In a discovery that reshapes Asia’s Ice Age plant history, researchers have unearthed a 37,000-year-old thorny bamboo fossil from Manipur’s Imphal Valley—an astonishingly intact specimen that preserves features almost never retained in the geological record.
Scientists from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), found the fossil during field surveys in the silt-rich deposits of the Chirang River in the Imphal Valley.
They chanced upon a bamboo stem with unusual markings, later identified as Chimonobambusa manipurensis. The specimen is the earliest known thorny bamboo from Asia and only the second such fossil ever recorded globally.
Unearthed from the river’s silt deposits, the fossil retains exquisitely preserved nodes, internodes, nodal buds and, most remarkably, multiple thorn-base scars—ghostly imprints of defensive structures that vanished tens of thousands of years ago.
Because bamboo’s hollow, fibrous stems decay quickly, finding one with thorn scars intact is exceptionally rare. Scientists describe the specimen as “extraordinary,” calling it a rare window into a defensive trait that plants developed in response to Pleistocene herbivores.
The study, published in Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, argues that thorny bamboo was already established in Asia during the late Pleistocene.
This was a period of dramatic global cooling that wiped out bamboo from regions such as Europe. Yet the fossil suggests that Northeast India—particularly the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot—remained warm and humid, allowing bamboo and its evolutionary traits to persist.
“This discovery confirms that Northeast India served as a climatic refuge during the Ice Age,” write authors Harshita Bhatia, Pushpa Kumari, N.H. Singh and Gaurav Srivastava. “It preserved not just species, but entire morphological adaptations that disappeared elsewhere.”
The completeness of the fossil allowed detailed anatomical study. It preserves three nodes and two internodes, each with prominent nodal buds marked by concentric rings. Along every node are three to four thorn-base scars—key evidence of the plant’s ancient defensive structures.
Morphological comparisons with modern thorny bamboos such as Bambusa bambos and Chimonobambusa callosa helped reconstruct its ecology and confirm its placement within the genus Chimonobambusa.
Crucially, the find provides a missing Asian chapter in the global story of bamboo evolution.
The only other thorny bamboo fossil—from Pliocene–Pleistocene Peru—preserves only a partial node and offers limited insight. The Manipur fossil, by contrast, fills a major gap by showing that spinescence in bamboos likely evolved during the Neogene and persisted into the Pleistocene, shaped by climate shifts and herbivore pressure.
Beyond its scientific significance, the discovery strengthens understanding of Eastern India’s Quaternary forests as long-term biodiversity reservoirs, offering rare evidence of how plants adapted to global stress events. At a time when climate resilience is a central concern, this Ice Age survivor from Manipur reminds us that the Northeast has long been a sanctuary for life—harbouring species, traits and entire lineages through some of Earth’s harshest climatic eras.
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