Archive for March 31st, 2009

Pre-Historic India: Post-Sohan Valley

The Sohan industry continued in developing forms until the third glaciations and possibly as the so called Evolved Sohan, until the fourth. It consists of typically pebble and flake tools amongst which chopper like implements predominate. Some of the pebble tools are struck from the original pebble surface without the more usual prepared striking platform. The flake tools on the other hand not infrequently show high angled platforms reminiscent of the Clactonian industry of England. As time went one, the proposition of pebble implement tended to dimish and the flakes approximated more nearly to the Levalloisian of the European mid Paleolithic. In terms of years, an antiquity of 400,000 years has been ascribed to the beginnings of the industry but necessarily with a wide margin its duration was immense, probably more than 300,000 years. Alongside the Sohan industry both in its earlier and in its later aspects appeared another of a different kind based not on flakes but upon shaped cores in other words upon implements which have been shaped in a manner which has been compared to sculpture by the reduction of a lump of quartzite to the desired form through the removal of surplus material. At first, some hammers were used for this purpose but later more sensitive instruments, barsĀ  of wood or horn were partially substituted with the result that shallower flake scars were produced resulting in a more shapely tool. The characteristics form was a pear shaped hand axe, of a type widely distributed in Europe and Africa and approximating to the Acheul of the classical typology.   Although in north western India and sometimes elsewhere the flake industries and the core industries overlap, they appear to be basically of diverse human types. At Swanscombe in Kent a skull essential modern in type has been found in gravels containing core artifacts with which it was contemporary, whilst on the other hand there is a tendency for the earlier flake industries to group with obsolete human species representing decadent collateral branches from the human stem. But whether the mixed Indian industries imply the partial coexistence of widely divergent human types in the subcontinent cannot be guessed in the present complete absence of associated human bones. The recovery of human skeletons of Paleolithic age is one of the major needs of Indian archaeology. In the south of India the hand axe is the dominant Paleolithic form, and the [...]