Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.9

c9.9

The surviving elements of Palaeolithic material culture are confined to tools made of imperishable stone, and until Upper Palaeolithic times we hardly have even the certain traces of any human settlement, if only a hunters’ camping-place. Discarded stone tools lying in river-gravels, an occasional human fossil, and frequently those of the animals hunted, are almost all we have to rely on for our study of Lower Palaeolithic man and his achievements. All archaeological study suffers from the accident of survival – the least perishable substances will survive alone out of a people’s material culture – but of no period of prehistory is our knowledge so imperfect as of the Palaeolithic. The study of these remote periods must always have a certain inhumanity and lack relationship to anything we know or can visualize within the comprehensible bounds of human history. It is, I think, impossible to do more in describing the earlier phases of the Indian Stone Age than to show how the known stone industries fit into our knowledge of the general pattern of human evolution in the Old World, and their relationship in time and space. Within these limits it is possible to indicate India’s place in the Palaeolithic so far as we have the evidence available: to treat the enormous period of the most ancient hunting peoples as a prelude to the periods which follow the introduction of agriculture in the fourth or fifth millennium B.C., and from which the bulk of our information on prehistoric India comes.