Research says that Central Indians probably already knew about the Sumatran rhino, the only two-horned species in Asia.
Revered as a fire-eater by the Karen community in Myanmar, the two-horned Sumatran rhinoceros never ventured west of the Brahmaputra floodplains that span Assam and Bangladesh.
But the depiction of animals in the Bhimbetka rock shelters of Madhya Pradesh, central India, has provided researchers with a clue to early human migration into the subcontinent.
Spread over 10 km in Raisen district, Bhimbetka is a complex consisting of six other hills including more than a thousand rock shelters that provide evidence of human settlement over 100,000 years ago. In one of the caves of the Bhimbetka complex, a broad structure on a lower terrace at Urden had a two-horned rhinoceros, 30 cm long, drawn with a red pigment – hematite, obtained from an iron ore.
Tracing human migration through the Bhimbetka cave paintings, researcher Sudhabrata Chakraborty and his Bangladesh-based counterpart Turzo Nicolas Mondal have sought to decipher the puzzle of this two-horned rhinoceros in an area whose inhabitants may have never once lived in an area. did not see
“Humans, an integral part of the floral and fauna diversity in an ecosystem, thrive and sustain by appropriately using locally available natural resources, thereby establishing an intimate relationship with biodiversity and its constituents. Therefore, Learning from encounters between a group of humans and a particular animal helps shape dominant perceptions about the animal,” the two said in their recently published research paper.
The paper is titled “Rhino’s Enigma: Tracing Early Human Migration in India through the Cave Paintings of Bhimbetka”.
Both said that artistic expressions, as in the case of the two-horned rhinoceros depicted in the Urden cave, left a major mark on the cultural structure. To explain this painting, it is important to note the distribution of rhinos in the Indian subcontinent and the Indo-China peninsula, he said.
three species of rhino
The Indian subcontinent was once home to three species of rhinoceros – the Indian or greater one-horned, the Javan or lesser one-horned, and the two-horned Sumatran rhino.
The Indian rhinoceros, with an abundance of grasslands and wetlands, was once distributed in the Ganges-Brahmaputra floodplains up to the Indus Valley, but is now restricted to areas of southern Nepal, northern West Bengal and Assam. About 55% of this animal is in the Kaziranga National Park of Assam.
The lesser one-horned Javan rhinoceros, which once thrived in the Indian coastal and floodplains, is now confined to the Ujung Kulon National Park in Indonesia.
Indonesia also has the Sumatran rhinoceros, the smallest of the living rhinos and the only Asian species with two horns. It was once distributed in the northeast of India and the mountainous areas of Chittagong in Bangladesh.
The researchers noted that, unlike the other two species, there is no evidence of Sumatran rhinoceros crossing the Brahmaputra to venture into central and northern India. Despite originating in the same region of Southeast Asia, Sumatra’s habit of clinging to the highlands set it apart from the Javan.
“Since the Sumatran rhinoceros could not cross the Brahmaputra, the painting of the species in the central Indian cave becomes all the more important. First, the only places in the subcontinent where humans could have encountered the Sumatran rhino were, except for the Indonesian archipelago, eastern Bangladesh and It was in the mountainous regions of Northeast India,” the researchers said.
“Second, since the painters of Bhimbetka did not encounter a Sumatran rhinoceros, the painting was probably drawn from an image imprinted in their mind. Third, taking into account the distance between Bhimbetka and the Brahmaputra, it inferred The image may have been developed from a pool of rich ancestral memory that resonates a harmonious relationship with biodiversity,” he said.
They analyzed three connecting threads – cultural, linguistic and genetic, and typo-technical – to understand how knowledge about the two-horned rhinoceros reached Bhimbetka.
Waves of people of several origins have inhabited Bhimbetka for centuries, but the two-horned rhinoceros would not have been depicted in the Urden cave had people migrated east, the researchers said.
“Therefore … the same wave of migratory populations that encountered Sumatran rhinos in the eastern Brahmaputra floodplains reached Bhimbetka when they migrated from Southeast Asia to the Indian peninsula during the Mesolithic period. While they were there, the memory of those encounters is ancestral. was assimilated through knowledge, which helped him in painting the two-horned rhinoceros,” he said.
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