Why is Harappan ancestry different from modern ethnic identity?

Ancestry and ethnicity answer different questions

Harappan ancestry concerns relationships among people in the past and their descendants; modern ethnic identity also concerns historically changing forms of social belonging. The National Academies’ 2023 genetics report distinguishes genetic ancestry, inferred through inherited DNA and genetic similarity, from ethnicity, a social classification involving claims about shared heritage and cultural connections. These concepts can intersect, but one is not a laboratory substitute for the other. An archaeological label does not remove that distinction.[3]

What the Rakhigarhi study actually sampled

The 2019 study by Vasant Shinde and colleagues provides a concrete example. Researchers attempted ancient-DNA work on 61 skeletal samples from the cemetery at Rakhigarhi. Their reported genome came from one individual, I6113, identified as female. The paper describes the burial’s archaeological context and the laboratory steps used to isolate authentic ancient DNA. This is evidence from a particular person within an archaeological setting, not a genetic census of every Harappan city or household.[1]

The researchers compared that individual with other ancient and present-day samples to model ancestry relationships. Their findings bear on population history and on hypotheses about movements of people. They do not supply the individual’s spoken language, religious self-description or membership of a modern ethnic community. Expanding from one sampled burial to an assertion about everyone across the civilisation would require evidence beyond the genome reported in this study.[1]

Avoid turning a population model into an identity test

The American Association of Biological Anthropologists’ 2019 statement rejects the idea that human populations have been biologically pure, fixed or neatly isolated. It also warns that ancestry clusters depend on the people included in the comparison and can misleadingly project present-day categories into the past. A coloured cluster on a chart therefore needs its sampling and analytical explanation; its label should not be read as an ancient person’s declaration of identity.[2]

The same statement makes clear that rejecting biological races does not deny the real social consequences of racial classification. For historical writing, this means avoiding claims that a genetic result proves a community’s superiority, purity or entitlement to exclusive ownership of the past. Describing relationships among samples is a different task from ranking living people or deciding who may claim a cultural inheritance.[2]

The National Academies recommends choosing population descriptions for the actual research question and avoiding assumptions that groups are homogeneous or stable through time. Applied here, the answer is precise: report the burial, dates, sampled individuals and ancestry model as such. Investigate language, family narratives and ethnic self-description through the evidence appropriate to those subjects, rather than treating genetic similarity as a certificate of modern identity.[3]