The lithic industries on the fossiliferous outcrops of the Late Pliocene Masol Formation, Siwalik Frontal Range, northwestern India (Punja)
Résumé
The Quranwala zone (QZ) in the sector near Masol (Siwalik Frontal Range, Punjab) has been known since the 1960s for yielding freshwater and terrestrial vertebrates living during the late Pliocene on the sub-Himalayan floodplain. The fossils and quartzite cobbles are constantly unearthed from the core of an anticline. The basal member of QZ is about 130 meters below the Gauss/Matuyama paleomagnetic reversal, i.e., 2.588 Ma. Since 2009 the Indo-French Program of Research ‘Siwaliks’ has surveyed 50 hectares and highlighted a dozen localities on outcrops where artefacts in quartzite occur with fossil bones, of which a few show butchering marks. A few cobble tools and a flake were unearthed from a trial trench opened along the same boundary between silts and sandstones (Masol 2) as the one that provided a bovid tibia shaft bearing cut marks (Masol 1). Some 250 artefacts were collected mainly from the surface, sometimes in the slopes of outcrops recently eroded. These were mostly heavy-duty tools that comprised a majority of choppers, end choppers rather than side choppers, among which the “simple choppers” (shaped by one single removal) are common. The light-duty tools consist of flakes that are seldom retouched. The cores are very few and the flakes generally result from the shaping of choppers, except the larger flakes that are complemented by split cobbles. The consistency of the lithic assemblages among the localities supports their chronological homogeneity. Their features do not reflect any lithic technical tradition known in the region, neither Acheulean nor Soanian (in which the choppers are usually classical, not “simple”).