Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.16

c9.16

To sum up, the background of the Old Stone Age in India is the presence of climatic phases during the Pleistocene which can be correlated with similar phases in Europe, and probably with others in South India and Africa, where pluvial conditions replace glaciations. Against this natural etting can be set two main traditions in implement manufacture - one in the north of India related to other similar flake or chopper industries known from several East Asiatic sites; the other, in the south, belonging to the core-tool family whose distribution includes Africa and Western Europe. While no human fossils have been found, the evidence from elsewhere in the Old World suggests the tentative conclusion that tools of the flake or chopper tradition may be the products of the ‘Ancient’ or Palaeoanthropic stem in human evolution (such as *Pithecanthropus*), and that those of the core technique were made by the earliest representatives of *Homo sapiens* in the ‘Modern’ or Neoanthropic family. With this outline in our minds, we can turn to consider the Indian evidence in slightly more detail.