The Indian Stone age.
Homo Erectus.
Lived on the Pothohar Plateau, in upper Punjap, Pakistan along the Soan river (nearby modern-day Rawalpindi) during the Pleistocence Epoch. Soanian sites are found in the Sivalik region across what are now India, Pakistan and Nepal.
Biface handaxes and cleaver traditions may have originated in the middle Pleistocence. The beginning of the use of Acheulian and chopping tools of the lower Paleolithic may also be dated to approximately the middle Pleistocene.
The Homo Sapiens.
Analysis of mitochondiral DNA dates the Immigration of Homo Sapiens to South Asia to 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. An analysis of Y Chromosome Haplogroups found one man in a village west of Madurai to be a direct descendant of these migrators. These populations spread further to Southeast Asia, reaching Australia by 40,000 years ago. Cave sites in Srilanka have yielded the earliest non-mitochondrial record of modern Homo sapiens in South Asia. They were dated to 34,000 years ago. (Kennedy 2000: 180). For finds from the Belan in southern Uttar pradesh, radiocarbon data have indicated an age of 18-17kya.
At the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka humans lived throughout the Upper Paleolithic (10th to 8th millennia BCE), revealing cave paintings dating to c. 30,000 BCE, and there are small cup like depressions at the end of the Auditorium Rock Shelter, which is dated to nearly 100,000 years; the Sivaliks and the Potwar (Pakistan) region also exhibit many vertebrate fossil remains and paleolithic tools. Chert, Jasper and Quartzite were often used by humans during this period.
Bronze age India.
The Indus Valley Civilization was a Bronze Age civilization. The Bronze age in South Asia begins around 3000 BCE, and in the end gives rise to the Indus Valley Civilization, which had its (mature) period between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE. It continues into the Rig Vedic Period, the early part of the Vedic Period. It is succeeded by the Iron age in India, beginning in around 1000 BCE.
South India, by contrast, remains in the Mesolithic stage until about 2500 BCE. In the 2nd millennium BCE, there may have been cultural contact between North and South India, even though South India skips a Bronze Age proper and enters the Iron Age from the Chalcolithic stage directly. In February 2006, a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamilnadu discovered a stone celt with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old. Indian epigraphist Iravathan Mahadhevan postulated that the writing was in Indus script and called the find “the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu”. Based on this evidence he goes on to suggest that the language used in the Indus Valley was of Dravidian origin. However, the absence of a Bronze Age in South India, contrasted with the knowledge of bronze making techniques in the Indus Valley cultures, questions the validity of this hypothesis.
Iron age India.
North India.
R. Tewari (2003) radiocarbon dated iron artefacts in Uttar pradesh, including furnaces, tuyeres and slag between c. 1800 and 1000 BCE. Iron using and iron working was prevalent in the Central Ganga Plain and the Eastern Vindhyas from the early second millennium BCE. The beginning of the use of iron has been traditionally associated with the eastward migration of the later Vedic People, who are also considered as an agency which revolutionised material culture particularly in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The new finds and their dates suggest that a fresh review is needed. Further, the evidence corroborates the early use of iron in other areas of the country, and attests that India was indeed an independent centre for the development of the working of iron.
South India.
The earliest Iron Age sites in South India are Hallur, Karnaka and Adichanallur, Tamilnadu at around 1000 BCE. Archaeologist Rakesh Tewari, the Director, U.P. State Archaeological Department, India, stated that studies of the site at Karnataka implied “that they had already been experimenting for centuries” as by that time they were able to work with large artifacts. Shyam Sunder Pandey suggested that “the date of the beginning of iron smelting in India may well be placed as early as the sixteenth century BC” and “by about the early decade of thirteenth century BCE iron smelting was definitely known in India on a bigger scale”.
Thank you Wikipedia.