Palaeolithic Age in India: Old Stone Age Tools, Phases and Sites

Overview

The Palaeolithic Age (also spelt Paleolithic), or Old Stone Age, is the earliest and longest period of the human past in India, from about two million years ago to about 12,000 years ago. Its people were hunter-gatherers who made tools of stone, and it is divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic by the tools they made, from hand axes and choppers to flakes and then blades.

The Stone Age and the Prehistoric Period in India

Meaning of the Palaeolithic Age

The prehistoric period is the time before writing. There were no books or written documents, so everything known about it comes from the things people made and left behind. Of these, stone tools have lasted best, and the three ages of the Stone Age are named after them.

The names come from Greek words, in which palaeo means "old", meso "middle", neo "new" and lithos "stone". The Mesolithic follows from about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago and the Neolithic from about 10,000 years ago. The ages are broad stages of technology rather than sharp breaks, and older kinds of tools went on being used after new ones appeared.

A bar drawn to scale from two million years ago to today. The Lower Palaeolithic (until about 3,00,000 years ago) fills most of it; the Middle Palaeolithic (about 3,00,000 to 50,000 years ago) and the Upper Palaeolithic (about 50,000 to 12,000 years ago) are narrow bands near the end, and the last 12,000 years are a thin red sliver. Below, the last 14,000 years are enlarged to show the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago and the Neolithic from about 10,000 years ago. The Palaeolithic alone covers 99 per cent of human history, and the Lower phase is most of it.

The Palaeolithic covers 99 per cent of human history, and its Lower phase alone fills most of that span; the Mesolithic and the Neolithic together are a thin sliver at its end.

Palaeolithic Age Time Period in India and the Pleistocene

In India the Palaeolithic stretches from about two million years ago to about 12,000 years ago. It is divided into the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic by the kinds of tools people made. The span of each phase is broad and varies from region to region.

Table 1. The three phases of the Palaeolithic Age in India
Phase Time span Tools
Lower Palaeolithic Until about 3,00,000 years ago Hand axes, cleavers, choppers
Middle Palaeolithic About 3,00,000 to 50,000 years ago Flakes from prepared cores
Upper Palaeolithic About 50,000 to 12,000 years ago Blades, burins

The Old Stone Age falls within a geological epoch called the Pleistocene, which ran from about 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago and was a time of repeated cold glacial spells. The Palaeolithic is usually taken to end with the end of the ice age, when the earth's climate became warmer; that change came about 12,000 years ago and marks the start of the Mesolithic.

How Historians Study the Prehistoric Past: Tools and Sites

People of the Old Stone Age made tools of stone, wood and bone, but only the stone tools have survived well, so they are the main evidence. Archaeologists study them at sites, the places where the remains of things people made and used are found, whether on the surface, buried under the earth or even under water.

  • Habitation sites: Places where people lived, such as caves and rock shelters, which gave protection from rain, heat and wind.
  • Factory sites: Places where good stone was found and tools were made, recognised by blocks of stone, discarded tools and chips of waste stone.
  • Habitation-cum-factory sites: Places where people both made tools and lived for long spells.

Dating such old material needs special methods. At Attirampakkam near Chennai, tools were dated by cosmic ray exposure dating, the first use of the method at an Indian site, and by luminescence dating; at the Siwalik site of Masol, the fossil layer was dated by palaeomagnetism. Such dates keep changing the picture. The oldest Acheulian tools of India are now known to be as old as those of Africa and Central Asia.

Phases of the Palaeolithic Age: Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic

Lower Palaeolithic Age: Hand Axes, Cleavers and Choppers

In the earliest and longest phase, people made tools in two traditions. In the Acheulian they made bifacial hand axes and cleavers, worked on both faces; in the Soanian, named after the Soan river, a tributary of the Indus, they made choppers and other tools on quartzite pebbles.

  • Attirampakkam, Tamil Nadu: Acheulian hand axes and cleavers about 1.5 million years old, among the oldest known anywhere.
  • Isampur, Karnataka: A quarry about 1.27 million years old, one of about 200 Acheulian sites in the Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys, where over 15,000 artefacts show every step of tool-making from limestone slabs.
  • Didwana, Rajasthan: Hand axes dated to the Middle Pleistocene, about 4,00,000 years ago.

Who made these tools is not known from fossils. Elsewhere the makers of Acheulian tools were early humans such as Homo erectus, so the presence of such humans in India is inferred from the tools alone. Acheulian sites spread from the Kortallayar valley in Tamil Nadu and Chirki-Nevasa in Maharashtra to Didwana and the Bhimbetka hills.

Some traces are older than the Acheulian. Cut-marked bones at Masol in the Siwaliks point to tool use, and the tools at Riwat and in the Pabbi Hills of Pakistan belong to a technology separate from both the Acheulian and the Soanian.

Middle Palaeolithic: Flake Tools and the Levallois Technique

In the middle phase the emphasis shifted from large bifaces to tools made on flakes, which needed more planning. The flakes were struck from a core shaped in advance, a method called the Levallois technique.

  • Attirampakkam: Over 7,000 artefacts show Levallois technology dated to about 3,85,000 years ago, among the earliest outside Africa; whether early modern humans or an older species made them is unresolved.
  • Jwalapuram, Andhra Pradesh: Tools lie both below and above the ash of the Toba super-eruption of about 74,000 years ago; people survived that event in the region.
  • Narmada valley: India's oldest human fossil, a skull cap found near Hathnora in 1982 by Arun Sonakia of the Geological Survey of India.

The Narmada Human, as that fossil is called, is still debated. It was first classed as Homo erectus narmadensis; later studies have placed it closer to archaic Homo sapiens, and its age is put anywhere between about 50,000 and 1,60,000 years. Collarbones from the same valley point to a second, short and stocky population that lived beside a larger-bodied one between about 2,50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Upper Palaeolithic: Blades, Burins and Modern Humans

The last phase of the Old Stone Age is the age of modern humans, Homo sapiens, who reached the subcontinent between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago on the evidence of mitochondrial DNA. Tools were now made on long, thin blades, and the burin, a stone tool with a chisel-like edge, was used to work bone, antler and hides.

  • Early microliths: Tiny tools at Mahadebbera and Kana in West Bengal date from 42,000 to 25,000 years ago, earlier than microliths were once thought to appear.
  • Belan valley, Uttar Pradesh: Upper Palaeolithic tools here are radiocarbon dated to 18,000 to 17,000 years ago.
  • Patne, Maharashtra: Large quantities of ostrich egg shells, some engraved with designs, and beads made from them; ostriches then lived in India.
  • Hunsgi, Karnataka: A late Old Stone Age site with long blades of reddish-brown chert.
Timeline on a log scale of years before today, with the Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic as coloured bands. Above the line: 2.6 to 2.5 million years, cut-marked bones at Masol and tools at Riwat; 4,00,000 to 3,85,000 years, hand axes at Didwana and Levallois tools at Attirampakkam; 74,000 years, the Toba eruption, with tools above and below its ash at Jwalapuram; 42,000 to 25,000 years, microliths at Mahadebbera and Kana in West Bengal. Below the line: 1.5 to 1.27 million years, Attirampakkam and Isampur; 75,000 to 50,000 years, modern humans arrive; 18,000 to 17,000 years, the Belan valley; 12,000 years ago, the end of the Old Stone Age. On a log scale each step to the right is ten times closer to the present.

These dates show how slowly the tools changed. The hand axes of Attirampakkam and Isampur came more than a million years before the planned flakes of the middle phase, and the blades and microliths of the last phase crowd into the final 50,000 years before the Old Stone Age ended about 12,000 years ago.

Palaeolithic Age Tools: How Old Stone Age Tools Were Made and Used

Stone on Stone, Indirect Percussion, Pressure Flaking and Levallois

Palaeolithic tools changed slowly over almost two million years. The trend ran from large, heavy tools shaped on both faces to smaller, thinner and more specialised flakes and blades, and good stone mattered so much that people looked for places where it was easily available. Three ways of taking flakes off a stone were in use.

  • Stone on stone: The pebble to be shaped, called the core, was held in one hand and struck with a hammer stone held in the other, knocking off flakes until the shape was right.
  • Indirect percussion: The core was set on a firm surface, a piece of bone or stone was placed on it, and the hammer stone struck that piece, so the blow reached the core more exactly.
  • Pressure flaking: A pointed piece of bone, antler or hard stone was pressed against the edge of a tool, pushing off small, thin flakes to finish the edge.
Two panels and a strip. In stone on stone, the core is held in one hand and struck with a hammer stone held in the other, and flakes come off. In indirect percussion, the core rests on a firm surface, a piece of bone or stone is placed on it, and the hammer stone strikes that piece, removing flakes. The strip shows the Levallois technique, in which the core is prepared first, one blow is struck, and a flake of planned shape comes off. Lower Palaeolithic tools were big and shaped on both faces, Middle Palaeolithic tools were planned flakes, and Upper Palaeolithic tools were long, thin blades.

The Levallois technique added planning to these methods. Instead of trimming a pebble until a tool emerged, the toolmaker first prepared the core and then struck off one flake whose shape had been decided in advance, which gave a thin, sharp tool with less waste of good stone.

Raw Materials and Uses of Old Stone Age Tools

The stone chosen depended on what each region offered. Quartzite was worked at Attirampakkam and in the Siwaliks, the local limestone at Hunsgi and Isampur, and finer stones such as chert and jasper were used for the blades and small tools of the later phases.

Table 2. Raw materials of Palaeolithic tools
Material Where used Tools
Quartzite Attirampakkam, Siwaliks Hand axes, choppers
Limestone Hunsgi, Isampur Bifaces, cleavers
Chert, jasper Upper Palaeolithic sites Blades, small tools

The uses of these tools can be read from their shapes. Some cut meat and bone, scraped bark from trees and hides of animals, or chopped fruit and roots; some were fixed to handles of bone or wood to make spears and arrows for hunting. Others chopped wood for fuel, huts and more tools, dug up edible roots or stitched clothes made of animal skin.

Palaeolithic Sites in India

Palaeolithic Sites in South India: Attirampakkam, Hunsgi and Kurnool

South India holds some of the oldest and best-studied sites. Attirampakkam, a village near the Kortallayar river about 60 kilometres from Chennai, has a record of tool-making that runs from the early Acheulian to the Middle Palaeolithic. Robert Bruce Foote and William King of the Geological Survey found the first tools there in early 1863, and it became the type site of the Madrasian culture, the name once used for the Acheulian of the region.

  • Hunsgi, Karnataka: Several early Palaeolithic sites, some close to springs. The large ones, with tools for many tasks, were habitation-cum-factory sites; the smaller ones were only workshops.
  • Kurnool caves, Andhra Pradesh: Traces of ash show that people knew the use of fire, which could give light, cook meat and scare away animals.
Map of the Indian subcontinent with nine numbered Palaeolithic sites and the Indus, Ganga, Narmada, Godavari and Krishna rivers. Riwat on the Pothohar plateau, with tools about 2.5 million years old; the Soan valley, with pebble choppers of the Soanian tradition; Didwana in Rajasthan, with hand axes; Bhimbetka, with rock shelters and cupules; the Adamgarh hills in the Narmada valley; the Belan valley, with finds about 18,000 years old; Hunsgi and Isampur in Karnataka, with limestone tools; Jwalapuram, with tools above and below the Toba ash; and Attirampakkam near Chennai, with hand axes about 1.5 million years old. The Siwalik hills, the Vindhyas and the Deccan are labelled. Colours show the phase each site is known for: Lower, Middle or Upper Palaeolithic, the Soanian, or tools older than the Acheulian.

Palaeolithic Sites in Central India: Bhimbetka and the Narmada Valley

Central India's hills were a natural home for Stone Age people. Bhimbetka, in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh about 45 kilometres from Bhopal, lies in the foothills of the Vindhyas; some of its shelters were lived in more than 1,00,000 years ago. It shows human life from Acheulian times onwards. Its name is read as Bhima's resting place, after the Pandava of the Mahabharata.

  • Discovery and status: The archaeologist V. S. Wakankar discovered the complex in 1957, and the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, as a tradition continuing from the Palaeolithic to the medieval period.
  • Size: Seven hills and over 750 rock shelters spread over about 10 kilometres.

The rock shelters of the Adamgarh hills, near Narmadapuram, hold Lower Palaeolithic and Mesolithic tools. Natural caves and rock shelters are common in the Vindhyas and the Deccan plateau, and many lie close to the Narmada valley, where the Narmada Human was found. People chose them because they gave shelter from rain, heat and wind and lay near water and good stone, which is why prehistoric sites cluster along rivers and hills.

Palaeolithic Sites in North-West India: Soan Valley, Siwaliks and Didwana

The Siwalik foothills hold the oldest traces of early humans in South Asia. The Soanian tools are found along the Siwaliks in present-day India, Nepal and Pakistan, and include choppers, discoids, scrapers, cores and flakes, mostly made on quartzite pebbles and cobbles.

  • Masol: North of Chandigarh, fossil bones in a layer dated by palaeomagnetism to 2.6 million years carry cut marks that researchers have read as the work of early humans using quartzite edges.
  • Riwat and the Pabbi Hills, Pakistan: Tools at Riwat on the Pothohar plateau are dated to about 2.5 million years ago, and simple tools from the Pabbi Hills to between 2.2 and 0.9 million years ago.
  • Didwana, Rajasthan: Hand axes whose shapes and sizes trace the Acheulian from its early to its very late stage.

The Soanian is hard to date because its tools are mostly found on the surface, not in datable layers. One view places it in the Middle Pleistocene and credits it to Homo erectus; another, based on Soanian-type tools found at late Harappan sites on mid-Holocene river terraces, places some of them far later. Its tools are often found near those of the Acheulian in the same sub-Himalayan zone.

Life in the Palaeolithic Age: Hunter-Gatherers, Art and Climate

Why Palaeolithic Hunter-Gatherers Moved From Place to Place

Palaeolithic people did not stay in one place for long. Hunting animals that are faster and stronger than humans needed alertness and skill, and gathering needed knowledge of which plants were edible and when fruits ripened. In a tropical land with an immense variety of plants, gathering was an extremely important source of food. They moved often, for four main reasons.

  • Food: Staying long in one place would have used up the plants and animals nearby.
  • Animals: Deer and wild cattle moved in search of grass and leaves, and their hunters followed.
  • Seasons: Different plants bear fruit in different seasons.
  • Water: Many rivers and lakes are seasonal, so people moved in the dry months.

Who did which work is not known. Men and women may have done many tasks together, or some tasks may have been done only by women and others only by men, and practice may have differed from region to region. People also travelled to meet friends and relatives, always on foot.

Palaeolithic Art: Engraved Shells, Cupules and the First Paintings

Art appears late in the Old Stone Age. The earliest paintings in India are reported from Upper Palaeolithic times, and at Bhimbetka the oldest group shows huge bison, elephants, tigers, rhinos and boars drawn as linear figures in green and dark red, with stick-like human figures; the green paintings are of dancers and the red ones of hunters.

  • Engraved ostrich shells: At Patne in Maharashtra, designs were engraved on pieces of ostrich egg shell, and beads were made from them.
  • Cupules: The cup-like hollows of Bhimbetka's Auditorium rock shelter, nearly 1,00,000 years old.
  • First discovery: Rock paintings were first found in India in 1867‑68 by the archaeologist Archibald Carlleyle, twelve years before the discovery of the Altamira cave in Spain.

The same age saw cave painting elsewhere. In France, paintings made between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago show wild horses, bison, reindeer and bear in colours made from minerals such as ochre or iron ore, and charcoal, perhaps for rituals before a hunt. Indian rock painting flowered in the following age, the Mesolithic.

End of the Palaeolithic Age: A Warmer Climate 12,000 Years Ago

The Palaeolithic Age ended with a change in the world's climate. Around 12,000 years ago conditions became relatively warm, and in many areas grasslands spread; deer, antelope, goat, sheep and cattle, animals that live on grass, increased in number.

  • Hunters who followed these herds learned their food habits and breeding seasons, which may have led them to think of herding and rearing the animals themselves.
  • Fishing became important.
  • Wheat, barley and rice grew wild in different parts of the subcontinent, and people who collected the grain learned where it grew and when it ripened, which may have led them to grow plants on their own.

These changes opened the Mesolithic Age. Farming, pottery and villages followed in the Neolithic Age, and the first cities in the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Palaeolithic Age Characteristics and How It Differs From Later Ages

The Palaeolithic differs from the two later Stone Ages in its tools, its food and the way people settled.

Table 3. Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages compared
Feature Palaeolithic Mesolithic Neolithic
Time 2 million to 12,000 years ago 12,000 to 10,000 years ago From about 10,000 years ago
Tools Hand axes, flakes, blades Microliths Polished stone tools
Food Hunting, gathering Hunting, fishing, gathering Farming and herding
Settlement Caves, rock shelters, camps Camps, some longer stays Villages with houses

Previous Year UPSC‑CSE Questions

Each question comes with an answer outline.

  1. UPSC Mains 2023 GS‑IExplain the role of geographical factors towards the development of Ancient India.
    Answer outline

    The outline sets out what the question asks, the main arguments, relevant examples and the direction of the conclusion; it is not a full model answer.

    Directive verb: Explain

    Approach: Show how relief, rivers, climate and resources shaped where and how people lived at each stage, beginning with the Stone Age.

    Introduction: Geography was the setting that decided where the earliest Indians lived and how they got their food.

    Body (sub-themes to develop):

    • Stone and water: Palaeolithic sites near rivers, springs and good stone, such as Attirampakkam on the Kortallayar and Hunsgi with its springs and limestone.
    • Relief: Rock shelters of the Vindhyas and the Deccan, Bhimbetka above all, gave shelter from rain, heat and wind.
    • Climate: The warmer conditions of about 12,000 years ago spread grasslands and wild grains, leading towards herding and farming.
    • Later stages: Fertile river valleys for farming villages and cities; mountains and seas as barriers and routes.

    Conclusion: Geography set the stage for each step, while people's choices shaped the outcome.

Sources

Editorial Disclaimer

This article draws on the current NCERT textbooks and the sources listed above. Dates for prehistoric sites are revised as new methods are applied.

More on Prehistoric India

Read next Mesolithic Age in India: Microliths, Sites and Bhimbetka Rock Paintings
All articles on Prehistoric India