Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.2

c6.2

LIF E ON THIS PLANET originated, we are told, over two thousand million years ago. Somewhere within the last of all those millions, creatures in whom we can recognize a simulacrum of ourselves, with emergent ideas and capacities, came in their turn upon the scene and hesitantly assumed command of the world about them: so hesitantly that, as it seems, they became economically creative—and to that extent independent—only a dozen millennia ago, and civilized in any comprehensive sense only some five or six millennia ago. Advancing science will move these ‘dates’ a little this way or that but is unlikely now to revolutionize them. The general framework of human endeavour is set.