Indian History Quiz: Prehistoric India: Stone Age and Chalcolithic Cultures

The Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age is the first and by far the longest phase of prehistory, the time of hunting and food gathering, of hand axes, cleavers, flakes and burins, and of people who had neither agriculture nor pottery.

The rock shelters of Bhimbetka in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh were occupied from the Lower Palaeolithic onwards, and their lower layers have yielded hand axes and cleavers along with the earliest of their paintings.

At this Chalcolithic settlement on the Ghod river in Maharashtra the dead were buried within the habitation area, laid out straight with the head pointing north, and pots with food and water were placed beside them.

The north-western hill belt of the Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges holds Mehrgarh in the Bolan valley, the earliest village of the subcontinent, where wheat and barley were grown and cattle, sheep and goat were kept about eight thousand years ago.

The correct answer is D, because Jorwe is a Chalcolithic site in Maharashtra that gives its name to the Jorwe culture, not to the Malwa culture, which is named after its own region in Madhya Pradesh and is represented by Navdatoli, Eran and Nagda.

A geologist with the Geological Survey of India, he picked up a stone hand axe at Pallavaram near Madras in 1863, the first recorded Palaeolithic tool from the subcontinent, and his later surveys in the south earned him the name of the father of Indian prehistory.

Bagor lies on the Kothari river in the Bhilwara region of Rajasthan and is the largest Mesolithic settlement known in India, with thousands of microliths, stone floors, human burials and bones of sheep, goat and cattle that give the earliest Indian evidence of animal keeping.

This site in the Kashmir valley is the type site of the northern Neolithic, where people dug pits into the ground, roofed them and lived inside, made tools of bone and antler, and buried dogs with their human dead, a custom found nowhere else in the Indian Neolithic.

This Jorwe culture site on the Pravara river in Maharashtra yielded a hoard of solid cast bronze figures, among them a chariot drawn by two oxen with a driver, and figures of a buffalo, an elephant and a rhinoceros, the finest metal work of Chalcolithic India.

A microlith is a very small blade, usually one to five centimetres long, that was fixed into a handle of wood or bone to make a composite tool such as an arrow, a harpoon or a sickle, and it is the defining tool of the Middle Stone Age at sites…