Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.26

c9.26

It must be confessed that the evidence of stone tools in the Lower Palaeolithic of India takes us a very small way in visualizing anything of the life of their makers, but other areas of the world have contributed practically nothing more. We seem to have the imperishable remnant of the material culture of nomadic hunting groups, who may have been well equipped with other objects made of such impermanent substances as wood, fibre, grass, leaves or other organic materials such as skin and leather. The use to which the Soan choppers or the Madras hand-axes were put is unknown: we can guess, more or less unprofitably, at many uses to which a simple cutting or hacking tool might be turned, from chopping at meat or wood to grubbing for roots. The most striking feature of the Lower Palaeolithic industries is their immense duration - from about 400,000 to the end of the last glaciation, perhaps 10,000 years ago - and the slowness of human progress in technological achievement in that time.