“Ancient Mysteries Unearthed: What Do This 12,000-Year-Old Rock Carvings Reveal About a Vanished Civilization?”
The carvings — which depict a wide variety of things such as animals, humans, birds, and geometric shapes — have given archaeologists groundbreaking insights into the ancient history of the area.
BBC MarathiA carving found in Maharashtra.
While researchers are interested in what the carvings do depict, they’re also interested in what they do not. For example, none of the images show any form of agriculture, leading the researchers to believe that the civilization that created them was mainly made up of hunters and gatherers.
“We have not found any pictures of farming activities,” Tejas Garge, the director of the Maharashtra state archaeology department, told the BBC. “But the images depicted hunted animals and there’s detailing of animal forms. So this man knew about animals and sea creatures. That indicates he was dependent on hunting for food.”
However, one question the researchers haven’t found the answer to is why animals that aren’t native to that region of India, like rhinoceroses, are the subject of some carvings. One possible theory is that the people who created the images moved from an area where those animals lived while another theory is that back when the carvings were created, those creatures did roam the region.
For the most part, these carvings stayed hidden from human eyes underneath layers of dirt. Eventually, the petroglyphs were first uncovered only recently by Sudhir Risbood and Manoj Marathe, who began searching for them as sort of a passion project after they found a few in the area.
Post Comment