Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.19

c9.19

The Early Soan industry contains two main types of implements, one series made from rounded pebbles, which of course exercise some control over the form of the implement, as only the minimum flaking necessary to obtain a chopper shape is found. Such massive pebble-tools have been found in approximately contemporary (or rather earlier) Palaeolithic deposits in South and East Africa, but the simplicity of the form, so greatly dictated by the raw material, makes it dangerous to insist on such comparisons. The other types within the Early Soan comprise thick, heavy flakes and the equally crude parent cores from which they were detached. These flake-implements have been compared to the earliest flake-tools of Europe in the Clactonian industries, and some archaeologists would therefore include this aspect of the Soan within a general ‘Clactonian’ family of flake-tools distributed over most of the Old World. But recently it has been suggested by the American archaeologist Movius that a new group of chopper-tools must be recognized, allied to the Clactonian flake-tools but not part of it. In this chopper-tool group Movius would group the Soan industry as well as other similar industries in Burma (the Anyathian), Malaya (Tampanian), and Java (Pajitanian), and probably also the rough quartzite and limestone tools found with *Pithecanthropus* at Choukoutien. If this last correlation were correct, it would afford a very valuable link between tool-groups and types of fossil man, and give more reality to the East Asiatic chopper-tool group of the Middle Pleistocene as the products of the Palaeoanthropic branch of the human family.