Posted on 05/10/2007 9:30:24 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The National Museum in New Delhi is one of the richest storehouses of India's cultural and scientific heritage. Among the prehistoric and protohistoric objects displayed in the very first gallery in the Museum's ground floor, there is a bronze figure from Mohenjo-daro (now in Pakistan). Made in circa 2500 B.C., it is an image of a naked young girl in a dancing pose. Though the figure's height is only 10.8 cms., it tells us a lot about the metal technology that was developed in the Indus Valley Civilization, also called the Harappan Culture. The bronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-daro is the most outstanding item among the objects displayed in the gallery. It is the first sculpture in dancing gesture discovered in the Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the earliest cast bronzes in this cultural area. But its most interesting aspect is that in casting it the Harappan metallurgists used an advanced technique known as the lost-wax (cire perdue) process... The features of the unclad body of the dancing girl show her to be that of the Proto-Australoid type which, perhaps, constituted a segment of the mixed Harappan society. The concept of Proto-Shiva also appears to be the contribution of the Indus Valley Civilization.
(Excerpt) Read more at vigyanprasar.gov.in ...
["Vigyan Prasar is an autonomous organisation setup by the Government of India's Department of Science and Technology in 1989, to undertake large scale science popularisation tasks in the country."] ...the bronze figurine of dancing girl from Mohenjodaro...
Map of the Sarasvati-Sindu and Ghaggar drainage system. From Gregory Possehl, ed. Harappan Civilization (1982). Probably the real economic (agricultural) and demographic basis of the ancient Sarasvati-Sindu civilization lay in the region, now desert, East of the Indus.
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Naked dancing girl? All they needed was the beer.
Looks like Paris Hilton in a burn unit.
Looks like Flo from Mels’ diner.
“Mel, kiss my grits”
Seems that way. They got to Australia from somewhere. See Aborigines may have Indian roots
Youre being generous...to Paris...
Interesting.
That object on her left arm, while apparently made of bands similar to the bracelets on her right, suggest to me a function beyond just jewelry.
In the way that the image displays here, it appears that there are some rivets(?) in the left arm adornment and the bands that the adornment is made of are enlarged at the elbow which at least to me suggests some type of functional intent beyond jewelry.
Blam will stop in with some links about this, I don’t doubt. Plus I’m a bit lazy. :’)
Then, the whole Indus civilisation was wiped out by the invasions of the ancestors of the present-day Indians, or were they displaced to Australia?
Looks like, but this is art-piece, not necessarily reflective of the appearance of the people living there. I wonder if anyone could make figurines any more differently than that, assuming the size of the figurine is a few inches.
Viking sculpture.
Statue of a bearded man, Indus Valley Civilisation.
By this time rising ocean levels had made the narrow channel between Sundaland and the New Guinea/Australia landmass too wide for easy access.
Well there are tribes in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands of India, where the people there supposedly have African origins, and are completely unrelated to the people living in the Indian mainland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andaman_and_Nicobar_Islands#Name_origins
Joseph Greenberg proposed that these languages, or at least Great Andamanese, are related to the Papuan and Tasmanian languages as members of a phylum he called Indo-Pacific, and especially close to the western branches of Indo-Pacific. This proposal is not generally accepted by linguists (see Extended West Papuan).
The Andaman Islanders are physically Negritos - short-statured, peppercorn-haired, dark-skinned people found in small surviving pockets all over tropical Asia and New Guinea, and perhaps beyond. However, old skulls of unmixed Andaman aborigines display many morphological affinities to crania of the Caucasoid race. Moreover, recent phylogenetic studies of the human Y-chromosome have shown that the Y-chromosomes of unmixed Andaman aborigines are ultimately derived from the same ancient YAP+ clade, Haplogroup D, that produced the Y-chromosomes of about 90% of the Ainu of Japan and about 50% of the Tibetans of Tibet. Interestingly, while all other Negrito groups in Asia proper speak languages closely related to those of their non-Negrito neighbors, Andamanese shows no similarity to the language even of the nearby Nicobar Islands. This has led some to speculate that the Andamanese languages may be the last representative of the (or one of the) original languages spoken by the Asian Negritos throughout Southeast Asia before Neolithic groups took over their areas, leaving them in their current fragmented distribution.
Could be something like
a Doctor Who time-loop piece...
Paris is in jail,
and the government
uses inmates for some kind
of bizarre attempt
to travel in time,
there's a big explosion and
the next thing we know
Paris Hilton's tossed
thousands of years back in time
and starts up the cult
of Shiva among
India's proto-Hindus...
All the more reason
to pardon Paris
while we have the chance to change
the course of history!
A finding of particular interest is that the Andamanese do not carry another Y chromosome signature, known as Marker RPS4Y, that is common among Australian aborigines.
Now, if only this came from a reliable source instead of the New York Times! :-))
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