The Hills Named After Shiva
The Siwalik Hills stretch in a long arc from Pakistan through northern India and into Nepal, running along the base of the Himalayan range. The name comes from Shiva, "Siva" in Sanskrit, and the range was once thought to be the matted hair of the god himself, pressed flat by the weight of the mountains above. What lies inside these hills is stranger than any mythology. The Siwalik formation is a geological sequence of sedimentary rock laid down over roughly 18 million years, from the middle Miocene epoch to the late Pleistocene. Bones, teeth, and skulls fell into ancient riverbeds, got buried in silt, and were compressed into stone. Today, they erode back out of the hillsides across Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Uttarakhand. The Geological Survey of India and the Yale-Cambridge expeditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries pulled thousands of specimens from these beds. What they found rewrote the story of life on this part of the planet.
