The painted shelters of Bhimbetka

Bhimbetka is a spread of more than 700 rock shelters on a sandstone ridge south of Bhopal, and about 400 of them are painted. V. S. Wakankar reported the site in 1957, and excavations by Wakankar, V. N. Misra, Susanne Haas and others followed from 1971 to 1977. Misra's trench in shelter III F-23 gave a continuous run of stone industries from the Late Acheulian to the Late Mesolithic, and the UNESCO nomination traces occupation there from about 100,000 BCE to 1000 CE.

The site opens the evidence track of this atlas: people lived and painted here long before any village, city or text on the map. Later paintings bring in horses, riders and script, and UNESCO notes that the traditions of the 21 villages around the site still resemble what is on the walls.

Both dates are soft, which is why the margin shown here is so wide. The 100,000 BCE figure comes from the type of the tools, not from a laboratory date. The paintings have not been directly dated either: their age is inferred from style, from one painting overlying another, and from pigment found in excavated layers. UNESCO's list says only that they "appear to date from the Mesolithic Period right through to the historical period".