Ambadevi rock shelters may be older than Bhimbetka

Mumbai: The Ambadevi rock shelters along the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border may house the oldest Indian rock art—much older than Bhimbetka near Bhopal, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Ambadevi site is located in the Satpura Range of the Gawilgarh Hills in Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, north of Dharul village in Amravati district of Maharashtra.

The sandstone shelters are covered by lush vegetation and bear a striking resemblance to other rock art sites in India, Australia, South Africa, and France.

The previously unrecorded site was discovered by Vijay Ingole and his colleagues Padmakar Lad, Manohar Khode, Shirish Kumar Patil, Dnyaneshwar Damahe, and Pradeep Hirurkar in January 2007.

After painstaking research of nearly two decades, Dr. Ingole, a multifaceted engineer and scientist, concluded and claimed that the Ambadevi rock shelter is the oldest in India.

The paintings mainly depict various animals, tortoises, fish, birds, humans, hand impressions, geometric figures, hunting scenes, war scenes, and abstract geometrical figures.

Pictographs are painted on vertical wall surfaces, ceilings, and hollow rock cavities. The oldest pictograph depicts carnivorous mammals such as tigers, leopards, hyenas, jackals, and aardvarks (an extinct anteater). Further paintings feature omnivores like bears, herbivores like spotted deer, nilgai, barasingha, sambhar, and rhinoceros. A flightless bird similar to an ostrich is also depicted here.

“We are of the opinion that the pictographs at Ambadevi—particularly those in the Mungsadev and Baradnala shelters—originate from as early as ~35,000 BCE. These findings challenge conventional timelines of Indian rock art and open new discussions regarding Pleistocene-era symbolic expression and faunal documentation,” Dr. Ingole told DH over the phone from Amravati, where the septuagenarian researcher is based.

“While Bhimbetka has long been considered the cradle of Indian rock art, recent discoveries at Ambadevi in the Gavilgarh range point toward an earlier genesis. This paper proposes that Ambadevi shelters, based on multi-disciplinary evidence, contain the oldest pictorial depictions in the subcontinent,” he added.

“Unlike Bhimbetka, Ambadevi provides direct visual documentation of extinct fauna, genetic dating anchors, and a compelling neurovisual logic: that such animals must have been seen firsthand to be painted with such anatomical fidelity,” he said.

Why Ambadevi could be the oldest

Ostrich eggshells discovered in proximity to the painted shelters have been dated to 24,000–42,000 BP.

The pictographs at Mungsadev depict a long-necked, feather-plumed bird whose morphology matches the African ostrich—a species extinct in India today, but genetically confirmed to have lived during the Late Pleistocene.

The Baradnala shelter includes an anatomically accurate wild dog pack, closer in form to the African Lycaon pictus than to Indian dholes.

A painted single-horned rhinoceros further supports the presence of megafauna once ranging beyond present-day Assam.

Bhimbetka

Bhimbetka rock shelters, discovered by Dr. V. S. Wakankar in the 1950s, have long held the title of the oldest known rock art site in India. Though evidence of human occupation at Bhimbetka stretches back to the Middle Paleolithic (~100,000 BP), the actual paintings are conservatively dated to the Mesolithic period (~10,000–12,000 BP). A few speculative claims exist for Upper Paleolithic art at Bhimbetka (~30,000 BP), but these lack direct radiocarbon or pigment analysis and are not anchored in contextual faunal evidence.