as it came to be closely associated with food production and settled life,
which the Indian Late Stone Age anticipated in several ways.
    Langhnaj in Gujarat and Adamgarh in Madhya Pradesh testify to the
presence of domesticated animals; there is evidence too of the exchange of
commodities between different areas and communities.
Distribution and Characteristics of Paleolithic Cultures
Paleolithic Tool Traditions There has been a gradual accumulation of data
on the early Pleistocene tools in the Indian Siwaliks. Uttarabaini in the
Jammu area has revealed early Paleolithic artifacts in the Upper Siwaliks.
Ample evidence has also come from the Siwalik region of the Potwar plateau
in Pakistani Punjab. The crucial site in the present context is Riwat, southeast
of Rawalpindi. The subsequent related evidence has emerged from the Pabbi
hills, to the east of Jhelum. Another area that is noteworthy is the Kukdi
valley in the Pune area of Maharashtra. There are eight volcanic ash
exposures near the village of Bori. Paleolithic artifacts are mostly found in
gravel. This is not early Pleistocene and earlier, as in the case of the Indian
Siwaliks, Riwat and the Pabbi hills, but if its dating is universally accepted,
the Acheulian industry in the Deccan can be taken to date from early middle
Pleistocene. In fact, the Paleolithic remains occur practically in all eco-zones,
or atleast in most of them, outside the major alluvial deposits, between
Baluchistan and the western borders of Bangladesh, and between Ladakh and
the Palghat area of Kerala.
Growing Knowledge about Habitat Our forefathers were certainly
knowledgeable about the suitability of different types of local stones as raw
materials for their tools and where such stones were not available, as was the
case in Tripura and Bangladesh, they preferred a suitable type of fossil wood.
They obviously knew the terrain they were living in. They had to know about
the local food and water resources and plan their activities accordingly. They
were, thus, the first explorers of Indian landscape. As we get back to the
lower Paleolithic, one of the burning questions is the evaluation of the Indian
subcontinent as a geographical zone in the overall scheme of human
evolution. What we can assert on the basis of the Hathnora evidence is that
the region was within the distribution    area of archaic Homo sapiens.