Stone Age Man in Ceylon

Abstract

P. E. P. DERANIYAGALA has written an important paper entitled “The Stone Age and Cave Men of Ceylon (J. Roy. Asiatic Soc., Ceylon Branch, 34, 92; September 1940). Before 1936, the conclusions at which specialists had arrived relating to the prehistoric stone artefacts of Ceylon were extremely divergent owing to the absence of glacial deposits and of vertebrate fossils upon which these conclusions might be based. The second impediment no longer exists. Recent discoveries of an extinct hippopotamus, rhinoceros and race of elephant associated with stone artefacts may, it is argued, be assigned to the Upper Pleistocene, being younger than the Narbudda deposits of the Middle Pleistocene in which the hippopotamus occurs with three extinct proboscidian genera. The presence of the lion fossil and the absence of tiger and king cobra in Ceylon suggest that the island's extinct fauna entered before the last two descended far into peninsular India, while the absence of the horse indicates that the large extinct mammals entered Ceylon after the extinction, temporary or final, of this ungulate in India. If this be correct, these fossils of Ceylon must be regarded as comparatively recent; nor can the primitive stone artefacts be held to be the earliest handiwork of man, while the hitherto unexplored river terraces may reveal an earlier phase when stone cultures began in the island.