Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.8

c9.8

Throughout the Palaeolithic period the basis of subsistence was hunting and food-gathering in one form or another, and the evidence permits us to visualize a small population living in tiny groups of families or small tribes, following the animals they killed for food over great tracts of country. Life was impermanent, precarious and isolated, and ideas could not readily be transmitted from group to group. Did psychologists permit us to believe in a group mind, we might well see it as responsible, at an early stage of the evolution of the human consciousness, for the slow changes in tool techniques over vast regions of the earth’s habitable surface.