Giriraj Kumar

• Managing Director at Dayalbagh Educational Institute

Daraki-Chattan Cave, a Lower Palaeolithic cupule site in the Chambal basin in India, is one of the oldest known rock art sites in the world. Containing more than 500 cu-pules, it has been studied by the EIP Project since 2000 and the sediment deposits at the cave's entrance have been excavated. This paper presents an analysis of the cupules in the...

The cave of Daraki-Chattan (in Rewa river, India) bears important palaeolithic rock art (petroglyphs), while the environs is exceptionally rich in stone tools, mostly of the Acheulian. The field survey and excavations in the area found cupule panel fragments almost down to bedrock; Acheulian industry to Oldowan-like industry including several hamme...

Surveys conducted in June and October 2015 in the Chinese regions of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Guangxi and Henan have focused on the scientific potential of numerous rock art sites to yield forensic and dating evidence. The work was a continuation of the two successful 2014 campaigns in several provinces. It resulted in the first rock art...

Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis of extinct ratite species is of considerable interest as it provides important insights into their origin, evolution, paleogeographical distribution and vicariant speciation in congruence with continental drift theory. In this study, DNA hotspots were detected in fossilized eggshell fragments of ratites (dated ≥25000 yea...

Sample collection locations shown on map. (A) Bundi (B) Anjar (C) Chandresal-1 (D) Nagda (E) Runija (F) Khajurna (G) Ravishankar nagar. (Source- Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html). (TIFF)

Estimates of Evolutionary Divergence between Sequences. The number of base substitutions per site from between sequences are shown. Analyses were conducted using the Maximum Composite Likelihood model. The analysis involved 7 nucleotide sequences. Codon positions included were 1st+2nd+3rd+Noncoding. All positions containing gaps and missing data we...

Scientists collect and analyse data for scientific study, but the relevance of data for scientific study of rock art depends upon proper understanding of the impact of various taphonomic factors working at the site and on the rock art. This became clear during the Early Indian Petroglyphs Project. The impact of temperature fluctuation and climatic...

Throughout the world, iconic rock art is preceded by non-iconic rock art. Cupules (manmade, roughly semi-hemispherical depressions on rocks) form the major bulk of the early non-iconic rock art globally. The antiquity of cupules extends back to the Lower Paleolithic in Asia and Africa, hundreds of thousand years ago. When one observes these cupules...

The Lower Palaeolithic cupules in the small cave of Daraki-Chattan are of different shapes and sizes. How they were made is the subject of this investigation. The hardness of the quartzite rock of the cave adds to the complexities in understanding the production process. The study of the more than 500 cupules on the vertical walls of the cave is a...

Daraki-Chattan in the Chambal basin is the richest known Pleistocene cupule site in the world. Here excavations were conducted by the Rock Art Society of India in collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India under the EIP Project for five seasons from 2002 to 2006. The excavations established that the site was in use mostly in the Lower Pa...

In addition to housing some of the oldest known rock art in the world, Daraki-Chattan is also an important Palaeolithic site because it is one of the very few Indian locations where Mode 1 (pre-Acheulian) occupation evidence has been excavated in a stratified context. Overlain by a typical Acheulian with hand-axes, this deposit has yielded very sim...

The EIP Project has produced unambiguous evidence of Lower Palaeolithic petroglyphs in the excavations at Bhimbetka and Daraki-Chattan in central India. In order to obtain absolute dates, efforts have been made, through IFRAO and involving Indian and Australian scientists, to meet the challenge since 2001. We have tried OSL dating of the sediments...

Chaturbhujnath nala in Chambal valley is the biggest rock art gallery in the world. It is located in Tahsil Bhanpura, District Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh in India. It is rich in rock art representing the pre-Pastoral and early-Pastoral cultural stage. The latter is presented in many forms and styles. While carrying out micro-documentation of rock a...

Petroglyphs of Lower Palaeolithic age have been discovered in central India since 1990, when two motifs were found that had been covered by Acheulian strata in Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka site complex. Nine cupules occurring above ground in the same cave have been suggested to be of similar antiquity. A large corpus of cupules located in another qua...