Tag: Homo heidelbergensis

  • Hanuman Vanaras Existed 2,50,000 Years Ago? Homo Heidelbergensis

    Hanuman Vanaras Existed 2,50,000 Years Ago? Homo Heidelbergensis

    Ancestors of Homo sapiens were Homo heidelbergensis.

    Home sapiens were our ancestors.

    Hanuman is described as Chiranjeevi, Immortal.

    Vanaras, to which he is reported to belong were not Apes.

    Valmiki observes that they could speak and were intelligent

    Hanuman had authored Sanskrit Grammar before Panini.

    Hanuman is described as Wise.

    There are Mantras that are addressed to Hanuman for better communication skills and mental strength.

    In the light of following information could it be that Vanaras as a species existed 2,50,000 years ago?

    In India?

    Indian Thought does not support Darwinian Theory of Evolution

    Species co existed.

    This is being proved by recent researches in Biology and Archeology.

    I had written earlier about Hanuman being possibly the equivalent of Neanderthals.

    Hanuman is described as Immortal, Chiranjeevi

    .Asia remained as reservoir of all races moving in to Europe.

    2.For reasons not very known’ Humans started pushing towards Europe, this is presumed to be due to a cataclysmic event like flood or long dry periods.

    3.Access to Europe was easy as the Russian plains were there to cross over effortlessly.

    4.The complex structure of European geological features made these groups entering into Europe to become small groups settling n pockets.

    The Basques settled in the North of Pyrenees, Celts in Wales,Ireland and north-west of Scotland,Lombard in Italy,

    In the Fourth Century AD, out of Asia came the Huns,predecessor of Germans),Tatars.’

    https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/ramanan50.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/hanuman-vanaras-are-neanderthals-of-india/amp/

    heidelbergensis

    Where Lived: Europe; possibly Asia (China); Africa (eastern and southern)
    When Lived: About 700,000 to 200,000 years ago

    This early human had a very large browridge, and a larger braincase and flatter face than older early human species. It was the first early human species to live in colder climates; their ­­­short, wide bodies were likely and to conserving heat. It lived at the time of the oldest definite control of fire and use of wooden spears, and it was the first early human species to routinely hunt large animals. This early human also broke new ground; it was the first species to build shelters, creating simple dwellings out of wood and rock.

    Year of Discovery: 1908
    History of Discovery:

    In 1908 near Heidelberg, Germany, a workman found the of H. heidelbergensis in the Rösch sandpit just north of the village of Mauer. This was nearly complete except for the missing premolars and first two left molars; it is heavily built and lacks a chin. German scientist Otto Schoentensack was the first to describe the specimen and proposed the name Homo heidelbergensis.

    Before the naming of this species, scientists referred to early human fossils showing traits similar to both Homo erectus and modern humans as ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens.

    Height: Males: average 5 ft 9 in (175 cm); Females: average 5 ft 2 in (157 cm)
    Weight: Males: average 136 lbs (62 kg); Females: average 112 lbs (51 kg)

    We don’t know everything about early humans—but we keep learning more! Paleoanthropologists are constantly in the field, excavating new areas with groundbreaking technology, and continually filling in some of the gaps about our understanding of human evolution.

    Below are some of the still unanswered questions about Homo heidelbergensis that may be answered with future discoveries:

    .Smithsonian

    1. Did this early human indeed range in time from 1.3 million to 200,000 years ago, and in geography from Africa to Europe to Asia? Or are there more than one species represented among the fossils that some scientists call H. heidelbergensis (including H. antecessor, H. cepranensis, and H. rhodesiensis)?
    2. Many scientists think this species was ancestral tor n, but which species wancDidbehaviorceTheir model begins about 250,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis arrived in India toting crude stone tools. Digs in central India in the 1980s turned up skeletal remains of the species, and other sites revealed almond-shaped hand axes chipped from stone.

    Meanwhile in Africa modern humans arose about 190,000 years ago, most archaeologists believe. These humans too developed stone tools

    .

    Scattered evidence, such as red ochre—perhaps used as body paint—suggests early African humans also dabbled in the creative arts.

    The new theory posits that as much as 70,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans migrated east, arriving in India with technology comparable to that developed by Homo heidelbergensis.

    “The tools were not so different,” Petraglia says. “The technology that the moderns had wasn’t of a great advantage over what [Homo heidelbergensis] were using.”

    But modern humans outcompeted the natives, slowly but inexorably driving them to extinction, Petraglia says. “It’s just like the story in Western Europe, where [modern humans] drove Neandertals to extinction,” he says.

    The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of the so-called Hobbits, whose fossilized bones were discovered recently on the Indonesian island of Flores.

    But Athreya of Texas A&M argues that the evidence for such a “replacement event” in India remains weak.

    “You have to explain the reasons for the replacement, [such as] technical superiority,” she said.

    Reference and Citation.

    https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1114_051114_india_2.html

  • Million Year Tamil Site Pallavaram Chennai Dated Report

    I  posted an article that the Tamils lived around 74,000 years ago and that too near Chennai.

    I forgot to provide the Link.

    Scroll down for Video.

    This led to the speculation that I have been providing information not backed up by facts.

    Readers of this site know well that I never post information without evidence nor providing information without authentic links.

    I forgot in the above case.

    Attirampakkam,Chennai being excavated.Jpg Attirampakkam,Chennai being excavated..

    That is also good in the sense that I have been able to get more information on the site and details.

    The site is now estimated to be around .

    ‘Archaeologists have discovered India’s oldest stone-age tools, up to 1.5 million years old, at a prehistoric site near Chennai. The discovery may change existing ideas about the earliest arrival of human ancestors from Africa into India…

    The Story of Attirampakkam.

    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 turned out to be an epochal discovery. Foote’s discovery revolutionised the study of India’s pre-history.

    Attirampakkam (13°13′50″N, 79°53′20″E, 38.35 m a.s.l), is an open-air Palaeolithic site situated near a meandering tributary stream of the river Kortallaiyar, northwest of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, along the southeast coast of India. Discovered in September 1863, by Robert Bruce Foote and his colleague William King, it was investigated in the early to mid 20th century by several scholars- T.T. Paterson, V.D.Krishnaswami and K.D.Banerjee. Later work on the prehistory of this region was conducted by A.Swami. S.Pappu’s doctoral dissertation on the prehistory of the Kortallaiyar river basin (see publications), highlighted the importance of the context of artefacts at this site, in addition to other observations on the nature of the prehistoric record of this region.

    A team of Indian and French archaeologists have used two dating methods including Cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to show that the stone hand-axes and cleavers from Attirampakkam are at least 1.07 million years old, and could date as far back as 1.5 million years.

    12 years of painstaking work

    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.

    “This means that soon after early humans invented the Acheulian tools, they crossed formidable geographical barriers to get to southern Asia,” said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, who is an expert in Asian prehistoric archaeology but was not associated with the Chennai study. “The suggestion that this occurred 1.5 million years ago is simply staggering,” he said.

    Petraglia himself had earlier been involved in excavating the Hunsgi valley in Karnataka, which has yielded 1.27 million-year-old stone tools, regarded as India’s oldest until now. Although earlier excavations had revealed Acheulian tools at a few sites on the Indian subcontinent, including a two million-year-old site in Pakistan, the dates assigned to the artefacts so far have remained under debate.

    The latest dating techniques

    Pappu and her colleagues assigned dates to the Attirampakkam tools by analysing traces of certain elements embedded in them and by correlating the archaeological layers excavated at the site with changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.

    “We adopted two different dating methods and arrived at consistent results,” Shanti Pappu explained “We believe this is the strongest evidence so far for an Acheulian industry in India older than one million years.”

    The dating studies were carried out by collaborating geophysicists in French academic institutions. Researchers believe the new dates will have major implications for current ideas about who carried the Acheulian culture into India.

    In the past, some researchers had attributed the flow of Acheulian tools into southern Asia and Europe to the Homo heidelbergensis, another ancestor of modern humans but one that appeared long after the Homo erectus. But the 1.5 million year date assigned to the Attirampakkam tools suggests that groups of Homo erectus carried the tool-making culture into India.

    In an independent research study, Petraglia and his colleagues have analysed Acheulian tools in India that appear to be only 120,000 years old. The two findings suggest that the Acheulian toolmakers inhabited India for 1.4 million years – from 1.5 million years ago to 120,000 years ago.

    “The excavators have done an outstanding job, unprecedented in archaeology studies in India. This means soon after early humans invented the Acheulean tool kit 1.6 million years ago, groups migrated out of Africa crossing formidable barriers to get to southern Asia,” confirmed Michael Petragalia.

    What sets apart the Indo-French discovery from other similar previous findings is the dating accuracy.

    The tools in Attirampakkam suggest that the Homo erectus carried the Acheulian culture into India before the Homo heidelbergensis ferried this tool-making culture into Europe, where the earliest sites are about 600,000 years old, said Robin Dennel, a senior archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, in a special scientific commentary in the March 2011 issue of Science.

    Early Pleistocene Presence of Acheulian Hominins in South India

    Shanti Pappu, Yanni Gunnell, Kumar Akhilesh,Régis Braucher,Maurice Taieb, François Demory, Nicolas Thouveny

    Read the full paper in Science, March 25th, 2011.

    South Asia is rich in Lower Paleolithic Acheulian sites. These have been attributed to the Middle Pleistocene on the basis of a small number of dates, with a few older but disputed age estimates. Here, we report new ages from the excavated site of Attirampakkam, where paleomagnetic measurements and direct 26Al/10Be burial dating of stone artifacts now position the earliest Acheulian levels as no younger than 1.07 million years ago (Ma), with a pooled average age of 1.51 ± 0.07 Ma. These results reveal that, during the Early Pleistocene, India was already occupied by hominins fully conversant with an Acheulian technology including handaxes and cleavers among other artifacts. This implies that a spread of bifacial technologies across Asia occurred earlier than previously accepted.

    You can read more about this paper by following this link

    You can also check out perspectives on this paper by Robin Dennell in the same issue of Science.

    A comment on this paper is also present on John Hawks web blog

    More comments on Sheila Mishra’s web blog

    The contents are copyrighted.

    Please visit the sites.

    Reference and Citation for  research.Thanks to these Studies.

    http://www.sharmaheritage.com/index.php/research/attirampakkam

    http://www.archeolog-home.com/pages/content/attirampakkam-inde-million-year-old-tools-found-india-s-prehistory-pushed-back.html

    http://www.ancientdigger.com/2011/03/excavations-at-attirampakkam-in-india.html

    http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/pappu297/

    http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/pappu325/

    http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/april-2011/article/early-humans-occupied-south-asia-over-a-million-years-ago

    http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/03/2011/stone-tools-reveal-indias-1-5-million-year-old-prehistory

    http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/history-and-culture/stone-tools-that-revolutionised-study-of-indias-prehistory/article3516451.ece

    A discovery that changed the antiquity of humankind who lived in Indian subcontinent

    http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/a-discovery-that-changed-the-antiquity-of-humankind-who-lived-in-indian-subcontinent/article4753744.ece

    http://www.sharmaheritage.com/index.php/about-us/86-sche-content/aboutus/right-column/110-dr-shanti-pappu

    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6024/1532

    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6024/1596.figures-only

    http://earth-pages.co.uk/2011/05/08/early-bi-face-tools-from-south-india/

    http://www.le.ac.uk/has/ps/past/past37.html

    http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/pappu297/

    https://ancienttamilcivilization.wordpress.com/tag/tamils/

    * Some links may be broken and some have moved