Free Republic

The discovery of a Neolithic stone celt, a hand-held axe, with the Indus script on it at Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu is, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, "a major discovery because for the first time a text in the Indus script has been found in the State on a datable artefact, which is a polished neolithic celt." He added: "This confirms that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu shared the same language family of the Harappan group, which can only be Dravidian. The discovery provides the first evidence that the Neolithic people of the Tamil country spoke a Dravidian language." Mr....

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...

Previously, the Iron Age burial site of Adichanallur in southern Tamil Nadu had revealed an impressive collection of iron implements, currently housed in Chennai’s Egmore Museum, dated between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE.Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, while addressing the Tamil Nadu Assembly Monday, said: “It has been found that the date of the iron artefacts ranges from 2172 BCE to 1615 BCE. The results have reiterated the fact that the Iron Age of Tamil Nadu dates back 4,200 years, which is the oldest in India.”This finding has answered questions relating to the start of agricultural activity in Tamil Nadu, he...

Archaeologists working in the village of Konthagai in southern India have found a rusted iron dagger preserved in a burial urn alongside skeletal remains, the Times of India reports. The discovery is part of a major excavation effort in the state of Tamil Nadu that seeks to shine a light on the ancient Keeladi civilization.Though the dagger's 16-inch steel blade was rusted and broken in half, part of its wooden handle remained intact. R. Sivanandam, director of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, tells the Hindu that this type of weapon was used by warriors during the Sangam period...The wood's...

PAINGANADU, INDIA (Reuters) - Indians in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, which U.S. vice president hopeful Kamala Harris visited as a kid, erected banners, held special prayers and wished her success. Villagers in Painganadu, Harris’ ancestral village, put up banners of Harris. Harris’ mother, who migrated to the United States to study, traces her roots to this non-descript hamlet in eastern Tamil Nadu. “They (Kamala Harris) have gone to the level of contesting for a vice-presidential candidate in America. Naturally, the villagers are very happy,” Ramanan, a trustee at a local temple, told Reuters Television. Harris, born to an...

Wood Buried Under Ocean Floor Thousands of Miles at Sea October 22, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Wood chips hundreds of feet deep in ocean sediments have been found. How did they get there? Watch out for ocean trees. Geology researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) went boring into ocean sediments near India, and were surprised to find direct evidence that “Catastrophic events carry forests of trees thousands of miles to a burial at sea.” They pulled up six cores of sediment from the ocean floor a thousand feet below the surface. The cores were extracted miles apart...

From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu T.S. Subramanian Strong resemblances between graffiti symbols in Tamil Nadu and the Indus script Continuity of tradition: Megalithic pots with arrow-work graffiti found at Sembiankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district. CHENNAI: In recent excavations in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, megalithic pottery with graffiti symbols that have a strong resemblance to a sign in the Indus script have been found. Indus script expert Iravatham Mahadevan says that what is striking about the arrow-mark graffiti on the megalithic pottery found at Sembiyankandiyur and Melaperumpallam villages is that they are always incised twice and together, just...

Skeletons, script found at ancient burial site in Tamil Nadu By T.S. Subramanian An urn containing a human skull and bones unearthed by the Archaeological Survey of India at Adhichanallur, near Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. Twelve of these urns (below) contain human skeletons. Three of them, which may be 2,800 years old, bear inscriptions that resemble the early Tamil Brahmi script. -- Photos: A. Shaikmohideen CHENNAI, MAY 25. In spectacular finds, the Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai Circle, has unearthed a dozen 2,800-year-old human skeletons intact in urns at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. Three of...

The back legs of the baby elephant are consumed by fire as it chases after its startled mother, screaming. In the chilling photo, a flaming ball of tar...the source of the fire, along with a few hurled firecrackers — is frozen in the air as a crowd sprints away from the petrified pachyderms. Many things in the photo are unclear: the fate of the calf and its mother, the reason the men are attacking them on a road cut through a forest, whether the practice has a formal name or is just a random bit of sadism. But in an...

Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves said. The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said. The 'man-with-the-jar' has been a distinct motif of the Indus valley symbols. The Edakkal engraving has retained its unique style as the engraver...

The ruins are located close to the popular tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mamallapuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Just before the devastating 2004 Asian Tsunami hit, the ocean receded several hundred feet, and tourists reported glimpsing large stones and boulders in the distance. A 10-member team from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) surveyed the area from March 10 to 18, and have found the ruins of one of six ancient temples that are thought to have been swallowed up by the ocean as sea levels rose. The team, comprising of divers, geologists and...

For about 60 million years during the Eocene epoch, the Indian subcontinent was a huge island. Having broken off from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Indian Tectonic Plate drifted toward Eurasia. During that gradual voyage, the subcontinent saw a blossoming of exceptional wildlife, and when the trove of unique biodiversity finally made contact with bigger Eurasia, the exchange of animals and plants between these areas laid the foundations for countless modern species. "Today, mainland Asia and India have all this unique biodiversity -- but did the mainland Asian biodiversity come from India, or did the Indian biodiversity come from...

Witnesses said the blast left a crater 5ft deep and 2ft wide. =================================================================================================================================== A meteorite crashed into an engineering college in Vellore district on Saturday , causing an explosion that killed one man and injured three others, the Tamil Nadu government said on Sunday. Scientists, however, said it wasn't clear how the government concluded that a meteorite strike caused the blast. There has been no established death due to a meteorite hit in recorded history, they said. If a meteorite indeed caused the death, bus driver Kamaraj will be the first person ever to have died in a meteorite strike....

DHANUSHKODI, India (Reuters) - For India, it is an almost 150-year dream about to come true -- its "Suez" carving a new channel between the south coast and Sri Lanka, dramatically shortening the sea route for freight and slashing costs. But for environmentalists and fishermen, it is a nightmare in the making, one that it will haunt South Asia for decades. The $560 million Sethusamudram Ship Channel has roused strong emotions among supporters and opponents alike. And the tussle is likely to worsen as digging begins on Saturday. One of India's showcase projects to upgrade its infrastructure to cope with...

The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this week which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram. The report was withdrawn after huge protests by opposition parties. The report was presented to the Supreme Court on Wednesday in connection with a case against a proposed shipping canal project between India and Sri Lanka. Hindu hardliners say the project will destroy what they say is a bridge built by Ram and his army of monkeys. Scientists and archaeologists say the Ram Setu (Lord Ram's bridge) - or Adam's Bridge as it is sometimes called -...

The popularization of scuba diving after World War II had its impact on Sri Lanka, when Sir Arthur Clarke and Mike Wilson (later Swami Siva Kalki) came here after their successful expedition on the Great Barrier Reef. They came here to write on the 'Reefs of Taprobane' (Sri Lanka ). Here they were joined by Jonklass. Although spear-fishing and coral reef exploration were the scuba divers' primary aims, searching for wrecks soon became their past time in a sea strewn with ship wrecks. It was Sir Arthur Clarke's book which first carried colour photographs of off-shore shipwrecks and the ruins...

Ram Sethu: Scientific evidence of ancient human activity By S. Kalyanaraman Scientific evidences point to human activity in ancient times on both sides of Ram Sethu as found by Dept. of Earth Sciences and ocean technologists of Bharatam. This area should be declared a protected monument under the Protection of Monuments Act and declared as a World Heritage site by the Government of India and advised to UNESCO. The Geological and geophysical survey of the Sethu-samudram Project clearly reveal that Rama’s bridge appears to be a major Geological feature. The surveys reveal that to the north of Ram Sethu on...

Hindu groups are launching an international campaign today to halt India?s plans to create a shipping channel by dredging the sea between India and Sri Lanka. They say that the project will destroy an ancient chain of shoals known as Adam?s Bridge, which Hindus believe was built by an army of monkeys to allow Lord Rama to cross to Lanka to rescue his abducted wife. They are also protesting on environmental grounds, arguing that the 30-mile string of limestone shoals, also known as Ram Sethu, protected large parts of India from the 2004 tsunami. ?The bridge is as holy to...

Government on Tuesday said there are no archaeological studies that reveal the existence of a Ram Sethu bridge between India and Sri Lanka. However, a NASA satellite picture has shown the existence of a stretch of land bridge in the Palk Strait between the countries, Minister of Tourism and Culture Ambika Soni said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha today. She informed the house that as there are no archaeological studies to confirm the fact, the government was not planning to take any preservation initiative in this direction.

A scheme to make the shallow strait between India and Sri Lanka navigable has upset environmentalists and the port of Colombo. To its supporters, it is a dream project, no less than the “Suez of the east”; to its opponents it is an environmental catastrophe. Either way, plans to dredge a channel in the seabed between India and Sri Lanka will be controversial, and could alter maritime and military operations in the Indian Ocean. The $400m project, called the Sethusamudram Ship Canal, involves digging a 152km, 300m-wide channel through the Palk Strait, a shallow stretch of sea separating the south...