Lower Paleolithic

Formerly associated with the emergence of Homo habilis, some 2.8 million years ago, this date has been pushed back significantly by finds of the early 2000s,[5] the Oldowan or Mode 1 horizon, long considered the oldest type of lithic industry, is now considered to have developed from about 2.6 million years ago, with the beginning Gelasian (Lower Pleistocene), possibly first used by australopithecine forebears of the genus Homo (such as Australopithecus garhi).

Homo habilis is assumed to have lived primarily on scavenging, using tools to cleave meat off carrion or to break bones to extract the marrow.

The move from the mostly frugivorous or omnivorous diet of hominin Australopithecus to the carnivorous scavenging lifestyle of early Homo has been explained by the climate changes in East Africa associated with the Quaternary glaciation.

The unlocking of the new niche of hunting-gathering subsistence drove a number of further behavioral and physiological changes leading to the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis by some 800,000-600,000 years ago.

This type of human is more clearly linked to the flake tradition, which spread across southern Europe through the Balkans to appear relatively densely in southeast Asia.

Later, behavioral adaptations to further social life, uncertain food distribution (resulting in need to find and secure food and remember where it could be found) and ecological changes brought about by Homo led to the further expansion of the brain in the areas of problem-solving, memory etc., ultimately leading to the great behavioral flexibility, highly efficient communication, and ecological dominance of humanity.

The biological pre-adaptations of the great apes and earlier primates allowed the brain to expand threefold within just 2 to 2.3 million years of the Pleistocene, in response to increasingly complex societies and changing habitats.

The intermediate may have been Homo heidelbergensis, held responsible for the manufacture of improved Mode 2 Acheulean tool types, in Africa, after 600,000 years ago.

From about 300,000 years ago, technology, social structures and behaviour appear to grow more complex, with prepared-core technique lithics, earliest instances of burial and changes to hunting-gathering patterns of subsistence.

North India Guy Ellcock Pilgrim, a British geologist and palaeontologist, discovered 1.5 million-year-old prehistoric human teeth and part of a jaw indicating that ancient people, intelligent hominins dating as far back as 1,500,000 ybp Acheulean period,[12] lived in the Pinjore region near Chandigarh.

[13] Quartzite tools of the lower Paleolithic period were excavated in this region extending from Pinjore in Haryana to Nalagarh (Solan district in Himachal Pradesh).