The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c10.22

c10.22

completely isolated a large portion of the continent, and the inhabitants have not advanced beyond the stages of primitive agriculture, stock-raising and hunting. Only the coastal belts, facing the Mediterranean and the Indian ocean, have to some extent escaped this fate. Besides, with the intensive exploitation of the N. African belt prior and during the Roman Empire, Man lent his evil hand to Nature in turning it into a desert, making it more or less a blind alley of civilization. Australia and Oceania were completely isolated, and, but for small scale island-hopping adventures, their isolation was broken only by the much later European colonial expansion.