Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c10.5

c10.5

We cannot trace this process in India itself, and on the whole it seems improbable that this essential transition from food gathering to food production was made independently in India as early as it was farther west. Agriculture begins in the archaeological record, as we shall see, with the growing of grains of the wheat and barley types. The prehistory of the cultivation of rice, the other staple Asiatic crop, is at present very obscure. It seems probable that rice cultivation began earlier in India than it did in China, and that the knowledge reached the latter country by way of the Yangtze, to make its appearance in the Chinese Bronze Age about 2000 B.C., the Neolithic crop in North China having been millet. But by 2000 B.C. agriculture had been established for at least three thousand years in Persia and Mesopotamia, and for a thousand in Western India, and it is to the region stretching between Persia and Egypt that we must look for evidence of the transition from hunting to farming.