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Introduction: In the year nineteen hundred and sixty-three, we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the first palreolithic find which laid the foundation of prehistoric research in the subcontinent of India. Robert Bruce Foote of the Geological Survey of India discovered a palreolith (Cleaver) from the debris of a pit dug in the lateritic gravel at Pallavaram near Madras on the 13 May 1863 and continued that line of research for the next forty years with unique persistency and undiminished interest. He is truly called the father of Indian Prehistory, not because he planted the sapling but because he looked after it for a pretty long time with unrivalled enthusiasm. In the following pages is presented the history of prehistoric research in India and the progress so far made in connection with exploration and excavation in this realm of palreo-anthropological enquiry
with an attempt to piece together the evidences so far collected in constructing the picture of different prehistoric cultures and their links with Africa and Southeast Asia on both the sides of the subcontinent.
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