Since the advent of radiocarbon dating in India many radiocarbon dates of the later palaeolithic industries have been obtained. It is only comparatively recently that the dating techniques able to cope with the vast time-span of the early palaeolithic have been used, although on a very limited scale. In their earliest limits, some of the dates have been fascinating and raise issues regarding india’s position in the geographical scheme of human evolution. The tool sequence beginning 2.6 mya in east Africa is well known and accompanies many related, earlier and later hominid fossil finds. What is directly relevant to the Indian context is not so much the African evidence but the evidence emerging from Indonesia and China. In the case of Java in Indonesia several hominid remains have been recently dated between 1.8 and 1.6 mya, thus putting an end to all doubts regarding the early dates of the Javanese finds. In China, although the famous Zhoukoudian finds near Beijing are dated from the baseline of 5,00,000 years ago onwards, the age of 1.7–1.9 mya for a fossil skull find and associated stone tools from the Longgupo cave in Sichuan is a very important development. It would only be prudent to make inquiries into the earliest dates suggested for the Indian palaeolithic tools.
The first Indian publications in this regard date from 1975 and 1977 and deal with the Siwalik region. Geologically, the Upper Siwalik formations comprise, successively, the Tatrot and Pinjor zones. Here, among other things, the problem is to place the boundary between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene. According to R.K. Ganjoo in 1990, on the basis of magnetic polarity, this boundary lies within Pinjor at 1.8 mya and ‘therefore the basal part of the Pinjor is of late Pliocene age’. Archaeologically, what is significant is that in 1975 B.C. Verma of the Geological Survey of India reported in situ artefacts and associated fossils from the base of Pinjor. In 1977, J.C. Sharma of Chandigarh University discovered numerous stone implements in the Lower Boulder Conglomerate above Pinjor, which B.C. Verma in 1984 placed in the Lower Pleistocene. While reporting his finds, Sharma was sure that the Boulder Conglomerate stage of the Upper Siwaliks belonged to the middle Pleistocene and possibly to the early Pleistocene. In fact, he cited a geological opinion to the effect that the Lower Boulder Conglomerate stage could indeed be dated to the lower Pleistocene. The chronological implications of these finds, especially the one made by Verma in 1975 at the base of Pinjor, are obvious. In 1984, Verma further reported a chopper tool of quartzite pebble located in situ in a red clay band in the Tatrot horizon to the north of the Siwalik Fossil Park at Suketi in Himachal Pradesh. In this publication he draws attention to the existence of ‘numerous early palaeolithic artefact-bearing sites’ in the outer Siwalik belt and in the Markanda river valley of Sirmur district, Himachal Pradesh. Moreover, he argued that ‘the earlier concept of linking the artefacts found in the Outer Siwalik Belt with different levels of the terraces’ did not hold ‘convincing ground’. In view of the later developments in the Potwar plateau in the Pakistani Punjab, which have led to the rejection of de Terra’s idea of terrace-bound occurrence of stone tools in the Soan valley, Verma’s statement shows that some Indian geologists also were sceptical of the veracity of de Terra’s terrace-bound lithic succession.
In any case, it is clear that there was a slow but steady accumulation of data on the early or pre-middle Pleistocene tools in the Indian Siwaliks from 1975 onwards. In 1991, Verma further drew attention to a site called Uttarbaini in the Jammu area, which yielded early palaeolithic artefacts from below a tuffaceous ash bed in the Upper Siwaliks. In 1988, this bed was dated to 2.8 ± 0.5 mya by A. Ranga Rao of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, and others. There have been claims of palaeolithic finds in the lower Pleistocene stage from Ladakh as well.
Clear evidence has emerged from the Siwalik section of the Potwar plateau in Pakistani Punjab where Helen Rendell’s geomorphological work buttressed by archaeological surveys and dating has done away with de Terra’s earlier scaffolding of Pleistocene events in the region. The crucial site in the present context is Riwat, south-east of Rawalpindi. Here a limited number of indisputably flaked artefacts (at least two) were found embedded in a gritstone conglomerate with about 70 m of deposit above it. The geological context of this conglomerate was within the folded strata of a formation known as ‘Soan syncline’. Palaeomagnetic dating of this context was at 2.01 mya and thus the embedded artefacts also are 2 million years old. This was published in 1988 and 1989. The subsequent related evidence has emerged from the Pabbi hills which lie to the east of Jhelum. The Pabbi hills lithic assemblage does not show any handaxe or cleaver and seems in this sense to be pre-Acheulian: the artefacts found ‘tend to be very simple, and are predominantly flaked pebbles, cortical flakes, disc cores and flakes with < 25 per cent of their cortex remaining’. The absence of formal tool types has been specifically commented on. This assemblage was collected from the erosional surfaces of fossil horizons of 1.2 and 2 mya. The implications of this find are obvious and agree well with those of the Riwat find.
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TABLE II.3 |
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Another area which has emerged into the limelight in the present context is the Kukdi river valley in the Pune area of Maharashtra. There are eight volcanic ash exposures for a stretch of about 8 km near the village of Bori. Palaeolithic artefacts, which include handaxes, flakes and choppers, are mostly found in a gravel which cuts into the ash bed at a number of sections. Sheila Mishra and her associates have studied the sections in detail and reached the conclusion that ‘the dating of the tephra gives us a date for the gravel and the Acheulian assemblage found in it’, because the tephra and the gravel are both underlain and overlain by the same unit. In 1988, preliminary attempts to date the tephra or the volcanic ash bed from the sections 1 and 3 of the area by using Potassiam–Argon dating method on the total material yielded a mean age of 1.38 ± 0.24 mya. However, the adoption of more rigorous techniques led to the mean age of the Bori tephra being established as 0.67 ± 0.03 mya. This is not early Pleistocene and earlier, as in the case of the Indian Siwaliks, Riwat and the Pabbi hills, but if this dating is universally accepted, the Acheulian industry in the Deccan can be taken to date from early middle Pleistocene. Another important point to consider is that two flakes have been recovered in two separate sections at Bori from the sediments underlying the tephra. Thus, the date given here denotes only a minimum for the early palaeolithic occupation of the area.
The problem regarding the Bori date is not yet over. Another Potassium-Argon date from Bori by a different research group puts it at 538,000 years ago. Further, P. Shane and others have rigorously analysed the trace elements of the Bori tephra and this closely matches the trace element pattern of the youngest tephra deposit from Toba in Indonesia, which falls around only 75,000 years ago! The debate may not yet be over, but the very fact of this debate has highlighted the possibility of the early occurrence of palaeolithic artefacts in the interior of the subcontinent away from the Siwalik zone.
