NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Social Science Chapter 4 Chapter opening — The Big Questions

Book page 61 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

How did humans live on Earth before the beginning of civilisation?

Answer

For more than 99 per cent of human history — from about 3 million years ago to 5000 years ago, the span Fig. 4.3 marks as 'Before' — people lived without farming, without villages and without writing. They lived by hunting and gathering, moving with the seasons, and the whole of that life has to be reconstructed from the objects they left behind, because they left no documents.

The chapter divides this long stretch into three stages, and each stage is defined by what the tools can do:

Stage	How people got food	Tools the chapter names	Where they lived	Dates the chapter prints
Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age)	Hunting large game, gathering plants, digging tubers, cracking bones for marrow	Handaxes, cleavers, scrapers, choppers of quartzite and limestone; later scrapers, borers and points; later still blades and microblades, and the bow and arrow	Open camps, caves and rock shelters	Subcontinent's oldest settlement about 2 million years ago; Attirampakkam 1.5–1.7 million; Isampur 1.2 million
Mesolithic	Small game, fish and shellfish — 'fishing was the mainstay of their subsistence economy' — and wild grains	Microliths (tiny stone tools), bone points	Caves and rock shelters occupied frequently; camps near rivers and lakes	From about 12000 years ago, when the climate warmed
Neolithic	Farming and herding — food production instead of food collection	Polished stone tools for processing food; pottery in many shapes and sizes	The first permanent village settlements	Mehrgarh 7000 BCE; most of the subcontinent by 2500 BCE

What else the evidence shows. These were not people with tools and nothing more. From the later Palaeolithic the chapter records symbolic behaviour: cave and rock-shelter walls decorated with paintings, pigments used to decorate the body, the first beads of stone, bone and shell, and a special tool — the burin or engraver — used to cut symbolic marks on bone and on shells such as ostrich eggs. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, a World Heritage Site, has hundreds of painted rock shelters.

Why this life lasted so long: hunting and gathering works. It supported people through enormous swings of climate across the Quaternary Period — the last 26 lakh years. What changed it was not that it failed but that, as the chapter puts it, hunter–gatherers 'gained adequate familiarity with seasons and different types of food resources' — they learned enough about plants and animals to start controlling them.

Careful with the word 'primitive': the chapter never uses it. A microblade struck from glassy rock is razor-sharp when fresh, and hafting several of them into one handle is a sophisticated idea. Simple tools are not the same thing as simple minds.

Q2.

How did humans communicate before writing was invented?

Answer

Through symbols they made by hand and left on durable materials — which is exactly why we can still see them. The chapter names three kinds of evidence for pre-writing communication, and each one is a physical object an archaeologist can dig up:

Painting. Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic people 'decorated the walls of caves and rock shelters with paintings'. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh preserves hundreds of painted shelters (Fig. 4.12). A painting of a hunt is a message about what was hunted and how.
Body decoration. They 'used pigments to decorate their bodies', and were 'the first to produce beads of stone, bone, and shell'. Ornament is a way of saying who you are and which group you belong to.
Engraving. The burin, a stone engraver, was 'used to engrave symbolic features on bones and shells (such as ostrich eggs)'. This is deliberate marking — the closest step before script.

Then came the half-way stages. Before full writing, the chapter records marks that carry meaning but are not yet a language on a page:

Stage	What it is	Where the chapter finds it
Graffiti on pottery	Repeated scratched marks on pots — probably ownership or contents	Early Harappan sites; 'extensive use'
Seals with geometric and simple animal motifs	Stamps that identify a person, family or workshop	Harappa, Rehman Dheri and Kunal — 'forerunners to the script and inscribed seals' of the mature civilisation
Full script	Signs standing for language	Harappan pictographic script (Sindhu lipi, undeciphered); Sumerian cuneiform from 3200 BCE; Egyptian hieroglyphs; Chinese oracle-bone symbols

The honest limit of this evidence: we can see that these marks meant something; we usually cannot say what. Fig. 4.3 states the problem exactly — before writing, 'it is generally difficult to understand the thoughts and ideas of people'. A painted bison at Bhimbetka proves people communicated. It does not tell us the sentence they were saying.

Q3.

How is archaeology helpful in understanding our past?

Answer

Because for the period before writing, archaeology supplies the only evidence there is. Fig. 4.3 is blunt about it: for the 'Before' period, 'tools, implements, and other material objects made by humans (artefacts) are the major sources for reconstructing people's ways of living'. Take those away and more than 99 per cent of human history goes silent.

How the evidence gets there in the first place. The chapter describes the mechanism, and it is worth following closely, because it is the reason archaeology works at all:

The chapter's own account of how the record forms: objects are discarded, buried under later earth, and recovered in order — which is why the sequence of tool types can be read at all.

What archaeologists actually do with it, according to the page 65 box:

Excavate early human sites to uncover clues — 'tools, bones, and other objects left behind by our early ancestors' (Fig. 4.5 shows a dig in progress).
Experiment. They 'also experiment by making and using similar tools'. This is the part students usually miss: to know what a cleaver was for, you make one and use it. That is how the chapter can state that these tools 'were used to chop animal meat, dig out tubers, scrape animal skin, and cleave animal bones to extract protein-rich marrow' — the wear on a replica matches the wear on the original.
Date and compare. Radio-carbon dates are what allow the chapter to say the Pre-Harappan phase at Bhirrana and Kunal 'began between 7000 and 5500 BCE'.

Three things archaeology alone could not tell us, and one it can: it cannot give us a king's name, the date of a war, or what people believed word for word — Fig. 4.3 says dating before writing is 'only approximate'. What it can do is give an unbroken account of how people lived: what they ate, what they made, where they moved, and what they traded. Meluhha, Magan and Dilmun are known from Akkadian tablets — but the Harappan beads that travelled that route are known from the ground.

Q4.

How did early civilisations interact with each other?

Answer

Mainly through long-distance trade, and the chapter's strongest case is the link between Mesopotamia and the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. Here the evidence is unusually good, because it comes from two independent directions at once.

Kind of evidence	What it says	Why it counts
Written — Akkadian cuneiform	The tablets of King Sargon name trade with the eastern territories of Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha	A named ruler's own records, in a script that has been deciphered
Geographical — Fig. 4.26	Dilmun = today's Bahrain; Magan = the Oman peninsula; Meluhha is generally identified with the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. The map plots Mesopotamian, Dilmun, Magan and Meluhhan sites in one chain along the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea	The three named places lie in a line, in the right order, on the sea route from Sumer to the Indus
Material — the goods	Traded to Mesopotamia: semiprecious stone beads, ivory, timber, gold dust, and probably copper	These are exactly the crafts the chapter says the Harappans had been developing since the Early Harappan stage — bead production at Harappa, Kunal and Datrana

Why these two and not the other two. The chapter gives a geographical reason: 'Geographically, Mesopotamia and the Indus and Ghaggar-Sarasvatī valleys are closer to each other. This proximity facilitated strong contacts and trade.' By contrast, the Egyptian and Chinese civilisations 'have little tangible evidence of their direct contact with the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation'.

What is established and what is inferred. Established: Sargon's tablets name Meluhha, and Harappan-type goods moved west. Inferred, and worth saying so: that Meluhha = the Harappan civilisation is an identification — the chapter says 'generally identified', not 'proved'. It rests on the goods matching and the direction being right, not on a Harappan document saying so — and no Harappan document can say so while the script stays undeciphered.

A second kind of interaction: ideas that appear in more than one place. The chapter is careful here. It notes that 'while the Sumerians were developing canal irrigation, the Early Harappans… were also building check dams known as gabarbands' — parallel solutions, later refined into the interconnected stone and mud-brick water tanks at Dholavira in Kachchh and the burnt-brick dockyard at Lothal. Its closing paragraph settles the point: the Bronze Age civilisations 'emerged independently in the fertile river plains' and 'developed social and administrative systems independently'. Contact was real, but it was contact between societies that had already invented their own answers.

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