Before the cities: Bhimbetka and Mehrgarh
Thousands of years before the first city rose on the Indus, people in India were painting dancers and hunters on cave walls, sowing barley and — astonishingly — drilling teeth. Walk into the oldest chapters of Bharat's story.
Paintings in the forest
[Archaeological evidence]
In the forests of Madhya Pradesh, about 45 km from Bhopal, stand the Bhimbetka rock shelters — more than 750 shelters, about 400 of them painted. Hunters chase bison and boar, people dance in lines holding hands, riders sit on horses and elephants. The oldest paintings are generally dated to the Mesolithic period, roughly 10,000 years ago or more, and the site shows continuous human presence going back much further. UNESCO inscribed Bhimbetka as a World Heritage Site in 2003. Local people named it after Bhima of the Mahabharata — "Bhima's sitting place".
The first farmers of the subcontinent
[Archaeological evidence]
At Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, archaeologists found one of the earliest farming villages in South Asia, occupied from about 7000 BCE. Its people grew barley and wheat, herded cattle, sheep and goats, built mud-brick houses and buried their dead with ornaments of shell and lapis lazuli from distant lands. And in the teeth of some of the people buried there, scientists found something no one expected…
The journey continues for members
- Nine thousand-year-old dentists
- From village to city
- What the rock art tells — and doesn't
- Older still
- Tradition's memory
- What we can learn
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage — Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka (2003)
- Coppa et al., Nature 440 (2006) — Early Neolithic tradition of dentistry
- J.-F. Jarrige — Mehrgarh excavations
- Pappu et al., Science (2011) — Attirampakkam