The Stone Age in India

Historians divide early human history into periods, by the tools people used and how they lived (Fig. 4.7):

"What does 'Palaeolithic' mean?" Palaeo means old and lithic means stone: the Old Stone Age. (So Neolithic, neo meaning new, is the New Stone Age.)

In the Indian subcontinent, the oldest human settlement goes back about 2 million years. Two famous sites:

• Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu: about 1.5 to 1.7 million years old;
• Isampur in Karnataka: about 1.2 million years old.

There, archaeologists found animal fossils and big cutting tools: handaxes, cleavers, scrapers and choppers, made of quartzite and limestone.

What were they for? Picture a hunting camp. The tools were used to chop meat, dig up tubers (roots like wild potatoes), scrape animal skins, and split bones to get at the protein-rich marrow inside.

Then tools got smaller and smarter: scrapers, borers and points. Sharp points tied to the ends of spears made projectiles, so hunters could kill from a distance. Hunting became more efficient.

Later came a big leap:

• the bow and arrow;
• thin, parallel-sided blades and tiny microblades, made from glassy stone that is very sharp when fresh, fixed into handles;
• hunting of small animals.

And something new appeared: art and symbols. People:

• painted the walls of caves and rock shelters;
• decorated their bodies with colours (pigments);
• made the first beads of stone, bone and shell;
• used a tool called a burin (engraver) to carve signs on bone and ostrich-egg shells.

These are linked with Homo sapiens, who spread all over the world, even to Australia and the Americas, between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The Mesolithic. About 12,000 years ago, the Earth's climate became warmer. Forests and grasslands spread into land that had been under ice. That meant more to eat: small animals, fish and wild grains. The result was the first population explosion in human history.

Mesolithic people used many kinds of microliths (tiny stone tools) to catch food from rivers and the sea; fishing was the main way of getting food. Art flourished, and people often lived in caves and rock shelters. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, a World Heritage Site, has hundreds of painted rock shelters.