On the existence of a perennial river in the Harappan heartland.

ABSTRACT: The legendary river Saraswati of Indian mythology has often been hypothesized to be an ancient perennial channel of the seasonal river Ghaggar that flowed through the heartland of the Bronze Age Harappan civilization in north-western India. Despite the discovery of abundant settlements along a major paleo-channel of the Ghaggar, many believed that the Harappans depended solely on monsoonal rains, because no proof existed for the river's uninterrupted flow during the zenith of the civilization. Here, we present unequivocal evidence for the Ghaggar's perennial past by studying temporal changes of sediment provenance along a 300 km stretch of the river basin. This is achieved using ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages of detrital muscovite and Sr-Nd isotopic ratios of siliciclastic sediment i

SUBMITTER: Chatterjee A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6868222 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature