A Paradigm Shift in South Asian Prehistory? Dr James Blinkhorn's Lecture on Early Hominins in Western India

 Sitting in a classroom of sixty and studying a module on South Asian Prehistory, at an Indian university two centuries old, a range of thoughts loomed large in my head. I went through the course structure multiple times, and each time a new thought struck me. I realize the syllabus is undoubtedly old and not sufficiently revised. But there was something fundamentally missing in this. Maybe what I was looking for was a paradigm shift in the way the course was structured.

This is how it all went: one had to necessarily start with a brief lip service to the palaeoclimates and physiography of the "Indian subcontinent". And then, very conveniently, you could shift towards describing lithic assemblages from different regions across the subcontinent (now having chucked out large parts of Pakistan and the whole of Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh). An added refrain would perhaps help justify this formalistic approach: "Sadly, you do not have any fossil evidence from South Asian Palaeolithic excepting the fragmentary one from Hathnora; so, we only have tool assemblages to study from". The professor concerned would try hard to "cover as many regions as possible". Interestingly, all the talks of palaeoclimates would hardly feature now. Tool assemblages, then, are to be understood in isolation from the geographical context. And yes, South Asian Prehistory should not have anything to do with our modern neighbouring countries, leave alone Africa.

Forgive me this long, dragging narrative of what seems to be my personal experiences of having studied South Asian Prehistory and Palaeolithic Archaeology at an Indian university. But yes, this is the vantage point from which I thought I should start writing about Dr James Blinkhorn's lecture at Speaking Archaeologically, about whom, I presume, my university course-instructors were blissfully unaware of, given the fact that he neither featured in our suggested references, nor in the multiple lectures that our professors delivered to us.

A very different context, however, emerges when I talk about Dr Blinkhorn's lecture, from the vantage point of being a Speaking Archaeologically Research Wing Member. Almost a year back, we had started our journey in Palaeolithic Archaeology. The early days were not too happy or pleasing, but really it was not meant to be so. We had to realize and understand how complex and never-ending this field of Archaeology was, and how everything that we seemed to have learnt and gathered, very laboriously, over a period of time, had to be unlearnt at the very next moment.

We have been fortunate enough to have heard and interacted with some of the leading Palaeolithic archaeologists and experts in this field, from across the globe. Off late, some of us at Speaking Archaeology were reading Professor Tom Higham's recently released book: The World Before Us. We were in complete awe at how much the world of Palaeolithic Archaeology was being constantly changed and redefined by new discoveries and scientific interventions in this field, and how much we had to seek from it in future. In one of his introductory chapters, Professor Higham notes how the dispersals of Homo sapiens into large parts of Eurasia, and into the regions of South and Southeast Asia, out of the African continent, definitively after 60 to 50 thousand years, would have required adaptations to varied climatic zones, ecosystems and geographical horizons. He refers to the term "generalist specialist" as a word used by some authors in this field to explain such behaviour of the early human populations, whereby they were occupying varied ecological zones and also adapting to specific climatic conditions of different regions.

With this, and many other insightful observations in mind, I sat to listen to Dr James Blinkhorn speak, on the "Hominins in the Indian Subcontinent: The Lithic Evidence from Western India". The title for the lecture had the usual trope of making South Asian Palaeolithic appear more as an exclusively "Indian" phenomenon, and offering yet another exhaustive list of lithic assemblages found from field excavations in Western India. Clearly, the ghost of an university-taught course had not yet left me. However, there was something crucially different in this lecture, and this is where I encountered a paradigm shift in our approach towards South Asian Palaeolithic Archaeology.

Dr Blinkhorn's lecture was about exploring the key recognizable features in the transition from Middle Pleistocene to Late Pleistocene in South Asia, and thus exploring how lithic records could help reconstruct important phases in our journey from Middle Palaeolithic to Late (or Upper) Palaeolithic. Guided by this broad research question, the approach was primarily orientated towards correlating MIS data series with episodes of early hominin movements into South Asia, from Africa and across Eurasia.

A little explanation about the MIS series might be helpful here. MIS, or Marine Isotope Series, is a tool of palaeoclimatic reconstruction whereby the ratio of O16 and O18, two isotopes of Oxygen present in ocean water as well as glaciers, is measured from deep sea cores, marine sediments or ice shelves. Higher levels of O18 in relation to O16 are interpreted as cooler, glacial periods, and lower levels of 018 are interpreted as warmer, interglacials. These are then assigned numbers starting from 1, with even numbers for glacial and odd numbers for interglacial phases, that occured alternatively in the past. MIS 1 is generally equated with a time period of 11.7 thousand years which mark the end of the Younger Dryas event. All other numbers follow this, which is thus the terminal point in MIS studies.

Dr Blinkhorn's research focused on the Thar Desert in Western India as a major boundary between two distinct biogeographical zones-- the Saharo-Arabian Desert belt in the west, and the Orientals Biogeographic zone in the east. This reminded me of the useful observation in Professor Tom Higham's book, that I had earlier referred to. By correlating MIS series data with fluvial and aeolian processes in this region, as also the monsoon regimes of the area, Dr Blinkhorn argued that the presence of river channels and fluvial systems would have facilitated early human occupations in this region, in the transition to Late Pleistocene. This, in turn, could be interpreted from the tool assemblages in these areas and the kind of raw material usages of the hominin groups. The stages of MIS 5 (130-71 thousand years) and MIS 6 (191-130 thosand years), for example, could be correlated with phases of fluvial activity in the Thar Desert and thus, potential hominin occupations in Western India.


The lecture touched upon several key sites in the Rajasthan and Gujarat Coast, some of these such as Singhi Talav,16R Dune and Budha Pushkar, already well-known in the archaeological literature, while others such as Kathoati and Sandhav, recently examined. We were presented with several new insights into the lithic evidence from these regions, specifically the results emerging from cluster analyses suggesting potentially interesting overlaps in the tool assemblages from different contexts: Acheulean, Middle and Late Palaeolithic. Similarly, the evidence of hierarchical bifacial cores at Singhi Talav, as well as non-pyramidal core crystals in small quantities, offered interesting possibilities of envisaging complex engagements of early human groups here with non-functional material. The research also seems to be indicating against the assumptions of an early emergence of Late Palaeolithic technology in the coastal tracts, based on closer studies at the site of Sandhav in the Gujarat Coast. The Middle Palaeolithic seems to have existed roughly from 114 to less than 43 thousand years, and the Late Palaeolothic tool assemblages would have appeared somewhere around 45 thousand years, continuing for much of the Holocene Epoch.

I was really intrigued by the comparisons that Dr Blinkhorn drew between the tool assemblage records from Western India and that from other parts of the subcontinent, interestingly starting with Bengal, that is otherwise never really the starting point for Palaeolithic Archaeological studies in South Asia. I agreed with his observations regarding the lack of reliable chronologies and dates, and also the presence of broad continuities across South Asia in terms of the Acheulean persisting up until the end of the Middle Pleistocene. His observations about the introduction of hafting techniques and their potential importance in understanding early human adaptations to diverse ecologies, and tool-kit diversities, has stayed with me for quite some time now and I am really looking forward to explore these areas of South Asian Prehistory, in my own little ways.

After a riveting Q&A session where the speaker sat through and patiently answered all our questions, no matter how unwitting they might have seemed to him, I was sated. I realized the void that my university course on South Asian Prehistory had created in me was probably somewhat fulfilled now. Yet, I have emerged intellectually more hungry and there are a host of new questions that this lecture has thrown in front of me. I now know how one might start approaching this difficult terrain of South Asian Paleolithic, where novelties in the research method and asking pertinent questions can help arrive at potentially interesting possibilities and some new conclusions. Or, is there any conclusion in this world of Palaeolithic Archaeology? After all, isn't it just the tip of an iceberg that we have just started hitting?