The Movius Line is a theoretical line drawn across northern India. It was proposed by the American archaeologist Hallam L. Movius in 1948 to show a technological difference between the early prehistoric tool technologies of the east and the west of the Old World.
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Movius noticed that the palaeolithic stone tools from sites east of northern India never contained handaxes. They had less formal implements known as chopping tools.[1] These were sometimes as extensively worked as the Acheulean tools from further west, but could not be described as true handaxes. Movius then drew a line on a map of India to show where the difference occurred, dividing the tools of Africa, Europe and Western and Southern Asia from those of Eastern and South-eastern Asia.
Fossil evidence also suggests a difference in the evolutionary development of the people who made the two different tool types across the Movius Line. The line is still in use as a distinction between the two traditions. The existence of the line, in terms of stone tool technology and human evolution, is still not explained.
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