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Climatic Changes in South-East India during Early Palaeolithic Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

F. J. Richards ,
L. A. Cammiade  and
M. C. Burkitt
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Extract

HUMAN artifacts can often be very useful to the geologist. When they occur in sufficient numbers and are characteristic, prehistorians can be definite in assigning the industries to a certain culture or cultures, and they can then be utilized by the geologist in the same way as are fossils. In Europe during a part of Quaternary times Lower Palaeolithic cultures flourished. Now Quaternary times in Europe can, of course, be readily subdivided into glacial and interglacial periods, but these naturally did not occur further south. In East Africa geological evidence has been adduced to show that intense pluvial periods took the place of our European glaciations, while during the interglacial phases the African areas suffered from arid conditions. Lower Palaeolithic industries are found at certain levels in East Africa and they enable the geologist to correlate the East African and European sequences. South-East India (Madras) is also not an area where glaciations ever occurred: but, we ask, can geological evidence be adduced to demonstrate climatic changes corresponding to those found to have occurred in East Africa ? Lower Palaeolithic industries occur in great numbers in South-East India; whereas most of them have been merely collected from the surface, and are therefore useless for the purposes of exact dating, a number of finds in situ in definite layers have been made, and as in East Africa these can be used as datum lines for correlating purposes.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Geological Magazine , Volume 69 , Issue 5 , May 1932 , pp. 193 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1932

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References

page 195 note 1 See Lake, P., in Mem. Gaol. Surv. I., xxiv, 1891, 217; J. M. Maclaren in Geol. Mag., 1906, 536 seq.; L. L. Fermor in Geol. Mag., 1911 and 1915, and Mem. Geol. Surv: I., xxxvii, 1909, 370–89; C. S. Fox, Mem. Geol. Surv. I., xlix, 1923.Google Scholar

page 197 note 1 Foote, R. Brucealso examined the site, but before quarrying operations had started.Google Scholar

page 198 note 1 Polished celts of diorite, some fragments of pottery, and an etched carnelian bead have also been found above the detrital laterite.

page 199 note 1 As a result of this evidence it might be possible to suggest that a second dry period intervened between the damp period during which the detrital laterite was deposited and the damp period which caused the implements to begin to lose their colloidal silica. However it can, of course, always be argued that this lateritization of the implements took place at the end of the same damp period during which they and the detrital laterite were being washed down and deposited at Manjan-Karanai.