Diseases, fights led to collapse of Indus civilization

Inter-personal violence and infectious diseases played a role around 4,000 years ago in the collapse of the Indus civilization that spanned over a million sq km of India and Pakistan, a new study suggests. While contemporaneous civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotomia are well-known their Indus trading partners have remained more of a mystery, researchers said. Archaeological research has demonstrated that Indus cities grew rapidly from 2200-1900 BC, when they were largely abandoned. "The collapse of the Indus civilization and the reorganization of its human population has been controversial for a long time," lead author of the study, Gwen Robbins Schug, from the Appalachian State University, US, said. Climate, economic, and social changes all played a role in the process of urbanization and collapse, but little was known about how these changes affected the human population. Robbins Schug and an international team of researchers examined evidence for trauma and infectious disease in the human skeletal remains from three burial areas at Harappa, one of the largest cities in the Indus civilization. The results of their analysis counter longstanding claims that the Indus civilization developed as a peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian state-level society, without social differentiation, hierarchy, or differences in access to basic resources. The data suggest instead that some communities at Harappa faced more significant impacts than others from climate and socio-economic strains, particularly the socially disadvantaged or marginalised communities who are most vulnerable to violence and disease.