The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c12.2

c12.2

The history of man begins from the dim past, when he first appeared on the face of this earth. The geologists and the palaeontologists tell us that this took place about a million years ago. For these vast stretches of unmeasurable periods, Clark has rightly compared our small solar year of 365¼ days to a centimetre for measuring the Mount Everest. Hence the prehistorians take advantage of identifiable natural phenomena like the major changes in the climate of the earth to correlate certain phases of human development to those of the climate. But thanks to astronomy, it is possible to calculate the amount of heat radiated by the sun during the last million years. The graphical representation of this phenomenon showed again certain fluctuations of climate, and at such approximate intervals, as to coincide remarkably with the earlier calculations of the geologists about the duration of the various glacial and inter-glacial periods. Thus Prof. Zeuner¹ has correlated the astronomical and other geological time scales for Europe and the Mediterranean region, which are being studied in great detail for well over a century.