SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 23 September 2025, Shift 3 · General Awareness · Question 4 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 13 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. From 2025 the candidate response sheet prints every question and option as a picture, so the text here is transcribed from those pictures for this shift and checked against them independently; where the layout carries meaning, the picture is shown as well. Each answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. SSC released a tentative key for challenge and later its final one, both only to candidates behind a login, and the sheet does not say which of the two it carries. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which type of weapons were commonly used by Mesolithic people for hunting?

(a)Swords
(b)Barbed spears
(c)Cannons
(d)Catapults

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Mesolithic hunters worked with microliths, tiny flaked stone points and blades. Set into wood or bone with resin, they made composite weapons.

A spear or harpoon could carry several microliths at its tip, and that is what gives a barbed spear its barbs → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Swords — A sword needs metal forged into a long blade. The Mesolithic is a Stone Age, and copper appears only with the Chalcolithic (copper-stone) cultures.
(c)
Cannons — Cannons fire with gunpowder, a medieval technology in India. Babur's guns at Panipat in 1526 are the textbook example, and Stone Age hunters had nothing of the kind.
(d)
Catapults — A catapult is a siege engine for hurling stones at walls. It belongs to warfare between states with forts, not to Mesolithic bands hunting with stone-tipped weapons.

Concept

The Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, sits between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. Its hallmark is the microlith, a stone flake too small to use on its own.

Microliths were hafted with wood, bone, resin and fibre into composite tools. They served as the points and barbs of spears and harpoons, and later of arrows.

All three distractors are later technology: metal blades, gunpowder and siege engines. Knowing that a Stone Age toolkit has no metal settles them at once.

Key facts

Microliths: tiny stone tools, hafted onto wood or bone to make composite weapons.
A spear or harpoon could carry several microliths as its points and barbs.
Chalcolithic (copper-stone) cultures are the first to use copper alongside stone.

Study next

Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic tool types comparedMesolithic sites of India such as Bagor and AdamgarhChalcolithic cultures and the first use of copper

Common traps

Reaching for a weapon that needs metal. Nothing in a Mesolithic toolkit is metal.
Treating the microlith as the weapon. It is a part, and the weapon is the spear, harpoon or arrow it arms.

The period is tested here through its hunting kit, with weapons from far later ages as the distractors. Fix the defining tool of each Stone Age phase, and later technology rules itself out.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: History — all 218 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.