Note: there have been actual Iron-working sites discovered in India that are older than this, dated to 1600 BC [0]. A lot of this has been ignored (just like the Painted-Grey ware continuity from IVC), partly I imagine, because it calls into question a lot of the racial non-sense that passes for "Indology".[0]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/isijinternational/54/5/...
[1]https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202...
Edit: Apparently Tamil Nadu state in South India has claimed to have found a site from 3500 BC (not yet peer-reviewed AFAICT),
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62e36jm4jro
contrarian1234|5 months ago
they just had a theory that copper processing lead to discoveries in iron processing.
the evidence they found seems to support that.
theyre not claiming this particular site is where the iron age started. and it has nothing to do with what some people in india did. Maybe they too discovered iron processing through a similar process. and i dont understand what racial things your bringing up..
lukan|5 months ago
Is there any theory how it could have been any different?
It sounds obvious, that advances in metal working comes from those working with metals and not from carpet makers.
akssri|5 months ago
(Note: the above is obviously a caricature, but current versions of theory don't change the structure, only the emphasis on "race").
No one would care about a copper-smelt site from 500 BC.; nor would they care about this one if the Indian archaeological claims were accepted (but that one also destroys centuries of Western history-making about India, and all the social-theories that depend on it).
This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread. For more information on how 'race' was ingested into Indology, I'd refer the interested reader to the excellent book by Adluri/Bagchi [0].
[0] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/120/3/1132/197...