Precisions concerning the distribution and identification of Miocene hominoids from India

Abstract

During the past four decades, the Indian Subcontinent has been a focus of palaeoanthropological research on account of the abundance of Middle and Late Miocene hominoid fossils that have been reported from it. In India, well known hominoid-bearing localities occur at Ramnagar (Lower Siwaliks) and Hari Talyangar (Middle Siwaliks), but there are less well known occurrences in the literature, such as the material from Dhara and Nungarh near Kalagarh in Pauri Garhwal District, not far from the Nepalese and Chinese frontiers. Reports of the discovery of hominoid fossils at other poorly known localities at Ramchand Ridge and Dhiran near Ramnagar (Jammu & Kashmir) and Bandal (Himachal Pradesh) formed the basis for claims that hominoids existed in the subcontinent earlier than the Chinji zone. If so, then current views of hominoid palaeobiogeography would need to be modifed to the extent that an earlier passage of large hominoids out of Africa towards the Indian subcontinent than is generally accepted, would need to be postulated. We also examine a claim for the persistence of large hominoids up to the Mio-Pliocene boundary (ca 5.5 Ma) on the basis of a tooth found near Bharari, east of Hari Talyangar. The aim of this paper is to examine the soundness of the basis of claims for the presence of pre-Chinji large bodied hominoids in the region and for their persistence in the subcontinent up to the end of the Miocene epoch. With this aim in mind, in January, 2009, the authors surveyed the zone northwest of Dera Gopipur; 1) to locate the place from which a partial set of upper and lower teeth attributed to Ramapithecus cf. punjabicus were collected by S.S. Gupta and B.C. Verma in the 1978-79 feld season of the Geological Survey of India, 2) to recover biochronologically informative faunal remains. No such faunal remains were found, making it diffcult to substantiate the claims of Lower Siwalik age for the deposits. Other published reports of the presence of early hominoids in India were also examined, but the sites were not visited.