Hunters, Gatherers, and Fishers
The archaeological record of early human occupation in South Asia is very patchy, generally being represented only by isolated stone tools, often disturbed from their original context. Various finds of stone tools suggest that people were present in several areas of South Asia before 1 million years ago and perhaps as early as 2 or 1.8 million. Part of a fossil hominid skull is known from the Narmada region, dated around 300,000 years ago; it probably represents Homo heidelbergensis, who lived then in Africa, Europe, and West Asia but may be a form intermediate between that and Homo erectus, who occupied parts of East and Southeast Asia at that time. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) probably reached South Asia from Africa via Arabia around 70,000 years ago. Working floors, and a scatter of material in caves and open-air sites, are the most usual remains of human occupation, but occasionally traces of windbreaks or huts have been found, made of perishable materials, boulders, and posts.
From around 30,000 years ago, however, the evidence from South Asia becomes much more abundant and varied, giving a much fuller picture of its inhabitants' way of life. Their tools were made from fine, long stone blades struck from a core, using a variety of techniques that continued in use not only into Indus times but even up to the present day: These include heating the raw material and the use of inverse indirect percussion. Stone working debris at the great factory site in the Rohri Hills, where suitable flint was abundant and easily extracted, bears witness to the use of these techniques. This flint outcrop had also been exploited by earlier groups, as had other sources of good-quality raw material.
A fascinating direct insight into the way of life of these hunter-gatherers comes from the paintings that began during the late Palaeolithic, a time when art was flourishing in a number of parts of the world, and these became more common in the subsequent Mesolithic period. Such paintings can be seen in caves such as those at Bhimbetka in Central India.
In addition to the vivid painted scenes, the remains of food and of the tools used to process foods show that early South Asians were hunting game such as birds, antelope, wild goats, sheep, and cattle; fishing; and collecting lizards, shellfish, and various plant foods. Some changes in the nature and distribution
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Of these resources took place after about 10,000 BCE as temperatures rose, the ice sheets retreated in northern parts of the globe, and rainfall increased worldwide, but many of the economic patterns established during the previous twenty thousand years endured.
In many parts of the world, the plants on which animal and human foragers depend are available at different times of year in different areas. Many hunter-gatherers, therefore, move seasonally to exploit plant foods as they become available and to follow the herds of game animals as they move between seasonal pastures. At certain times of the year, favored areas attract groups of foragers to come together, meeting not only to take advantage of the seasonal abundance of resources but also to engage in social activities. The evidence indicates that such seasonal movement and aggregation were the pattern of life in many parts of South Asia at this time. In the northwest, the availability of vegetation was influenced by marked differences between very hot summer and very cold winter temperatures, with associated aridity. Many groups are likely to have spent their winters on the margins of the Indus plains and their summers in the mountains of Baluchistan or in Gujarat, their movements dictated by the availability of grazing for the animals that they hunted and by the contrasts between summer and winter temperatures. This pattern of movement continued after the adoption of animal husbandry and continues to the present day, the same environmental constraints governing the pattern of life despite major changes in global temperature, the environment, and human economies.
A similar pattern of seasonal movements occurred elsewhere in the subcontinent, between upland and lowland regions, between coastal and inland locations, and between other areas with complementary resources. Marine and freshwater fish, shellfish, water plants, and wildfowl were often important, favoring the occupation of coasts and lakeshores. In some tropical regions, local resource abundance and the relative lack of seasonal temperature extremes allowed some hunter-gatherer communities to occupy permanent or semipermanent settlements.
South Asia's many hunter-gatherer groups exploited a range of environments, from desert to tropical rainforest and from coast to mountain plateau. The Central Indian rock paintings provide a revealing supplement to the material remains uncovered by archaeologists, which are often little more than the tiny stone tool components (microliths) that were mounted singly or together in bone or wooden handles to create a variety of tools such as arrows, knives, and harvesting tools. The paintings show many scenes of people using such tools: men brandishing a fistful of arrows, shooting them from a bow, or hotly pursuing game with a many-barbed spear. Other scenes, however, depict tools of organic materials, which have not survived. Women use nets to catch fish and wooden digging sticks to extract small creatures from their burrows, men and women carry home game or fruit in bags slung from their heads, others climb trees with bags or baskets to collect honey or fruit, and the whole family sits down in a tent, the "x-ray" view of their stomachs showing they are eating fish.
A hunting scene, one of many rock paintings found at Bhimbetka in central India. Hunter-gatherers began creating these vivid scenes of their daily lives more than ten thousand years ago. (Namit Arora)
The rock paintings also show other sides of life that are generally beyond the reach of archaeological detection. There are scenes of dancing men, dressed in loin clothes and often wearing streamers on their legs, arms, and heads, who move together in a long line or execute complicated individual steps, either singing to accompany themselves or accompanied by musicians. Many clues, from style, technology, and other sources, have been pieced together to date the individual paintings, since the decoration of these caves continued into recent times.
In contrast to most parts of the world, in South Asia the shift to farming did not bring about the end of the hunter-gatherer way of life. On the contrary, a symbiotic relationship developed between hunter-gatherers and farming communities, and even today there are tribal groups whose livelihood depends on the exploitation of wild resources such as honey, which they trade with their neighbors for grain or manufactured goods. In Indus times a mutually beneficial relationship between hunter-gatherers and settled communities seems to have been important.
World History
