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ARCHAEOLOGY
Eternal India
encyclopedia
Enlargement showing pre-historic sites in N.W. Punjab
dentate line indicates mountain border
+ Sohan industry
0 Pre-Sohan artefacts
O Neolithic sites
Fig : 2 - Distribution of Stone Age sites in India
Cultures
The progress of man from a nomadic food-gathering stage to a
food-producing stage was slow extending over 500,000 years to
50,0
years. With a combination of the skill of hand and brain he
was able to fashion stone tools needed for digging up edible roots,
scraping hides and for cutting trees. The Old Stone Age (Palaeo-
lithic) culture is subdivided into Lower Palaeolithic, Middle Pa-
laeolithic and Upper Palaeolithic cultures, and together with the
Mesolithic the whole period is treated as the food-gathering stage
of man. In the New Stone Age (Neolithic) man started producing
food, domesticating cattle and building dwellings. It is however
necessary to note that the environmental diversity and the vast-
ness of the country show sometimes culture cycles in India differ-
ent from those of European Stone Age stages. Pending the estab-
lishment of a sequence of pre-historic cultures in India based on
stratigraphy and sea-level fluctuation the Lower Palaeolithic cul-
tures are assigned to the period 500,000 to 50,000 years. Before
Present (BP) corresponding to the Geological time span of Middle
Pleistocene and early part of Upper Pleistocene.
The communities using small stone tools (microliths) are gen-
erally brought under Mesolithic culture datable from 50,000 to
10,000 years B.P. In some areas such as Gujarat the Mesolithic