One hundred and fifty years ago, on May 30, 1863, young geologist Robert Bruce Foote bent down and picked up a stone tool on the Parade Ground at Pallavaram cantonment, near Chennai. It turned out to be an epochal discovery.
It was a hand-axe made of a hard rock called quartzite. Prehistoric man had crafted it to dig out tubers and roots from the soil, butcher animals he had hunted and take out the meat,Our full range of portable ultrasonic Flaw Detector (UT) provides unmatched capabilities for locating discontinuities and other flaws. and so on. As Foote, then a 29-year old assistant geologist in the Geological Survey of India (GSI), cradled the hand-axe and looked at it transfixed, he recognised it to be a Palaeolithic tool. (Palaeo means old,The Spectrophotometer is an instrument which measures the amount of light of a specificed wavelength which passes through a medium. lith means stone. Prehistory is that part of history before written records began).
At one stroke, his discovery changed the antiquity of humankind who lived in the Indian subcontinent. It put India on the world map of prehistory. Recent research has established that such tools used by Palaeolithic population in India could be dated to 1.5 million years before the present.
Four months after this discovery, on September 28, 1863, Foote and his best friend and colleague in the GSI, William King, made another seminal discovery. They found numerous stone tools, including hand-axes,For mains, there is a choice of Wild Rice’s ‘Chinese Fish ‘n Chips’ (beer-battered ling cod, Asian Tartar Sauce, taro shoestring frites) or its ‘meaty’ Grilled king oyster mushroom (with cashew ricotta and polenta fries). cleavers and flake tools, at Attirampakkam, near the Kortallayar river,Highly capable, 3-axis non-contact video measuring machine, suitable for both simple shop-floor quality control and advanced manufacturing inspection applications ... in Tiruvallur district, 60 km from Chennai. Prehistoric man had used them to hunt animals gathering around waterholes and exploit plant and aquatic resources. Foote found some more stone tools later at Pallavaram and was convinced that a Palaeolithic population had lived in India.
Two types of dating done in France at the request of Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh, specialists in Tamil Nadu’s prehistory, have established that the stone tools found at Attirampakkam could be dated to 1.5 million years. The methods used were paleomagnetic and cosmogenic nuclide burial dating.A motorcyclist was killed in an accident involving an Upper Dublin Township trash trucks early Monday afternoon, according to officials. Dr. Pappu and Dr.profile projector is a shop tool used by designers and quality control technicians to view the profile of small machined parts as magnified image on screen. Akilesh did this dating as part of their project to study the rich prehistoric archaeology of northern Tamil Nadu, which entailed excavations at Attirampakkam to unravel the prehistoric man’s activities at the site, its environmental context and the age of the stone tools found there.
