Bird Hunters in Indus River.The Indus river valley leaves some surprising remnants of it's culture.  A stone's throw from the largest intact Harappan Site (Mohenjo Daro), these hunters use the same method they used to hunt birds that goes back to 3300BC.  They tie their decoy live birds to hoops in the middle of the river and drop into the river so only their bird covered heads are showing.  When a bird lands they wiggle their heads as if they are a bird swimming and then physically grab their prey.  4,800 years ago, at the same time as the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, great cities arose along the flood plains of the Indus and Saraswati (Ghaggar-Hakra) rivers.  Developments at Harappa have pushed the dates back 200 years for this civilization, proving once and for all, that this civilization was not just an offshoot of Mesopotamia..They were a highly organized and very successful civilization.  They built some of the world's first planned cities, created one of the world's first written languages and thrived in an area twice as large as Egypt or Mesopotamia for 900 years (1500 settlements spread over 280,000 square miles on the subcontinent)..There are three major communities--Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, and Dholavira. The town of Harappa flourished during this period because of it's location at the convergence of several trade routes that spanned a 1040 KM swath from the northern mountains to the coast.
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