The oldest human tool discovered in India

Walk to one end of the Adichanallur Gallery where you can see beads and stone tools displayed. Play this story there.

As you heard in the previous stories, we now have evidence of the existence of an ancient Tamil civilisation. A grain of rice found in a burial urn on the banks of Porunai river was scientifically dated to 1155 BCE! But even that discovery pales in comparison to the next exhibit. Do you see those flat stones in the gallery? These stones may look ordinary, but these are in fact hand axes from the stone age. These are not from Adichanallur, but from Pallavaram, now a suburb of Chennai.

In 1863, a young geologist of the Geological Survey of India, a man named Robert Bruce Foote, discovered some oddly shaped stones in Pallavaram. Now Bruce Foote was no ordinary geologist; he was very conversant with anthropology, archaeology and he was an accomplished landscape artist too. He immediately guessed that these stones were not naturally shaped, but chiselled by human hand. They were found to be hand axes crafted by palaeolithic humans about 1.5 million years ago! For context, the oldest stone tools found in the world are 3 million years old and were found in Kenya. Until this discovery, no one had suspected that human evolution in India was this old. Four months after this discovery Foote found many more stone tools at Attirampakkam, about 60 Kms from Chennai. Prehistoric humans had used these stones to hunt. Further research confirmed that this was not just an old settlement, but THE oldest human settlement in India, and one of the oldest in the world. The hand axe that Bruce Foote discovered is the oldest ever human tool discovered in India!

This discovery is so significant that there is even an official period in proto history named after it. This prehistoric society was officially named Madrasian Culture after the old name of Chennai: Madras!