 Now That will attract aliensэйуээээээээ Ask gregman for a juicy content the tears wrong Make up a big like And today we have a video this is the oldest settlement settlements in South India the the Killadi excavations? All right. I don't know anything about it, but I do know the South of India is old. Yes. They do have a quite old language. Some would say the eldest. That's true. Some would call it the Rick Siegel of language. It's true, because it's been around as long as me. Anyways, so let's figure out some knowledge here. I think it's funny that knowledge is spelled with a K. I know. English is stupid. How old are the oldest settlements? As old as Rick. 27,000 years old. The Indus Valley civilization, the oldest Indian civilization that we know of, dates back to at least 2,600 BCE. It spanned northwestern parts of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sometime around 1,600 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization faded away. We still don't know why. It was followed by the Vedic civilization. Probably. Another vast civilization that centered around the Gangetic Plains of North India. That lasted until about 500 BCE. But what about South India? Weren't there ancient civilizations in South India too? Heck yeah. For a long time, people assumed that civilization in South India was no more than 2,300 years old. That's because there was no concrete evidence of any older settlement. No ruins of a city, for example. But many archaeologists rejected that notion. Backing them up was an ancient corpus of Tamil literature called the Sangam period literature. The poems of Sangam period, composed roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE, talk about a grand ancient Tamil civilization. But where was the physical evidence for that civilization? One recent discovery has brought this discussion back into the limelight. We are in the Vaigai River valley at a place called Kiladi, very close to the city of Madurai. This site is home to one of the most remarkable archaeological excavations in South India in recent times. What is so special about Kiladi? Let's find out. This is Kaur. In 2015, in a little village called Kiladi, on the banks of the river Vaigai near Madurai, archaeologists unearthed a host of ancient artifacts, all dating back to the 6th century BCE. These included pot sherds that were inscribed with a script very similar to the graffiti found at the Indus Valley sites. They also found beads made of carnelian, glass, agate and other colorful minerals in unusually large quantities and at single sites. These finds suggest that Kiladi was perhaps some kind of bead warehouse or market. All this created a flutter among scholars because now there was evidence of a structured and literate Tamil society that was at least as old as the 6th century BCE. But surely there were South Indian settlements older than that? Ironically, the evidence had been right under the nose of the archaeological survey of India for nearly 120 years. Between 1899 and 1904, an archaeologist named Alexander Ray had unearthed many ancient artifacts at a place called Adi Chandallur, about 200 kilometers south of Kiladi on the banks of Porunai River. Porunai is also called the Tamiravarini River and it is mentioned in the Tamil Sangam literature as well as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The excavations at Adi Chandallur, unearthed ancient skeletons, burial urns, gold ornaments and bronze and iron tools. Unfortunately, in the next 100 years, there was no follow-up to Ray's work. In later years, there was heavy quarrying around Adi Chandallur and a lot of the artifacts were lost forever. But in 2005, the archaeological survey of India returned to the site with better tools for excavation and analysis. Carbon dating of the artifacts shows them to be as old as 905 BCE. Recently, a grain of rice found in a burial urn on the banks of the Rupundi scientifically dated to 1155 BCE. It is now suggested that this site was built until 3,500 years old. This makes Adi Chandallur one of the most ancient sites excavated in India. Perhaps the most telling discoveries at Adi Chandallur were the skeletons that were found from the ancient burial sites. You would know. DNA analysis of the skeletons revealed that only 8% of them were of the local Dravidian race. The rest were a mix of races from Europe, Africa, and the Far East. The investigators seemed to be staring at an ancient, multiracial, international symmetry that was at least 2,500 years old. There was another odd observation. Many of the skulls had a clear depression from the eyebrows, almost like a third eye. What could explain all this? We now know that the depression in the skulls was not an inherited racial feature, but a deformity caused by the Streptococcus bacteria. It causes a swelling called the Pots Puffy Tumor. Do you know who's most vulnerable to this condition? Sailors and deep-sea divers. Wow! I had no idea. About 25 kilometers from Adi Chandallur is a place called Korkai, an ancient port city of the kingdom of the Pandiyas. 2,000 years ago, it was an international harbor and one of the ancient world's greatest pearl-export centres. The Korkai pearls were famous worldwide and people from all over the world sailed in to trade here. Many of them stayed on for extended periods. Sangam period literature even tells us of the Pandya kings employing Greeks, Romans and other foreigners as mercenary bodyguards. When they died, they must have been buried here. This explains the skulls of people belonging to multiple races. But the biggest revelation from all the recent excavations along the Waigai and Poronai rivers is that not only were these settlements really, really old, but they were also fairly advanced as a society. Take a look at these iron tools found in Adi Chandallur. They're quite special. You may have heard of Damascus steel swords. They were extremely priced in the first millennium and were known for their toughness and resistance to shattering. They were called Damascus swords because they were made in Damascus. But guess where the stealing gets for these swords came from? India, specifically Adi Chandallur and later from Sri Lanka. It was called Wootz steel and in 500 BCE, it was produced in Kodumanal near E-Road. Now, Wootz is a word which most probably came from Buk which came from the Tamil word. Go Buk, go Buk, am I right? Literally meaning melt. This steel had a very high carbon content which gave it great strength. Over time, the technique of producing this steel was forgotten. Today, we have no idea how it was made with the tools available back then. For its time, it was technologically very advanced. It meant that metallurgists from these early settlements could build kilns that could generate the high temperatures that such smelting required. So we now have ample evidence of the existence of an ancient, literate and fairly advanced Tamil civilization that dates back to at least 1155 BCE. But when it comes to human habitation, the available evidence takes us back thousands of years. Close to Kiriti is a village called Agaram where they found micro-rhythmic stone tools dating back to the Neolithic period. That is roughly between 8000 and 3000 BCE. But even Agaram builds in comparison to yet another discovery made in these parts nearly 150 years ago. Did you know that the oldest ever human tool discovered in India was found in a suburb of Chennai? This stone from the Igmo Museum in Chennai may look ordinary, but it is in fact a handaxe from the Stone Age. And it dates back at least 200,000 years. In 1863, a young geologist of the Geological Survey of India, a man named Robert Bruce Foote, discovered some oddly-shaped stones at Palabaram, a suburb of present-day Chennai. Now, Foote was no ordinary geologist. He was conversant with archaeology and anthropology and was an accomplished landscape artist too. He immediately guessed that these stones were not naturally shaped, but chiseled by human craft. They were handaxes crafted by Paleolithic humans at least 200,000 years before present time. Until this discovery, no one had suspected that human evolution in India was this old. Four months after his first discovery, Robert Foote found mole stone tools at Adirampakkam, about 60 kilometres from Chennai. Further research confirms that this was not just the handaxe that Bruce Foote found, is the oldest ever human tool discovered in India. This discovery is so significant that there is even an official period in proto-history named after it. This prehistoric society was officially named Madrasian culture after the old name of Chennai, Madras. All this suggests that people have been living in these paths for a very, very long time. So while Keeradi has certainly pushed back the accepted timelines of South Indian settlements, it is neither the first find, nor the oldest of such sites in Tamil Nadu. But Keeradi itself still has a lot more to offer. We spoke to Dr. Amarnath of the Archaeological Survey of India, the man who was at the forefront of the Keeradi excavations. It is not yet opened, opened in full fledged. It is covered only 10% or 12% of the entire area. With that evidence only, we are now speaking. My point of view, try to expose further. And we can get so many evidences, not only at Keeradi, try to see other places in the Baye River basin, as well as the Favare River basin, as well as Pahal Aaru and Tamaraband. Tamaraband, we are carrying out only for burial sites, try to find out some habitation sites. So that habitation site relates to Keeradi also. So interconnecting the sites can give, certainly give the evolution. The Keeradi excavations have certainly generated much excitement in South India. They have thrown up many new questions and opened up many exciting possibilities. It's almost certain that more digs will bring us more answers and many, many more questions as well. Really nice video. Really cool. I love learning stuff about like old civilization because it's absolutely mind boggling. Just how old. And like, we don't even know a percentage of old civilizations really. Like, we see some stuff and we're like, yeah, we know. And we're like, no, we don't, we don't. Cause there's so much that has been lost. Yeah. Due to obviously just natural. Time. Time. They're just now finding these massive, massive civilizations in the Amazon. Cause the forest has overgrown them once the European settlers came and killed them. Oh yeah, yeah. Like smallpox. Right. Ravaged them. And so they're finding these massive, massive civilizations in towns. That have been covered. In the middle of the Amazon. Just now. So imagine all these other things that are underground because of time. Yeah. And things that just over time were just pulverized. Yeah. You just, you won't find them because they're just pulverized. Yeah, amazing. Fires. And really well, everything about that video, the information, the way it's put together, the music they had playing in the background, the two hosts, really, really nice. Well put together. Yeah. I enjoyed the video. Yeah. If there's other informational videos of this information or other information that we can learnage it, please, information us the, I'm smart. Learnage. Josh!