Mehrgarh

Farmers, herders and the first dentists, thousands of years before the Indus cities

A Neolithic site on the Kachhi Plain of Balochistan near the Bolan Pass, between Quetta, Kalat and Sibi, and one of the earliest places in South Asia with evidence of farming and herding. The French Archaeological Mission in the Indus Basin, led by Jean-François Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige, found it in 1974 and dug it from 1974 to 1986 and again from 1997 to 2000, recovering about 32,000 artefacts from six mounds. The first settlement, a small farming village in the northeast corner of the 495-acre site, is dated to 7000 BCE, or by later radiocarbon dating of teeth to between 5250 and 4650 BCE. Its wheat, its early farming and its pottery and herd animals share traits with the Neolithic of the Near East, and some scholars see its culture as moving on into the Indus Valley. Its first farmers were semi-nomadic people who grew wheat and barley and kept sheep, goats and cattle, the earliest evidence of cattle herding in South Asia, and they built in unbaked mud brick, most houses divided into four rooms. The remains of nine men from Mehrgarh show that its people practised a kind of proto-dentistry, a finding announced in the journal Nature in April 2006.