Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.1

c6.s3.1

South of the Narbadā, the pebble industry dwindles but does not completely vanish. Such at least is the evidence as it stands, with the proviso that, where handaxes or cleavers are present, there is a natural tendency to collect them at the expense of cruder pebble artifacts, and so to create a false bias. As things are, the most southerly site at which pebble-tools have been recognized in quantity is in Mayurbhanj in Orissa, where river-sections near Kamarpal have produced a mixed handaxe and pebble industry resembling the Early Soan but with the pebble-tools in a minority.²⁰ Farther south, pebble-tools occur only in small proportion, though other types or industries supplement and extend the Madras handaxes and cleavers which dominate the Peninsula. At first sight, a tenuous link between north and south is sustained by a distinctively mid-Pleistocene fauna. Thus at Nevasa on the Pravara river, tributary of the Godāvarī, between Ahmadnagar and Aurangābād, 150 miles east-north-east of Bombay, a hard cemented basal gravel (I), which is capped successively by two further gravels (II and III) and a thick layer of yellow-brown silt, has produced teeth of *Bos namadicus*;¹ and both *Elephas namadicus* and hippopotamus have been found in comparable gravels of the Godāvarī itself. As between the Soan and the Narbadā, a faunistic equation of this kind seems to make sense (p. 38), but it must be confessed that a similar equation between the Soan and the Pravara is at present less easy. Thus the basal Gravel I of the Pravara, which produced *Bos namadicus*, is said to have yielded a handaxe-cleaver industry of Early-Middle Acheulian type (using trap and dolerite); whereas the Boulder Conglomerate of the Soan, which produced *Elephas namadicus*, yielded only the crude 'Pre-Soan' industry. This apparent unconformity may represent a true technological variation between the two regions, or may be due rather to contemporary differences between the tropical and the submontane fauna; but it needs watching, and illustrates the perils of hasty equation.