Prehistoric

Paleolithic Age

Some scattered early human fossils (later named Narmada) found in the Narmada Valley indicate that at least in the middle Paleolithic period India had been inhabited by humans. The genus of Narmada is uncertain (Homo erectus or Homo sapiens); archaeologists estimate its age from 200,000 to 500,000 years ago.Click Here For More.

Narmada fossils are the oldest living human fossils in South Asia. The earliest artifacts of the subcontinent were dated earlier than Narmada. The stone site was found in the Sivalik Hills in northern Pakistan, about 2 million years ago. The Sivalik site contains a large number of animal bones, but no human fossils have been unearthed. The number of traces of human activity was significantly increased in the geological age later than the Sivalik site. According to the opinion of Indian archaeologists, the Paleolithic culture of India can be divided into three stages: early, middle and late stages, starting from the second glacial period of Himalayan glacial sequence.

Paleolithic Culture

Two Paleolithic sites have been extensively studied as typical examples of early Paleolithic culture in India, namely, the Samoan culture in the north and the Madras culture in the south.

The Samoan culture is distributed in the Indus Valley and its tributary, the Samoan River. Its center is located in Rawalpindi (now Pakistan), but it is also found in the Jhelum River Basin and even in Andhra Pradesh, South India. The earliest Paleolithic tools of this culture were found on the platform of the second glacial period, which is called the former Samoan stone tools. The stone tools found on the platform of the second inter-glacial epoch, which are more advanced than the former Samoan stone tools, are called the early Samoan stone tools. Late Samoan stone tools were found on the second platform of the Third Glacial Period, among which the first tools were used to treat them with Levallois technique. The relics of the Samoan culture were also found on the platform during the third and fourth glacial periods. The main characteristics of the Samoan culture are single-sided stone tools with chopper – chopping as the representative objects, and then gradually there are new stone tools for cutting as scraper tools and flake stone tools.