Middle Palaeolithic Period in India

Middle Palaeolithic Period

  The Middle Paleolithic (or Middle Palaeolithic) is the second subdivision of the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. The term Middle Stone Age is used as an equivalent or a synonym for the Middle Paleolithic in African archaeology. The Middle Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age broadly spanned from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. There are considerable dating differences between regions. The Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age was succeeded by the Upper Palaeolithic subdivision which first began between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. According to the Out of Africa Hypothesis, modern humans began migrating out of Africa during the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic around 100,000 or 70,000 years ago and began to replace earlier pre-existent Homo species such as the Neanderthals and Homo erectus.

This was established only in the 1960's. 

• In india 50,000BC to 40,000BC 
• free from ice shields
• based upon flakes
• tools like blades, points,borers,and scrapers.
• major industries like luni, rohri and nevasan
• tool technologies like mousterian and aterian
• tool shapes like round, rectangular, pointed, tortoise, and parallel sided blade
• humans: homo heidelbergensis and homo sapience
• The earliest evidence of behavioral modernity first appears during the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age; undisputed evidence of behavioral modernity, however, only becomes common during the following Upper Paleolithic period.
• the earliest undisputed evidence of artistic expression during the Paleolithic period comes from Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Agesites such as Blombos Cave in the form of bracelets, beads, art rock, ochre used as body paint and perhaps in ritual.
• Activities such as catching large fish and hunting large game animals with specialized tools connote increased group-wide cooperation and more elaborate social organization.
• humans also first began to take part in long distance trade between groups for rare commodities .
• Evidence from archeology and comparative ethnography indicates that Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age people lived in small egalitarian band societies.
• The use of fire became widespread for the first time in human prehistory during the Middle Paleolithic.