Amba Devi Cave
The Ambadevi rock shelters are part of an extensive cave site, where the oldest yet known traces of human life in the central province of the Indian subcontinent were discovered. The site is located in the Satpura Range of the Gawilgarh Hills in Betul District of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, north of Dharul village in Amravati district of Maharashtra. Studies of various rock paintings and petroglyphs present in the caves suggest, that the Ambadevi rock shelters were inhabited by prehistoric human settlers since around 25,000 years ago. First discoveries of clusters of numerous rock shelters and caves were made by Vijay Ingole and his team beginning on 27 January 2007. Named after the nearby ancient Ambadevi Cave Temple, the site has also been referred to as the Satpura-Tapti valley caves and the Gavilgarh-Betul rock shelters. The Ambadevi rock shelters rank among the most important archaeological discoveries of the early 21st Century in India, on par with the 20th Century discovery of the Bhimbetka rock shelters.
The rock shelters are situated in the Betul District of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, around 60 km (37 mi) north of the city of Amravati. in the Vidarbha region, located on the southern slope of the Satpura-Gawilgarh hill ranges, at about 450 m (1,480 ft) above sea level. The site lies 6 km (3.7 mi) west of the Salbardi pilgrimage destination, near Morshi town, Amravati District. By 2015 an area of 10 km (6.2 mi) by 6 km (3.7 mi) had been explored. 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) on 27 January 2007. Amateur naturalists and bird watchers also explored the area until 2012. More than 100 rock shelters were identified of which at least 30 contain hundreds of pictographs, petroglyphs and stone artifacts. The settlement period of the site ranges from the Upper Paleolithic (25,000 to 15,000 BCE) to the Neolithic (10,000 to 5,000 BCE), the Chalcolithic (
Cave data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).