Describe the distinctive features and distribution of Upper Palaeolithic of India. (Answer in 350 words)

- Describe the distinctive features and distribution of Upper Palaeolithic of India. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
The Indian Upper Palaeolithic, roughly forty to ten thousand years ago, is defined by a blade-and-burin technology made by anatomically modern humans, and by the first unambiguous evidence of art and ritual in the subcontinent.

Body
1. The lithic technology: production shifts from the flake to the blade, struck by the punch or indirect technique from prepared prismatic and fluted cores. The characteristic types are parallel-sided blades, backed blades and knives, end scrapers on blades, burins, borers and awls, and tanged and shouldered points. Fine-grained cherts, jasper, chalcedony and crystal quartz replace quartzite, and true microliths appear at the close of the phase. Many Indian assemblages retain Middle Palaeolithic scrapers, so the transition is gradual rather than a replacement.
2. Non-lithic and behavioural evidence: bone tools — points, scrapers and barbed forms — from the Kurnool caves, especially Muchchatla Chintamanu Gavi and Billa Surgam. Ostrich eggshell beads and engraved eggshell from Patne in Maharashtra and Bhimbetka. The Lohanda Nala bone figurine from the Belan valley, read as a mother goddess. Above all Baghor I in the Son valley, where a triangular laminated stone set in a rubble platform is interpreted as a shrine, a practice paralleled in living Kaimur villages.
3. The distribution: central India is the core — the Son, Belan and Rihand valleys, Bhimbetka and Sidhi. Elsewhere, the Kurnool caves and Renigunta in Andhra Pradesh, Patne and the Godavari basin in Maharashtra, the Shorapur Doab in Karnataka, Visadi in Gujarat, Budha Pushkar in Rajasthan, Jwalapuram in the Jurreru valley, and Chhotanagpur and Odisha in the east. The alluvial Indo-Gangetic plain and the far north-east are largely empty.
4. Chronology and setting: the phase spans the last glacial maximum, an arid and open-grassland environment, with Toba ash lying stratigraphically below the earliest assemblages.

Conclusion
The Indian Upper Palaeolithic is regionally patchy and technologically conservative by European standards. Its importance lies in Baghor and Patne, which place symbolic behaviour in India at the same order of antiquity as elsewhere.