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Section A THE PALAEOLITHIC PERIOD The palaeolithic period is one of immense monumental inanition spread over millennium accomplished by human progress, as deduced from the tangible remains of man's handiwork that have survived, making but the slowest imaginable move.
Throughout the palaeolithic period, the basis of subsistence was hunting and food-gathering in one form or another, and the available evidence permits us to visualise a small population living in tiny groups of families or small tribes, following the animals they killed for food over great tracts of the country. Life was impermanent, precarious and isolated ; and ideas could not readily be transmitted from one group to another.
The surviving elements of palaeolithic material culture are confined to tools made of imperishable stone. Discarded stone tools lying in river-gravels—an occasional human fossil, and frequently those of the animals hunted, are almost that we have to rely upon for our study of the palaeolithic man and his achievements. Problem
All archaeological study suffers from the accident of survival. The least perishable substance will survive alone out of a people's material culture, but of no period of prehistory is our knowledge so imperfect as of the palaeolithic period.
One of the fundamental Stone Age problems in Indian prehistory is the correlation between the now-esta blished Himalayan glacial cycle and observed. Peniusular pluvial
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