Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.25

c9.25

The Madras Industry is almost exactly similar, in its tool techniques and their evolution, to the Lower Palaeolithic industries of South Africa of the Stellenbosch group - recently re-named, in terms of the analogous French sequence of core-tools, ‘Chelles-Acheul’. This use of French terminology reminds us that the core-tool province stretches north-westwards to include Europe and Southern England, and that in all areas - India, South Africa, Western Europe - strong similarities, sometimes amounting to identity, can be seen in the hand-axes and their techniques of manufacture. To this vast Eurafrican province, then, the South Indian Palaeolithic cultures belong, and, as far as is known at present, represent its farthest eastward extension. Probably the nearest core-tool area geographically is that of Arabia, where traces of similar industries exist. If the evidence from Swanscombe, in England, is accepted as representative of the whole province, we could attribute the core-tools to *Homo sapiens*, a skull almost indistinguishable from contemporary types having been found associated with a core-tool industry of the Acheul (or Madras) type at this site.