In the early centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, four main patterns of life existed in the subcontinent.
Scattered hunter-gatherer groups continued their earlier traditions but some also kept animals acquired from their farming neighbours.
These farmers grew wheat, millet and other crops, raised cattle, sheep and goats, hunted deer and caught fish. Their villages of wattle and daub houses are known particularly from central and western India, on the fringes of the Indus civilization.
The latter was the most populous and complex culture of the time, dense areas of towns and villages interspersed with belts of pastureland inhabited by animal herders.
On their northern fringes lived small groups of pastoral nomads, the most easterly branch of the wide-ranging Indo-Europeans.
By 1600 BC, the pattern had altered dramatically. Gone were all trace of the Indus towns and their amenities, writing, the complex political and economic organization and international trading networks of the Indus civilization.
However, the village communities in western India, probably enriched by immigrants from the Indus region in its decline, were growing in size and prosperity.
Farther south and east, life had changed less but in the north-east important moves were afoot. The fertile plains of the Ganges, hitherto sparsely settled by mainly hunter-gather groups, was now being colonized by rice farmers, probably descendants of some of the Indus folk, and by Aryan pastoralists.
