jueves, 12 de septiembre de 2013

Signs of civilisation in Purulia for last 1 million years

A recent archaeological study has found signs that there was human habitation in the hilly and forested tracts of Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore districts — regions that almost coincide with the modern day jangalmahal — for the last one lakh years.

The discovery is significant because in the prehistoric period, human settlements were rare as men led nomadic lives moving from one place to another depending on the availability of food.

“During our project over the past couple of years, we have found the existence of a micro blade industry in and around the Ayodhya hills area, which takes the history of the area back to the Late Pleistocene period,” Bishnupriya Basak of the department of archaeology at Calcutta University said at a seminar at the Indian Museum on Wednesday.

In archaeological terminology, micro blade signifies small stone tools that were typically chipped off from stones and used for various purposes from hunting to digging the earth.

The Late Pleistocene period commenced between 20,000 and 10,000 years BC. This was the time when humans started making and using small tools made of stones. Earlier, relics of large size stone tools of the early stone era, which date back to 80,000 and 1,00,000 years, were found in Purulia.

According to experts, the discovery of these two types of tools makes the crucial connection that prehistoric men settled down in this region and perhaps did not migrate.

Basak and her team discovered relics of human civilisation in the Ayodhya hills of Purulia in 2011-12. [...] hindustantimes.com

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