Jwalapuram: Stories Buried in Ash

Buried in the small village of Jwalapuram in the Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh are priceless clues about India’s earliest humans.

Anthropologists are still divided about the origins of our race – the Homo sapiens. When did they start their migrations and did they all really come out of Africa in one go? Since the 1990s, there has been an overwhelming body of work around this. One of the theories was that all modern-day humans, originated from East Africa’s Rift Valley, and they left Africa in 2 waves between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. The ‘Out of Africa’ theory was reinforced by research done by scientists Allan Wilson (University of California) and Rebecca Cann (University of Hawaii) who suggested that modern humans are descendants of a single group of Homo sapiens who moved out of Africa and they took the long route to traverse the known continents and settle along the coast, in the second wave. Based on this , it was further believed that the first humans would have reached India approximately 50,000 years ago.