The Life of Maupassant
Editor's Life|The Life of Maupassant
Small site archaeology has extraordinary potential for many major issues in archaeological research.
Similarly, any kind of micro-scale data will prove to be very important if studied carefully.
This article aims to point out this fact and specifically mention the skeletal remains of miniature animals in rodents as a special case.
The reason for focusing on this topic is that it is widely believed that this bone material is easily overlooked and sometimes even discarded altogether because it has no archaeological significance.
The rat is one of the ubiquitous small rodents in the world, and its history in India dates back to the Tertiary period.
Its skeletal remains have been found at several archaeological sites in India, spanning a time span of about 20 ka.
Rodents have the potential to provide paleoenvironmental information that is not available to other animal groups.
This fact is well understood in paleoanthropology, but, unfortunately, to date, has not been confirmed in archaeology.
This paper attempts to contemplate the possibility of paleoenvironmental interpretation of rodents in the archaeological record.
A fairly large group of microvertebrates excavated from an early historical site in the Kopia district.
Sant Kabirnagar (Uttar Pradesh, India) provides a case study of microanimal interpretation.
Evidence of Muroid's contribution to the diet of ancient humans is discussed with reference to several existing hunter-gatherer communities practicing mini-games and the indigenous people of Museyjar who lived in the interior of the Gangetic Plain.
It provides a ready-made database for dietary inferences for the archaeological interpretation of rodent fauna.
This paper demonstrates the multiple meanings of rat evidence in the archaeological record that has important implications for ecology, survival, and behavioral archaeology.
Rodents are one of the most prevalent small mammals in the world.
Over the course of their evolutionary history, rodents have diverged into a wide variety of species, inhabiting all available spaces except the Arctic.
Their distribution around the world is marked by different habitats.
The diversity of food species promotes the advantage of a wider range of potential microhabitats.
In addition, they are climate-sensitive and react quickly to environmental changes.
The rodents (rodents belonging to the family Muridae and the Murine family) are the main representatives of rodents and include more than 25 species from India's geological history.
Most are omnivorous.
They have different distributions, which are ultimately determined by the variety of habitats spread around the world.
Even if the size is small, it has great damage value on both the farm and the living area; Rodents, especially rats and mice, impress the human psyche.
The resulting literature, including allegories and folklore, provides a glimpse of animal behavior and its special place in Hindu mythology.
Ultimately, the study of rodents raises a wide range of questions, including ecology, diet, socioeconomics, and mythology, which makes them unique in the artistic and scientific fields of Indian paleozoology.
Relevance of Pleistocene species
In India, the first ever discovery of rodents of up to five species was by Richard Ledecker in 1886 in the Kurnool Cave sediment in Andhra Pradesh, which was classified as a late Pleistocene.
After 125 years, we now know more than 25 species of rodents that lived in sites from the Eocene to the Pleistocene and Holocene in India. The earliest records of Indian rodents can be obtained from the Subatu Formation in northwest India, and rodent fossils in neotertiary-quaternary sediments in northwest India are the main contribution to the study of Indian rodents, with greater paleoecological significance.
Paleontological studies of mesomorphs have proven useful for paleoecological reconstruction.
Rodents live in a space of just a few kilometers throughout their lives, thus contributing to the acquisition of reliable information about the biological environment in which they are distributed.
On the other hand, the long-distance migration of large mammals for food makes them unpredictable paleoecological indicators.
There are six small rodent families in northwest India, ie:
Parabenae, rodents, crickets, shrews, sand fleas, and sand fleas.
Among them, arvicolids are by far reliable era and climate markers in South Asia.
Aviko is a high-altitude resident and is currently found in Kashmir, Afghanistan, the Indo-Pakistani Himalayan region and the Nepalese Himalayas.
Their discovery in Karewas, Kashmir, revealed evidence of ancient climate fluctuations of more than 2 trillion rings.
They appeared 2.4 million years ago, which almost coincided with the first ice age in the Northern Hemisphere (replanned in 1983).
During the period of 2.4 to 2.2 myr, the region witnessed a glacial climate from cold to cold, which is similar to the period 0.3 to 0.4 myr when Karewas experienced cold again (Agrawal 1992). Murine and rodents in late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene sediments from Siwaliks provide an accurate record of small rodent paleocommunities, with a focus on the ecological conditions of the specific areas in which they lived.
Paleoecological interpretations based on mesomorphan records in the Narmada Valley of central India (Paternaik 1995b, Paternaik et al. 1995, Kotliya and Josh 2011) have made significant contributions to the reconstruction of local ecology.
To date, macrovertebrate-based interpretations have not contributed to local ecological reconstruction of concentrated areas, as large mammals tend to move over larger areas.
Large vertebrates have been observed to thrive in nearshore, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, while rodents prefer sandy plains and grasslands with high groundwater content.
This means a mosaic of diverse ecosystems that provided food for fauna in the late Pleistocene, which also applies to the Narmada Valley.
Fauna diversity in limestone cave sediments in Kurnool area of Andhra Pradesh provides excellent documentation of paleocommunity types from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.
Cave sediments have produced mostly in-situ fauna communities.
These bones show substantial evidence of skeletal alterations, and the institutions responsible for this may include humans as well as carnivores and birds of prey.
Large rodents like porcupines are active molecules in bone modification.
Rats and the archaeological record
The temporal distribution of rats in the Indian archaeological setting dates back to the Late Pleistocene, and there is evidence of archaeological artifacts from the Neolithic to the historical period, as mentioned earlier, ossified gravel from the Narmada Valley produced a large number of Late Pleistocene muroid remains, but these remains have no connection to the Paleolithic assemblage.
On the other hand, the rodent fauna of the Kurnool area of Andhra Pradesh is classified as the Late Pleistocene and Holocene respectively, related to the artistic assemblage of the Late Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.
Zoologists face the significant task of reconstructing paleoenvironments based on animal records, which are always inadequate and incomplete.
The problem is compounded when the taxonomic composition is poor and does not include the broad animal diversity in the animal community.
From the general nature of the fossil record, it is undeniable that the burial process does produce differences between the original species in the biological assemblage and the fossil assemblage, which would otherwise make the animal record difficult to interpret (Starr 1996).
However, primitive ecological information was found in the fauna, which is biased but explainable.
Especially when the assemblage is multi-species, paleoenvironments can best be reconstructed, reflecting the presence of a wider range of habitats.
Because microvertebrates are often confined to a limited area during their lifetime, and some microvertebrates are very sensitive to climate change, their emergence provides higher resolution to explain paleoenvironmental and paleocommunity formation.
From this point of view, rodents have the potential to provide paleoenvironmental information that other animal groups cannot provide.
In Indian archaeology, the usefulness of rodents as a source of such information seems to have been overlooked.
Although several authors have dealt exhaustively on the subject of microvertebralectomy and survival, it is important to recognize the relevance of these "guidelines" to Indian small mammal paleozoology to fully understand animal development in prehistoric India.
In this context, this paper discusses some known premises in the context of recent research in Indian archaeology.
Taxonomic determination of small rodent skeletal remains
The interpretation of the behavioral biology and ecology of a species is basically based on correct identification.
Muroids and cricetids have a very complex tooth and bone morphology.
Coupled with a highly complex habitat network, it requires a fine resolution to reach a precise taxonomic determination to meaningfully extrapolate paleoecology.
The black mouse (house mouse) is one of the species that is occasionally mentioned and identified in paleontological assemblages, followed by the small banded rat (Bengal plate-toothed rat), although only known in a few places.
Given the close similarities in tooth and bone morphology among all muroids members, a complete and larger collection of recent muroids is a prerequisite for accurate identification of small rodents.
For postcranial elements, qualitative and quantitative methods of bone morphology were used (Graham and Sanders 1978).
Used to distinguish closely related large mammal genera provides a better set of guidelines for the taxonomic determination of small rodents.
Burial and representativeness bias of small rodent specimens.
The skeletal remains of mesomorphs in archaeological sites are represented by dentition and limb bones, while the rest of the skeletal elements are mostly missing.
The number of bones points to several burial factors that may be responsible for the loss of most bone components.
After burial, soil-forming or soil-induced changes affect and alter all parts of the bone, unlike corrosion produced by digestion.
Fractures of bones are enhanced in wet conditions, but they are better preserved in dry conditions.
Suffocation, suffocation and suffocation factors are the main determining factors that determine the "future" of the death combination.
However, before starting to discuss the later episodes of burialology, it is necessary to look at the death patterns of small rodents, which proved to be the main force in setting the conditions for subsequent burial and petrification patterns.
In addition to humans, there are three main non-human media, namely:
Snakes, carnivorous birds, cats and monitor lizards.
Pythons, common sand pythons, rat snakes, cobras, golden ringed snakes, and Russell vipers are agile rat exterminators.
Rat snakes have also proven to be one of the most useful species for Indian farmers today, preventing their numbers from increasing (Murthy 1993).
However, snakes leave no record because they completely digest all parts of their prey (Murthy 1993).The degree of corrosion of digestive enzymes in smaller vertebrates (Andrews 1990, 1995) has been a major criterion for identifying their consumers.
The forces that lead to death assert a wide range of dispersion, including sub-atmospheric weathering in the natural environment and trampling on bones.
The severity of the procedure depends on the duration of exposure.
The bone composition will break down to such an extent that, in the best case, only a few (mostly) dentition and incomplete postcranial components will be deposited and subsequently fossilized.
It is also true that the bones of small mammals that pass through the digestive systems of birds of prey and carnivores and are deposited on trays and feces will certainly break down to a large extent.
Bibliography:
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