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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Excavations at Attirampakkam in India Reveal An Amazing Prehistoric Past


Leave it up to timing as the topics of my recent studies seem to all fall into the subject of Indian history.

In my Archaeology of Sex class, I'm reading about women in India. I just recently published my ethnography with Artira Dutta, and now, the discovery of stone tools dating to 1.5 million years ago have been discovered in India.

The excavations took place at a prehistoric site near Chennai and may change how we look at the evolutionary patterns of humans from Africa to India.

Stone hand-axes and cleavers from Attirampakkam have been dated to at least 1.07 million years old using two dating methods including Cosmogenic nuclide burial dating.

12 years of painstaking work The extensive excavations at Attirampakkam have brought to light a deep stratified sequences of occupation by prehistoric populations.

The excavations at Attirampakkam show a deeply stratified sequence of occupation.The Tamil Nadu site was first discovered in 1863 by British geologist Robert Bruce Foote, and has been excavated at various times since then.

Archaeologists Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education have spent the last 12 years continuing to excavate the site and have now found 3,528 artefacts that bear a distinct similarity to prehistoric tools discovered in western Asia and Africa.

The tools fall into a class of artefacts called Acheulian that scientists believe were first created by Homo erectus – ancestors of modern humans – in Africa about 1.6 million years ago.

Read the Full story about The 1.5 Stone Tools Discovered in India @ Past Horizons

Picture ©  Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, India

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