A timeline shifts in 2020
Speaking of ancient wonders lurking near us, the rock shelters at Bhimbetka have recently had a whole new chapter added to their story. The story was riveting enough. The petroglyphs (typically, rough outlines of people and animals scratched onto stone) and paintings on the cave walls here date back to a period from 290,000 to 10,000 years ago, and constitute some of the oldest known art in India. Scrawled over 700 caves spread across more than 10 km, this is also among the largest sites of ancient cave art in the world.
This cave art was accidentally discovered in 1957 by an archaeologist Vishnu Wakankar, while he was on his way to Nagpur by train (legend has it he looked out of the moving locomotive, saw the clear tier of stone running along a hilltop, and thought, there’s got to have been ancient habitation there; he uncovered numerous sites in this manner).
But it was only early last year that an even older sign of life was found here: 550-million-year-old fossils, from one of the earliest known multicellular organisms on earth, hidden in a wall of what is called the Auditorium Cave. A group of geologists from the US and South Africa, in India for the International Geological Congress (which was cancelled because of the pandemic), was touring the Unesco World Heritage site when they made the discovery.
Sharad Master, a researcher at the School of Geosciences at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, was the first to spot the fossils. Soon the whole group, which was led by Ranjit Khangar and Merajuddin Khan of the Geological Survey of India, got involved, and they couldn’t believe what they were looking at.
“I was at first incredulous, but then agreed after seeing several diagnostic details,” says Gregory Retallack, a palaeontologist and geologist from the department of earth sciences at the University of Oregon in the US, and lead author of the paper that was later published in journal Science Direct.
The group knew they would probably never get this close to the three fossils again, so they pointed all available cameras, DSLRs and phones, at them and shot them from various angles. Retallack would later use photogrammetry, a digital manipulation of multiple images, to create a 3D model.
It helped that he had written several papers on the fossil they were staring at, the Dickinsonia, thus proving the adage that fortune favours the prepared mind, he told Wknd. When the Dickinsonia was first discovered in the 1940s in Australia, it was hard to tell that they were even animals. (They have since been found in the Ukraine, Russia, China and now India). They are oval shaped and symmetrically ribbed, and looked nothing like the animal life that followed. They are the remains of a group of mysterious, soft-bodied organisms that existed between 541 and 635 million years ago.
Though recent consensus in the community has moved toward calling the Dickinsonia an animal, Retallack doesn’t agree. “I think Dickinsonia was a lichen.” Whatever it was, this was an astonishing find.