Now I am presenting some ancient scripts of India.
As I said in other posts on language and Indian Philosophy, it takes thousands of years to perfect a Language like Tamil, Sanskrit.
The conservative estimate of the Stone age of India is about 28000 years old,
This again, in my opinion is incorrect.
Grantha Script. The Grantha alphabet is a descendent of the Brahmi alphabet and started to emerge during the 5th century AD. Sanskrit was transmitted orally for a long time, and so was mostly written in the local script. (It is only in recent times, since Sanskrit was introduced in the modern universities, that the Devanagari was adopted as the standard.) In Bengal, it was written in the Bengali script; in Andhra, in the Telugu script.Vattezhuthu was the early script used to write Malayalam. Total alphabets were about 30. From the vattezhuthu was derived another script called the kolezhuthu. There is no fundamental difference between the two scripts except that in kolezhuthu there are no specific symbols for endings in u and for a and o. This script was more commonly used in the Cochin and Malabar areas than in Travancore. Yet another script derived from the vattezhuthu was the Malayanma, which was commonly used south to Thiruvananthapuram. Malayanma also does not differ fundamentally from the vattezhuthu.Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken mainly in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. The Tamil alphabet is descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India. The earliest known Tamil inscriptions date back to at least 500 BC.Gurmukhi script.Brahmi is a “syllabic alphabet”, meaning that each sign can be either a simple consonant or a syllable with the consonant and the inherent vowel /a/. Other syllabic alphabets outside of South Asia include Old Persian and Meroïtic. However, unlike these two system, Brahmi (and all subsequent Brahmi-derived scripts) indicates the same consonant with a different vowel by drawing extra strokes, called matras, attached to the character. Ligatures are used to indicate consonant clusters.The Indus Script.Pallava Script 640 ADSanskritHindi and Indian scripts.
Sometime back I saw a post in Tumblr about Hinduism ‘This Shit has happened before’ ridiculing Indian Philosophy and History.
If there is Shit and it had happened there is nothing wrong in stating the facts, even if it is shit.
Much before the Western Civilisation was even thought of India, under the Name of Bharat was in Existence as a highly developed Culture.
I am attempting to present some facts and sites for those who are curious and especially for those who have been brain washed into believing that it was the West that gave India its Technology and civilised behaviour(?)
For more,please read posts under India,Hinduism,Indian Philosophy and Astrophysics.
India.
The Stone Age the Stone Age in India begins with the Paleolithic (early Stone Age) and terminates after the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age). The Paleolithic dates back to the geological era of Middle Pleistocene. Paleolithic sites abound in Peninsular India, and are found more prominently at Pallavaram in Tamil Nadu, Hunsgi in Karnataka, Kuliana in Orissa, Didwana in Rajasthan, and Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh.
Stone Age in India began with Early Stone Age (called Paleolithic) and ended up with the Middle Stone Age (called Mesolithic). Remains of the Homo erectus in the Narmada Valley in Central India show the presence of human life in India since middle Pleistocene, which is around 200,000 to 500,000 years ago.
The Mesolithic period in Indian subcontinent started around 30,000 years ago, covering a time span of 25,000 years. Bhimbetka Petroglyphs (10 cupules and a single groove) is the oldest (c. 29,000 BCE) known Stone Age art that belongs to first permanent settlement of human being. It is found in Madhya Pradesh, Central India (quartzite Auditorium rock shelter at Bhimbetka). Traces of Neolithic period have been found in Gulf of Khambat in India. Late Neolithic culture was flourished in Indus Valley region from 6000 to 2000 BCE and in southern India from 2800 to 1200 BCE.
Map of Stone Age India.
Recent genetic research of people across the globe suggests that roughly 45,000 to 20,000 years ago, one of the most dramatic population booms after humanity dispersed from Africa occurred in southern Asia, leading to “the highest population densities in the world in prehistory,” explains Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in England.
BETTER BLADES: Primitive stone axes, found at the Jwalapuram site in India [top row], dominate until about 38,000 years ago, when the blades became smaller and more sophisticated [bottom row]. Each segment in the scale bar at the bottom represents one centimeter. Image: Kurnool District Archaeological Project.
After studying mitochondrial data from people in India and neighboring regions, Petraglia and archaeologist Ravi Korisettar of Karnatak University in Dharwad, India, and their collaborators refined the timing of this population boom to between 35,000 and 28,000 years ago. “Why this population expansion happened is a bit of a mystery,” Petraglia says.
To investigate both the potential causes and effects of this population boom, Petraglia and his colleagues scoured existing archaeological evidence in south Asia. They found that whereas 153 sites of human occupation were found dating back to the middle Paleolithic, or roughly 300,000 years ago, past studies had uncovered some 400 sites dating back to the late Paleolithic, or about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. The researchers suggest the greater number of late Paleolithic sites support the genetic suggestions of a population boom.
After delving into a site at Jwalapuram in southern India, which has preserved artifacts spanning the past 78,000 years, the scientists also discovered signs of technological innovation at roughly the same time as the population boom. Until 38,000 years ago, blades made of stone flakes were squat or relatively large. But afterward a new kind of blade came to the forefront—small, elongated “microliths” just four centimeters in length or less, with triangular, crescent or trapezoidal shapes. Similar findings were seen during the population boom at the Patne site on the west coast of India and at the Fa Hien Cave site in Sri Lanka.(scientific american)
Palaeolithic Age.
Local workers sift through Paleolithic deposits at the Billa Surgam Caves of Andhra Pradesh, first excavated in the 19th century. Now, as then, aggressive bees occasionally threaten the excavation. The caves were once thought to hold Upper Paleolithic deposits–a conclusion that an international team of archaeologists is questioning. (Samir S. Patel)
The great alchemy of prehistoric archaeology is the way it conjures our story–of modern humans, that is–from bits of stone and bone. But the tale of our evolution and migration to every corner of the planet is filled with gaps and guesswork. Scholars have been trying for decades to make sense of it. Much of their focus for the Middle and Upper Paleolithic eras, from roughly 250,000 to 30,000 years ago, has been on Africa, Europe, and the Levant (eastern Mediterranean). University of Oxford archaeologist Mike Petraglia sees an injustice there, which he and a diverse team of researchers from three continents are working to rectify. Specifically, they believe that India deserves a central place in our understanding of the Paleolithic. Their evidence suggests that modern humans arrived there rather early and thrived under some unusually grim conditions.
The Mesolithic sites far outnumber the Paleolithic ones, and are located all over the country. Synonymous with the advanced hunting, fishing, and food-gathering economy, Mesolithic usually corresponds to the immediate post-Pleistocene or early Holocene (about 10,000 years ago) period. The beginning of the disposal of dead, and the formation of band level society characterized this period. The early rock paintings depicting hunting and ritual scenes are the period’s most remarkable legacies.
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