Lower Paleolithic research began in India in 1863, when geologist Robert Bruce Foote (1914) discovered a cleaver in a laterite pit at Pallavaram—a suburb of the city of Madras. In the next four decades Foote himself as well as a number of other geologists and civil servants made discoveries of Lower Paleolithic artifacts and sometimes also of Pleistocene animal fossils in the alluvium of the peninsular rivers. Their discoveries covered almost the entire peninsula from Bihar in the east to Gujarat in the west and from Rajputana in the north to Madras in the south. Claims were even made for the existence of Pliocene Man, but these did not win wide acceptance. These discoveries were so numerous that in his synthesis of them in 1906, Logan (1906:5) was able to write, “India possesses an even greater range of chipped implements than western Europe. ”
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