Attirampakkam

13°13′50″N 79°53′20″E / 13.23056°N 79.88889°E / 13.23056; 79.88889

Attirampakkam is located in India
Attirampakkam
Attirampakkam's location in India

Attirampakkam or Athirampakkam is a village located 60 kilometers away from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The oldest known stone tools in India were discovered near the village, which became the type site for the Madrasian culture.

Discovery and dating of artifacts

Robert Bruce Foote and his colleague William King of the East India Company's Geological Survey found the first primitive stone tools at Attirampakkam in the early 1863. Later, more stone tools were recovered from Attirampakkam over a 20-year period by archaeologists from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education in India and other Indian institutions. Due to the paucity of any hominine fossils or bones recovered yet from the site or from South Asia as a whole, it is currently not possible to conclude which hominin species had created these tools.

By performing a luminescence dating method called post-Infrared-Stimulated Luminescence (pIR-IRSL) on about 7,200 artifacts found at Attirampakkam, researchers have made a chronology of Attirampakkam stone tool technology with a span of about 200,000 years. Latest studies indicate that the Levallois technology used at Attirampakkam emerged at about 385,000 (± 64,000) years ago, at a time period when processes signifying the end of the Acheulian culture occurred and a Middle Palaeolithic culture had emerged.

See also


This page was last updated at 2023-10-30 14:14 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari