Attirampakkam
Coordinates: 13 ° 13 ′ 50 ″ N , 79 ° 53 ′ 20 ″ E
Attirampakkam or Athirampakkam is a south Indian village about 60 km from Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu . The oldest stone tools in the country were discovered there.
With the help of the aluminum-beryllium method, an age of at least 1.07 million, if not 1.5 million years, was calculated for these devices . These are hand axes , cleavers and scrapers . The finds are attributable to the Madras culture , a hand ax industry from the early Paleolithic .
Finds from the Middle Paleolithic have recently been dated to 385,000 ± 64,000 years. In Attirampakkan this epoch lasted up to 172,000 ± 41,000 years. There, the decline in hand axes, the increasing use of smaller devices and the development or introduction of the characteristic Levallois technique can be traced more precisely for the first time and at the same time the beginning of the Middle Paleolithic can be clearly shifted to an earlier period. This shows a temporal alignment with analogous changes in human behavior in Europe and Africa. Until then, such changes had been assumed in connection with the spread of anatomically modern humans about 125,000 years ago.
Numerous artefacts from the Upper Paleolithic were found at the site, as well as three animal teeth, namely from an Asiatic buffalo , from a horse and from a Nilgau antelope . This indicates an open, damp landscape for the earlier epoch.
The site was discovered in 1863 by the geologist Robert Bruce Foote .
literature
- Shanti Pappu, Yanni Gunnell, Maurice Taieb, Jean-Philippe Brugal, K. Anupama, Raman Sukumar, Kumar Akhilesh: Excavations at the Palaeolithic Site of Attirampakkam, South India (Introduction) . Antiquity, 297, 2003.
- Kumar Akhilesh, Shanti Pappu, Haresh M. Rajapara, Yanni Gunnell, Anil D. Shukla, Ashok K. Singhvi: Early Middle Palaeolithic culture in India around 385–172 ka reframes Out of Africa models (abstract) . Nature, 554, pp. 97-101, February 2018. doi : 10.1038 / nature25444
Remarks
- ↑ Shanti Pappu, Yanni Gunnell, Kumar Akhilesh, Régis Bübers, Maurice Taieb , François Demory, Nicolas Thouveny: Early Pleistocene Presence of Acheulian Hominins in South India. In: Science . Volume 331, No. 6024, 2011, pp. 1596-1599, doi: 10.1126 / science.1200183
- ↑ Robin Dennell : An Earlier Acheulian Arrival in South Asia. In: Science. Volume 331, No. 6024, 2011, pp. 1532-1533, doi: 10.1126 / science.1203806 Dennell refers to the above article by Pappul et al.
- ↑ Shanti Pappu, Yanni Gunnell, Maurice Taieb, Jean-Philippe Brugal, K. Anupama, Raman Sukumar, Kumar Akhilesh: Excavations at the Palaeolithic Site of Attirampakkam, South India (Introduction) . Antiquity, 297, 2003.
- ^ Robert Bruce Foote: On the occurrence of stone implements in lateritic formations in various parts of the Madras and North Arcot districts , in: Madras Journal of Literature and Science, 3rd. series, II (1866) 1-3.