied and published the the partner paper, but these were in what is now Iran and Turkmenistan to the north.

However, it is known these 11 exchanged objects with the Indus Valley Civilisation and the researchers say they are likely migrants from India.

The paper also found that a period of time between 4,000 and 3,500 years ago saw people from the north of modern-day India and the south.

'Mixtures of the Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians--both of whom owe their primary ancestry to people like that of the Indus Valley Civilisation individual we sequenced--form the primary ancestry of South Asians today,' said Nick Patterson,a co-author of the study Harvard..

'The study directly ties present-day South Asians to the ancient peoples of South Asia's first civilisation,' added Vagheesh Narasimhan, co-first author of both papers and a postdoctoral fellow in the Reich lab.

The authors caution that analysing the genome of only one individual limits the conclusions that can be drawn about the entire population of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

'My best guess is that the Indus Valley Civilisation itself was genetically extremely diverse,' said Dr Patterson. 'Additional genomes will surely enrich the picture.'