Proud to be a Sikkimese: Sikkim Travel, Culture & Local Heritage

  News published in the Voice of Sikkim regarding the discovery of megalithic structures around Dentam has excited me a lot. I have always believed that the land of Sikkim is not just old, but ancient, contrary to theories focusing only on 'young fold mountains.' Attached is a newspaper clip from 2002 regarding Neolithic tools found in Sikkim by a team from the Archaeological Survey of India, Nagpur. According to historical records, the 150,000-year-old fossilized antelope horn found in Sajyong is particularly fascinating. If the dating is accurate, this fossil pushes the timeline of animal life in the Sikkim Himalayas back to the Middle Pleistocene era—long before the Neolithic humans who left stone tools in the same region.

Shapi, the so-called living fossil, has been an exciting subject matter for me since it was first documented in Sikkim some seventy years back. I have been looking for information on Shapi for the last couple of years but with little success.  Very little has been written about this rare animal that is regarded as older than deer, goat, and sheep. Considered a rare species and one of the most precious assets of Sikkim, this mammal was first discovered by  Ernst Schäfer, a German doctor, on an expedition in 1938 in Fimphu, North Sikkim.  I should not forget Margreth Paech from Germany, with whom I had an exchange of emails about the discovery of Shapi made by the German Expedition team led by Ernst Schaefer in 1938. She was generous enough to help me in my research by sending photographs of Shapi from the German Archives related to the Ernst Schäfer Expedition, which helped me take a glimpse of that historic discovery. I looked on the internet for information about Shapi. ...

Satyajit Ray with former King and Queen of Sikkim BY SHITAL PRADHAN I never wanted to be a teacher, and at the same time, I never had any options. I had always been interested in history since school, but destiny had other careers for me. When I completed high school, I compromised my dream of becoming an archaeologist and opted for Pure Science streams simply to please my father. In my early schooling days, we were taught to plant dreams, and I dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. Tutankhamun, Stonehenge, Crop Circles, Incas, Mayas, ancient civilizations, and many others were the only things I fantasized about. I regularly visited forest areas in my hometown and searched for things, believing that I was an archeologist and was destined to discover it. Funny ways of life. One day, I found a fossil; it was a petrified fossil with an impression of a Gramineae leaf.  Since 2003, I have been trying to get more information about it without success. I completed my Pure Science...