Today we rely on a decreasing number of species despite our increasingly diversified food options. This is very different from the past where wide ranges of crops/animals were the base of the diet, but critically there have been moments of challenge and change faced by past peoples too that can advise us as we move into our Anthropocene futures. One region of the world that offers an important case study is the Middle Ganga Plains. Between the 7th and 1st millennium BC a diversity of native and non-native crops and animals were brought under an agricultural system that eventually drove the second urbanism of South Asia. In this session we aim to bring together the current state of research, focusing not on single moments of transition but on the overall picture from Mesolithic through to historic, and specifically on how the human-plant-animal ecological entanglement facilitated the development of the unique powerhouse that was and still is Indian agriculture.