The Indus civilisation thrived during the third millennium BC and into the 2nd millennium BC (basically it was contemporary with the Bronze age in Egypt, the Levant, Iran and Mesopotamia). It was located in what is now NW India and southern Pakistan and emerged on the back of the earlier Baluchistan Neolithic culture. The people were an advanced society that farmed virtually everything from cotton to dates. They established 5 large cities with plumbing and sewerage systems etc. Harappa and Mohenjo Daro are the most famous sites, situated on Himalaya fed rivers. However, the bulk of the Bronze Age villages and settlements were not close to flowing water, located between the Ganges and the Indus river watersheds. As early as the 1800s archaeologists made note of a dry paleao channel – old riverbed. This ran through many settlements and it was obvious, or so it seemed, the river flowed during the height of the Indus civilisation – and why not. It led to the theory that the Indus theory actually collapsed as a result of the drying up of this river – but it turns out this is not strictly true. See https://phys.org/print431077654.html … It seems the paleaochannel dried up around 6000BC – 3000 years prior to the Indus civilisation …
… It seems that Bronze Age farmers relied on the seasonal monsoons, rain flooding the former river valley, rich in sediments and clays from the old river system. Farmers were able to survive and thrive in a gradually drying landscape – over a long period of time. See also www.livescience.com/61039-ancient-indus-civilization-survived-without-ri…
The interesting geology included the discovery the Sutlej river, which now flows across the Punjab and the rich farmland in that part of India, once flowed through the paleochannel. It had already shifted course at some point in Holocene history and to find out when they used optically stimulated luminescence on grains of sediments. The geology seems to show the river flowed between 15,000 and 8000 years ago. Is this further evidence of a re-alignment of the Earth's geoid around 6000BC. It can hardly be an accident as it occurred the same time as the North Sea basin became a sea and the English Channel opened up and the Indonesian land mass was drowned and became a multitude of islands,and big changes occurred in the Gulf and Red Sea (and so on). The river valley remained fertile during the following millennia, monsoon rains providing an annual flooding event similar to agriculture in the Nile valley.