The stone hand-axe discovered by Robert Bruce Foot on the Parade Ground at Pallavaram cantonment and a stone cleaver found by Foote and his colleague William King at Attirampakkam, 60 km from Chennai. Photo: R. Ravindran
Posted on 05/29/2013 6:12:45 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
One hundred and fifty years ago, on May 30, 1863, young geologist Robert Bruce Foote bent down and picked up a stone tool on the Parade Ground at Pallavaram cantonment, near Chennai...
It was a hand-axe made of a hard rock called quartzite. Prehistoric man had crafted it to dig out tubers and roots from the soil, butcher animals he had hunted and take out the meat, and so on. As Foote, then a 29-year old assistant geologist in the Geological Survey of India (GSI), cradled the hand-axe and looked at it transfixed, he recognised it to be a Palaeolithic tool. (Palaeo means old, lith means stone. Prehistory is that part of history before written records began).
At one stroke, his discovery changed the antiquity of humankind who lived in the Indian subcontinent. It put India on the world map of prehistory. Recent research has established that such tools used by Palaeolithic population in India could be dated to 1.5 million years before the present.
Four months after this discovery, on September 28, 1863, Foote and his best friend and colleague in the GSI, William King, made another seminal discovery. They found numerous stone tools, including hand-axes, cleavers and flake tools, at Attirampakkam, near the Kortallayar river, in Tiruvallur district, 60 km from Chennai. Prehistoric man had used them to hunt animals gathering around waterholes and exploit plant and aquatic resources. Foote found some more stone tools later at Pallavaram and was convinced that a Palaeolithic population had lived in India.
Two types of dating done in France at the request of Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh, specialists in Tamil Nadu’s prehistory, have established that the stone tools found at Attirampakkam could be dated to 1.5 million years. The methods used were paleomagnetic and cosmogenic nuclide burial dating.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehindu.com ...
The stone hand-axe discovered by Robert Bruce Foot on the Parade Ground at Pallavaram cantonment and a stone cleaver found by Foote and his colleague William King at Attirampakkam, 60 km from Chennai. Photo: R. Ravindran
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Interesting article; more and more the old theory of everything “Out of Africa” seems to get weaker with each new discovery. I know Leakey would hate it, but the newer technology for dating and the new discoveries seem to point to the fact that human beings were much more widespread and adaptable than originally thought.
I thought DNA studies already established the validity of the OOA theory.
And then they were wiped out 74,000 years ago.
Interesting article; more and more the old theory of everything “Out of Africa” seems to get weaker with each new discovery.
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Yeah, I wonder how so many scientists came to be among those who try to fit the data to a hypothesis instead of vice versa.
Archaeologists have a heck of an eye. To me they’d be “rocks.”
Interesting article; more and more the old theory of everything “Out of Africa” seems to get weaker with each new discovery. I know Leakey would hate it, but the newer technology for dating and the new discoveries seem to point to the fact that human beings were much more widespread and adaptable than originally thought.
Multiple waves following the coastlines would make more sense, remeber in the last 2 million years there were a lot of times the sea levels were much lower due t ice ages, so a lot of evidence is under the coastal plains...
Also humans are more semi-aquatic than some of the evolutionists would have us to belive...
Actually I read an article recently about research in India which showed human settlement both before and after Toba separated by a bed of Toba’s ash. It may have been in Archaeology Magazine.
Actually I read an article recently about research in India which showed human settlement both before and after Toba separated by a bed of Toba’s ash. It may have been in Archaeology Magazine.
Toba super-volcano catastrophe idea ‘dismissed’
BBC News | Jonathan Amos
Posted on 05/02/2013 7:34:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3015183/posts
and from the “save the replacement theory” desk:
Modern humans did not settle in Asia before the devastating eruption of Sumatra’s volcano Mount Toba 74,000 years ago
http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/researchnews/archaeogeneticresearchrefutesearlierfindings.php
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