Pre-history: India
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The earliest signs of life in India
A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has found evidence of life in India dating back at least 2.5 billion years — to the beginning of a time known to scientists as the Great Oxidation Event, which marked the entry of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, making life, as we know it, possible.
The first signs of life have been found in the form of microbial cells in the Deccan, and it took the team four years of arduous work. Finally, the microbes were found at a depth of three kilometres. The findings have been published in the December edition of “Scientific Reports: Nature”, an online, open-access journal from the publishers of the prestigious “Nature”, one of the most recognisable scientific journals in the world.
The news has stunned the ministry of earth sciences, which had asked the IIT team —led by Pinaki Sar, of the faculty of biotechnology — to probe the beginning of life in India. An official announcement is expected shortly.
Sar said these microorganisms, mostly bacteria, date back to a time when Earth’s crust was still unstable and earthquakes, punctuated with volcanic eruptions, were routine. Between 2.5 billion years and 65 million years ago, the crust would intermittently cool but would be shaken up again with fresh eruptions and lava flow. These cool interludes were the time when the first life forms, in the form of microbes, started making their appearances. The Deccan Traps, where the country’s oldest rocks (granites and basalt), are located, were home to these first life forms, much like the Witwatersrand in South Africa, Colorado river basin in the US, and Fennoscandian Shield, Finland. Geoscientists across the world are trying to reveal life antiquities on Earth and the discovery by the IIT scientists could well be a landmark, said sources.
The search started in 2014, when the ministry asked the IIT biotechnologists to join a team of geologists at Koyna, in Maharashtra (in Karar village), where a devastating earthquake had occurred in 1964. These geologists were trying to establish the cause of the quake. Since this part of the Deccan is made of the oldest igneous rocks, the ministry asked the IIT scientists to explore the possibility of life deep inside the rock belly. These are hard, near-impermeable rocks where very little water or nutrients had percolated to make life possible.
“The depths of these ancient rocks do not have oxygen, water, organics or light to support life. The rock cores we dug out from three boreholes were investigated and we have been able to prove microbial existence. It is obvious that they fought extreme conditions to stay alive and multiply,” said Sar.
Sar said the next phase of their research will focus on whether the organisms are still alive. “We cannot immediately confirm that,” he explained, calling the microbes “extremophiles” because they survived extreme conditions. They are extremely intelligent bacteria and they could teach us a lesson or two about how carbon and inorganic sources can be used for survival,” he added.
The earliest tools
Andhra
Prashant Rupera, August 10, 2022: The Times of India
From: Prashant Rupera, August 10, 2022: The Times of India
Vadodara: For a long time, it had been assumed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) migrated from Africa to India around 1. 25 lakh years ago and they carried Middle Palaeolithic stone tools with them to the country. Scientific dating of artefacts excavated in 2018 from Andhra Pradesh, however, busted these concepts recently. It revealed that these stone tools were actually indigenously developed in this country much before the advent of modern humans from the African continent. The dating of these tools/artefacts was carried out in the Luminescence Laboratory at the Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics division of Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad.
Till now, credit was given to the migrants from Africa, who entered India through the Arabian Peninsula-West Asia route, for introducing stone-made tools such as scrapers and points that helped them hunt prey or gather food. But tools excavated from Andhra Pradesh have now pushed back the antiquity of this culture by almost 1. 22 lakh years.
Archaeologists from MS University have carried out scientific dating of the stone tools that were excavated from Hanumanthunipadu in Andhra’s Ongole district in 2018. These artefacts date back to 2. 47 lakh years.
The study provides an entirely new version of human evolution in India. Researchers say the stone tool technology was invented indigenously even before modern humans came to this region. “In layman’s language, we are saying that the stone tools like points, scrapers, notches, flakes etc. , which were probably used for hunting and gathering food were present in the Indian region even before the modern humans migrated from Africa to India,” said Devara Anilkumar, assistant professor at MSU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient History.
Earlier theories were based on the excavation of tools from four sites — Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Sandhav in Gujarat’s Kutch, Katoti in Rajasthan and Dhaba in Madhya Pradesh. “The artefacts or tools that were excavated from these sites were not older than 1. 2 lakh years. These made scientists to think that Middle Palaeolithic stone tool technology or culture is not older than 1. 22 lakh years. But now we can say that the middle palaeolithic culture existed in India even before 1. 22 lakh years,” said Anilkumar.
