What form of portable art is found in the Indian Palaeolithic period?

Concept: Prehistoric archaeologists distinguish "portable art" (small, movable decorated objects such as engraved beads, pendants, and inscribed fragments) from immovable "parietal" art like cave paintings. Palaeolithic material culture survives only in materials that resist geological decay over tens of thousands of years — stone, bone, ivory, and shell. Worked metal requires smelting technology, which arises only with later Chalcolithic and Bronze Age cultures; fired or hand-modelled clay figurines belong to settled, agriculture-based Neolithic/Chalcolithic communities; and wood, being organic, rarely survives from such deep antiquity.

Application: In India, Upper Palaeolithic sites such as Patne (Maharashtra) and Bhimbetka (Madhya Pradesh) have yielded ostrich eggshell fragments bearing engraved geometric (cross-hatched) patterns, along with eggshell beads, dated to roughly 25,000-40,000 years before present. These finds are recorded in Indian archaeological literature as the earliest known examples of portable/mobiliary art from the Indian Palaeolithic.

Cross-check: Checking each of the other offered materials against the Palaeolithic material record confirms none of them fits:

• Metal sculptures depend on smelting and casting, technologies absent until the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age, well after the Palaeolithic.

• Wooden carvings are organic and do not survive in the Indian Palaeolithic archaeological record.

• Clay figurines are linked to settled Neolithic/Chalcolithic farming communities, not Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer groups.

Since only ostrich eggshell beads and engraved fragments are attested as portable art at Indian Palaeolithic sites, that is the material form the question asks for.