CBSE Class 9 Social Science Chapter 04 Early Humans And Beginning Of Civilisation MCQs Set 01

Answer: (A) The Harappan script

Explanation:
Harappan writing, also called Sindhu lipi, has never been successfully read, unlike the Mesopotamian and Egyptian scripts which were both deciphered long ago, marking the historical period.

Answer: (A) More than 99 per cent

Explanation:
The comparison chart shows that the pre-writing era stretches from about 3 million years ago to 5000 years ago, covering the overwhelming bulk of human existence, while written history covers only the last 5000 years.

Answer: (A) They acted as extensions of the body, letting humans do tasks their hands alone could not

Explanation:
Tools extended human physical capability, functioning almost like additional limbs for tasks such as cutting, scraping and digging.

Answer: (A) Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens

Explanation:
The evolutionary sequence shown moves from Homo habilis in Olduvai Gorge, to Homo erectus who spread out of Africa, to Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and Southwest Asia, ending with modern Homo sapiens.

Answer: (A) Warmer climate expanded forests and grasslands, offering a wider variety of food resources

Explanation:
As the earth warmed about 12000 years ago, expanding forests and grasslands provided small game, fish and edible grains, supporting many more people than before.

Answer: (A) The shift from hunting and gathering to farming and animal domestication

Explanation:
It marks humans taking control of plants and animals through cultivation and husbandry rather than merely gathering what nature offered.

Answer: (A) A ploughed field showing crossing horizontal and vertical furrows

Explanation:
The intersecting furrow pattern found at the site points to double cropping, a farming tradition nearly 5000 years old that continues in a similar form today.

Answer: (A) It would have disrupted fair and consistent long-distance trade

Explanation:
Cubical stone weights following a binary system for smaller units and multiples of ten for larger ones point to organised trade; without such standardisation, exchanging goods across regions would have been unreliable and disorderly.

Answer: (A) The Sumerians

Explanation:
These innovations, including the 60-minute hour and 360-degree circle, are attributed to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia.

Answer: (A) It served as a temple, treasury, and centre around which the city was organised

Explanation:
The chief god's temple stood atop this stepped structure, and since the surrounding walls had just one entrance, the ziggurat also doubled as the city's treasury, with economic activities tied to its authority.

Answer: (A) By counting the days between successive Nile floods

Explanation:
Tracking flood intervals along the Nile let Egyptians work out a 365-day calendar of three seasons, though it slowly drifted since the true year is about a quarter-day longer.

Answer: (A) Its trilingual inscription, including Greek, allowed scholars to eventually decipher hieroglyphics

Explanation:
Because one of its three scripts was readable Greek, it gave scholars like Jean-François Champollion the key needed to finally crack the Egyptian writing system in 1822.

Answer: (A) Chinese civilisation with the Huang He and Yangtze

Explanation:
• Chinese civilisation grew along the Huang He and Yangtze rivers
• Mesopotamia depended on the Tigris and Euphrates, not the Nile
• Egypt depended on the Nile, not the Tigris-Euphrates
• Harappan civilisation was linked to the Indus and Ghaggar-Sarasvati, not the Huang He

Answer: (A) They were heated until they cracked, and the crack patterns were interpreted to foretell the future

Explanation:
This practice, using animal bones and tortoise shells, is the earliest known source of information about early Chinese society, revealing their hopes and fears through the interpreted crack marks.

Answer: (A) Each developed independently in a fertile river valley that supported growing agricultural productivity

Explanation:
Despite arising separately with their own social and administrative systems, all four civilisations took root along fertile river plains, where surplus food production allowed urban centres, trade, and writing to flourish.

Answer: (B) They push back the antiquity of human occupation in India to well over a million years ago

Explanation:
Isampur is dated to about 1.2 million years ago and Attirampakkam to roughly 1.5-1.7 million years, based on animal fossils and large cutting tools like handaxes and cleavers found there. These finds show that hominins were present in India far earlier than once assumed, not that agriculture or writing began here.

Answer: (B) Modern humans and their early tool-making, human-like ancestors

Explanation:
The chapter defines hominins as a group covering modern humans along with their early human-like forebears, distinguished by the cognitive ability to make tools. This sets them apart from animals, which lack such tool-making capacity.
• Not restricted to bipedal animals in general
• Not limited to Homo sapiens alone
• Not confined only to Africa, since hominins later dispersed worldwide

Answer: (B) It was the first hominin known to have moved out of Africa, carrying stone tools like handaxes and cleavers

Explanation:
Homo erectus tools found across Asia and Europe indicate that this ancestor spread beyond Africa between 2 million and 500,000 years ago, making it the pioneer of the earliest known human migration out of the continent. Cave paintings and domestication came much later with other groups.

Answer: (B) Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian

Explanation:
The Sumerians were the earliest to build city-based settlements; their power was later overtaken by the Akkadians around 2334 BCE, who in turn lost ground to the Assyrians around 2154 BCE, and finally Babylonia rose to dominance in central Mesopotamia from 1900 BCE onwards under rulers like Hammurabi.

Answer: (B) It compiled rules of civil and social conduct that later legal systems drew upon

Explanation:
Hammurabi is credited with compiling a set of laws governing civil and social behaviour across his empire, and this compilation went on to influence the development of many later legal traditions. It was not a writing system, a trade record, or an architectural manual.

Answer: (B) It was the earliest known agricultural village in the region, later giving rise to Chalcolithic and eventually Bronze Age developments

Explanation:
Mehrgarh, dating to around 7000 BCE, was the earliest Neolithic farming village in the northwest of the subcontinent. Its people grew wheat and barley, herded cattle, and later took up copper working, laying the groundwork that eventually fed into the emergence of the Sindhu-Sarasvati civilisation around 3500 BCE.

Answer: (B) Because they believed a person's spiritual double, or ka, needed a preserved body to live on after death

Explanation:
Egyptians believed each person possessed a ka that continued to exist after death only if the body remained intact, which is why organs were removed, the body was dried and wrapped, and it was placed in a coffin with proper rituals.

Answer: (B) The black soil deposited along the Nile valley

Explanation:
Kemet translates to 'the black,' a reference to the dark, fertile mud left behind by the Nile's annual floods, which made farming possible along the riverbanks.

Answer: (C) It had to be obtained from outside China and was crafted into ritual or prestige objects

Explanation:
Since jade was not found locally, acquiring it required outside contact, and its transformation into ritual and prestige items suggests it carried social and symbolic importance in transactions rather than everyday utilitarian use like farming or defence.

Answer: (B) Repeated attacks by the Hittites, along with environmental strain and internal political troubles

Explanation:
Babylon's control weakened due to a mix of causes rather than one single event.
• Repeated attacks by the technologically advancing Hittites
• Growing environmental degradation and pressure on farmland
• Internal political and economic difficulties
Together these factors allowed new powers to rise in West Asia.