Prehistoric India

The Old Stone Age — the Palaeolithic — stretches across nearly the entire human past in India. People lived by hunting and gathering, used crude tools of quartzite such as hand-axes and cleavers, and knew the use of fire. The hand-axe tradition of South India, called the Madras industry, is among the oldest stone tool traditions in Asia.

Palaeolithic sites are spread from the Kashmir valley to Tamil Nadu, with rich finds in the Hunsgi and Baichbal valleys of Karnataka. The rock shelters of Bhimbetka (Madhya Pradesh), a UNESCO World Heritage Site, preserve paintings of bison, tigers, rhinoceroses and hunting scenes made by early human communities.

As the last Ice Age ended, communities entered the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age (c. 9000–4000 BCE). Its signature is the microlith — tiny stone blades set into wood and bone. Climate warmed, forests spread, and people began domesticating animals and camping for longer periods, bridging the gap to farming.

The Neolithic or New Stone Age (c. 7000 BCE onwards) changed everything: polished stone tools, pottery, and above all agriculture. Mehrgarh (in present-day Balochistan) gives the earliest evidence of farming and cattle-herding in the subcontinent, dating to around 7000 BCE. Neolithic communities grew wheat and barley in the north-west, rice in the Ganga plains, and millets in the south.

Distinct regional styles emerged — pit dwellings at Burzahom in Kashmir, ash mounds left by cattle-keepers at Utnur in Karnataka, and shouldered celts in the north-east. The domestication of plants and animals, not conquest, was the first great economic revolution in Indian history.

Prehistory matters because it set the physical stage: the river systems, forest zones and farming pockets on which all later civilisations rose. The shift from gathering food to producing it created the surplus that made the Indus cities possible — the subject of the next chapter.