Bukit Bunuh Findings To Be Sent To Space Centre In Canada
Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) is expected to send a summary of results on findings to prove Bukit Bunuh as a meteorite impact area to The Planetary and Space Science Centre (PASSC) at the University of Brunswick in Canada by year-end. Its Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof Datuk Omar Osman, said the summary was important to register Bukit Bunuh as one of the world's 28 meteorite impact areas which revealed evidence of suevite stone from a total of 896 world meteorite impact sites. Read more
Bukit Bunuh Archaeology Complex - Malaysia's new Quaternary Stratigraphic Unit
Bukit Bunuh Archaeology Complex has been declared a new Quaternary Stratigraphic Unit thereby making it the only suevite stone site from the Quaternary Age (around 2 million years ago until now) discovered in Asia. The declaration was made and co-signed by Prof. Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice-Chancellor, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and Dato' Hj. Yunus Abdul Razak, the Director of the Minerals and Geoscience Department Malaysia at the Centre for Global Archaeological Research, USM today. USM has been conducting research and monitoring of the Bukit Bunuh site since 2001 and has been leading archaeological research in the important location. In 2007, the site drew world-wide attention following the discovery of the hand-axe, dating back 1.83 million years, thus proving the existence of human activity in South East Asia during that period.
Stone tool artefacts - dated 1.83 million years old - have been found in a Lenggong oil palm plantation in Perak.
Universiti Sains Malaysia Centre for Archaeological Research Malaysia director Assoc Prof Dr Mokhtar Saidin and his team found a suevite axe as well as flake and chopping tools in 2008, in rocks churned up by lorries in an area called Bukit Bunuh. The hand-held axe Mokhtar uncovered looked good for slicing hide, cutting meat or dismembering carcasses. The Lenggong Valley is home to a number of prehistoric sites, with important archaeological findings. These include Kota Tampan, Bukit Jawa at Kampung Gelok and Kampung Temelong. The most famous archaeological finding in Lenggong is Perak Man, the 11,000-year-old human skeletal remains discovered in 1991. The Lenggong Archaeological Museum at Kota Tampan is a trove of prehistoric Malaya. Read more
A hand axe was found and the rock it was embedded in dated to 1.83 million years. This made big news in early 2009, but since then I've seen no reports on the actual age of the axe. According to press reports, an axe was made of quartzite rock and embedded in layers of suevite caused by meteorite impact. Read more
Palaeolithic Complex Site To Be Gazetted By Unesco
The 1.83 million year-old palaeolithic cultural complex site at Bukit Bunuh in Lenggong will be gazetted as a world heritage site by Unesco in July 2012. Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Global Archaeology Research Centre director Prof Mokhtar Saidin said USM and National Heritage Department had written to Unesco on the discovery. Read more
The third proven impact products are at Bukit Bunuh near the world-famous palaeolithic site of Kota Tampan along the Perak River. Recently Mokhtar Saidin, geo-archaeologist of Universiti Sains Malaysia, verbally reported a 1.74 Ma fission-track age for a volcanic agglomerate composed of unsorted small to huge fragments of quartz, quartzite, schist, felsic igneous rocks, and other as yet unspecified rock types. The megabreccia is set in light-coloured groundmass, superficially resembling volcanic tuff. Thin-section examination of the quartz turned up parallel planar fractures, mosaicismal extinction and also several cleavage sets. Detailed studies are in progress, but there is little doubt that this "agglomerate" is in fact suevite, an impact breccia. In spite of alteration by oxidation, hydrolisis and local secondary mineralisation of fractures and other voids, porosity estimates by visual inspection are of the order of 10 per cent. Source iagi-net (January 21, 2004)