“Resource-rich, stone-poor”: Early hominin land use in large river systems of northern India and Pakistan

Abstract

This chapter explores two related issues. The first is whether Early Pleistocene hominins were successful in colonizing the IndoGangetic floodplains of northern India and Pakistan; and the second is whether the paucity of evidence that they did so might help explain why the evidence for hominins in peninsula India dates to the Middle Pleistocene (Petraglia, 1998), with the exception of one recent, and unconfirmed, date of 1.27Ma from Isampur, Karnataka (Paddayya et al., 2002). In an earlier paper (Dennell, 2003), I pointed out that current evidence indicates several major discontinuities in regional hominin records across Asia in the Early Pleistocene (see Figure 1). Peninsula India currently has one of the longest, as hominins were present at Dmanisi, Georgia, to the west at 1.75Ma (Gabunia et al., 2000a), and Java to the east by ca. 1.6Ma (Larick et al., 2001) and possibly by ca.1.8Ma (Swisher et al., 1994). However, apart from a small amount of material that remains controversial from Riwat (Dennell et al., 1988) and the Pabbi Hills, Pakistan (Dennell, 2004; Hurcombe, 2004), there is no incontrovertible evidence that hominins were living in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent in the Early Pleistocene, even though it is the obvious corridor route between Southwest and Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I suggest that Early Pleistocene hominins would have found it very difficult to colonize successfully extensive floodplains such as those of northern India and Pakistan, and current evidence suggests that if they were there at all, it was probably on an intermittent basis and at very low densities of population. Important geological changes in this region towards the end of the Early