Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.15

c9.15

By the Middle Pleistocene it is possible to distinguish two main groups of fossil men, the Neoanthropic and Palaeoanthropic stems, and as they have already by this time reached a considerable degree of divergence, the period in which the undifferentiated common ancestors lived must be very remote. In Europe at least there is evidence that the Neoanthropic group, whose skulls differ little from that of modern man, is associated with the type of tools within the core cultures, and that the Palaeoanthropic stem, whose skulls bear greater resemblances to the common man-ape stock, may possibly be associated with the chopper-tool culture in East Asia; certainly by later Palaeolithic times the descendants of this particular group are essentially makers of flake-tools. The East Asian representative of the Palaeoanthropidae is the famous *Pithecanthropus* of Java, and his relatives from Choukoutien in China. In the latter site rough quartzite implements associated with the human fossils have been considered as comparable to others from North India and other Asiatic localities, as we shall see later.