The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.3

v1.c33.3

With the palaeolithic peoples of India we are scarcely here concerned. Their rough-chipped implements (Pl. IX, 1–5) have been found in large numbers in the southern half of the Peninsula, and in deposits which indicate that countless centuries must have elapsed between their last appearance and the dawn of Vedic history, while the forms of the implements themselves, strikingly unlike those of the Neolithic Age, have suggested to some writers that their authors may not even have had an ethnical connexion with the later inhabitants of the land. The neolithic races, on the other hand, are invested with a more immediate interest for the historian, not only because there are good reasons for supposing that some of the existing peoples of India—notably the Dravidians—are directly descended from them, but because this phase of civilisation was preserved in some parts of the country until medieval and probably more recent times. The stone weapons and utensils which are specially characteristic of it are found scattered over a much wider area than the more rudimentary palaeoliths, though mainly in regions where the trap rock, used especially in their manufacture, abounds. They exhibit a remarkable variety, illustrated by at least a hundred distinct types, some of which belong to the polished, others to the unpolished class (Pl. IX, 6–10). With few exceptions, however, they are identical in form with similar objects from Western Asia and Europe, and this identity has led to the supposition that the Dravidian peoples, with whom the neolithic culture in India appears to have been peculiarly associated, once dwelt in the highlands of Western Asia and penetrated thence by way of Baluchistān into India; and, at first sight, the survival in Baluchistān of a Dravidian language, Brāhūī, would seem to support this view. Other linguistic considerations, on the other hand, have been thought to point to the conclusion that the Dravidians were indigenous in the Deccan and spread thence over a part of Northern India. Whatever the truth may be regarding these particular tribes and whether they played a part or not in the introduction of neolithic culture into India, there can be no doubt that this culture was closely related to and, it may well be believed, mainly derived from the culture of the later Stone Age in Western Asia. Among the implements of non-European types referred to, the most noteworthy is a class of curious chisel-shaped, high-shouldered celts which are found in Burma, Assam, and Chotā Nāgpur, and which appear to have been manufactured by the ancestors of the present Mon-Khmer stock. Similar instruments occur also in Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula, where they seem to have been produced, not by the aboriginal tribes of the interior, but by later invaders who were in a more advanced state of civilisation.