Archaeologists have discovered India’s oldest stone-age tools, up to 1.5 million years old, at a prehistoric site near Chennai. The discovery may change existing ideas about the earliest arrival of human ancestors from Africa into India.
Armed with newly Stone Age tools in a town close Chennai, Indian researchers are testing the well known logical hypothesis that the Middle Paleolithic was conveyed to India by current people scattering from Africa just around 125,000 years back or later.
The new proof proposes that a Middle Paleolithic culture was available in India around 385,000 years back — generally a similar time that it is known to have created in Africa and in Europe. Center Paleolithic period is viewed as a critical social stage related with present day people and Neanderthals and additionally other bygone hominins. Stone tools of this period are used by scientists as proxy for studies of early.
The prehistoric stone tools excavated from Attirampakkam village about 60 kilometers from Chennai push back the period when populations with a Middle Palaeolithic culture may have inhabited India. The new examination showed up in global logical diary Nature on Jan 31.
Scientists Said “Our study presents a paradigm shift in thinking about the origin and spread of Middle Palaeolithic cultures in South Asia, suggesting a far greater antiquity and more complex story than we thought,” Professor Shanti Pappu of Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, who led the research team, told India Science Wire.
Without coordinate proof as fossils, the evolution of people in Eurasia is frequently outlined by changes in toolboxs. Specialists examined more than 7000 stone relics from Middle Paleolithic layers at Attirampakkam. These tools all in all demonstrate a move far from Acheulian technologies towards Middle Paleolithic methodologies, for example, the unmistakable stone-knapping known as Levallois technique, nearness of focuses, tanged focuses and sharp edge technologies. Specific luminescence dating method was used to date tool-bearing sediments.
“Without fossils we cannot pinpoint the species, but we can suggest that multiple hominin dispersals associated with Middle Palaeolithic culture were occurring far earlier than around 125 thousand years ago with complex patterns, processes and interactions between species,” Prof. Pappu added. The presence of full-fledged Middle Palaeolithic culture in India long before any modern human migrations out of Africa brought these technologies implies that either such migrations may have occurred earlier than previously thought and may have played a role in development of the Middle Palaeolithic culture in India.
Understanding the transition to the Middle Palaeolithic outside Europe and Africa is vital to the study of the lives and times of hominins in Eurasia, especially the appearance and subsequent migrations of anatomically modern humans within and out of Africa.
The archeological site at Attirampakkam was found in 1863 by R. B. Foote and in this way explored by a few researchers in the 1960s. Teacher Pappu and Dr Kumar Akhilesh from the Sharma Center have been uncovering at this place since 1999. The present work was led in coordinated effort Prof Yanni Gunnell from the University of Lyon, France; Prof Ashok K. Singhvi, Haresh M. Rajapara and Dr. Anil D. Shukla from the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.
The tools in Attirampakkam suggest that the Homo erectus conveyed the Acheulian culture into India before the Homo heidelbergensis carried this instrument making society into Europe, where the soonest destinations are around 600,000 years of age, said Robin Dennel, a senior paleontologist at the University of Sheffield, in an exceptional logical editorial in tomorrow’s issue of Science.