Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.3

c9.3

THE archaeological record of prehistoric human settlement in India goes back to a period of geological remoteness whose immensity leaves it without very much meaning to the ordinary person. The vast periods of time involved in geological reckoning, even in those final phases of the natural sequence where traces of man first appear, though they can be expressed in terms of solar years, still leave the mind bewildered. Such reckoning, however, has been attempted, and the results have met with some measure of agreement; the methods employed involve a correlation between the geological phenomena of the Pleistocene period and the fluctuating curve of solar radiation with which those happenings seem to be closely connected, and the result has been to place the beginning of the period somewhere about 600,000 years ago. To this fantastically remote time seem to belong the earliest tools made of chipped stone which attest the existence of man as a tool-using being in the Old World – a hundred thousand years later there is no doubt about the relatively competent technique that has developed in making stone tools to certain recognizable patterns, distinguishable at least in Europe and probably in Africa. To this time too may belong the skull from Modjokerto in Java, claimed by some geologists as the earliest representative of the *Pithecanthropus* race of primitive man. From this time onwards tools and fossils carry on the story of man’s earlier evolution across the millennia to the coming of ‘modern’ times, which from the geological standpoint is a mere fifteen or twenty thousand years ago.