Outside the Goan village of Usgalimal, on the banks of the river Kushavati, local villagers were always aware of the existence of petroglyphs or rock art comprising more than 100 images including of bulls and humans carved on laterite stone. In 1993, the locals revealed these petroglyphs to archaeologists and the site has since become a tourist destination
(Thermistocles D’Silva, https://goaprehistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/rock-art-at-usgalimal-goa.pdf;
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usgalimal_rock_engravings). According to the Indian Archaeological Society, these engravings are 20’000 to 30’000 years old. I have unfortunately not had the opportunity to witness the engravings personally but plan to do so the next time I visit Goa. Rock art can be found in many parts of the world; in India, paintings on the walls of caves have been found in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Bihar and Uttarakhand (https://www.openart.in/history/rock-art-from-india/).
Who were the people living in Usgalimal more than 20’000 years before present (ybp)? Genetics provides a clue about who these inhabitants could be.
David Reich, V. S. Shinde and other researchers have shown (Narasimhan et al., The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6457/eaat7487) that the Indian population consists of a mixture of Ancestral South Indians ASI and Ancestral North Indians ANI in varying proportions. The ASI who created the Indus Valley Civilisation - starting around 7000 ybp - arose when Iranians from the Zagros mountains migrated to the region and mixed with the local population tagged as Ancient Ancestral South Indians AASI. It is these AASI or a population closely related to them, therefore, who inhabited Usgalimal 20’000 ybp and have left behind their art for posterity.
Genetic studies carried out by Harvard professor Reich have linked the AASI to the Onge, an ethnic group of the Andaman Islands. Along with the Great Andamanese, the Jarawas, the Shompen, the Nicobarese and the Sentinelese, the Onge are one of the six native and often reclusive peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and are classified as belonging to the Negrito family. It is possible that the other five are also linked to the AASI but their genetic ancestry is not known.
These people are hunter gatherers, adept at using the bow and arrow. The Sentinelese are particularly intriguing because very little is known about them. They are protected by the Government of India and the island is off limits even for the Indian navy for fear that any close contacts with outsiders may infect the tribe with disease and wipe out the few remaining Sentinelese (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/7795188/worlds-most-ruthless-tribe-that-killed-us-tourist-and-anyone-who-approaches-their-island-love-having-beach-orgies/). And yet, the Sentinelese may be able to provide clues as to how the people of Usgalimal lived their lives, their culture, their food, their sexual habits and rituals or their art.
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