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Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.^[26][27][28] Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity.^[29] Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE.^[30] By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest.^[31][32] Its evidence today is found in the hymns of the Rigveda. Preserved by a resolutely vigilant oral tradition, the Rigveda records the dawning of Hinduism in India.^[33] The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions.^[34] By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism,^[35] and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity.^[36] Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin.^[37] Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity,^[38] but also marked by the declining status of women,^[39] and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief.^[g][40] In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.^[41]