Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.27

c6.s3.27

There the Victoria West (Cape Province) rostro-carinates have already been cited as analogies to the rostro-carinates of the Madras industry. But the similarities between the Indian and the African Palaeolithic are both more extensive and perhaps more significant than isolated resemblances suggest. Both in East and in South Africa the earliest Stone Age industry consists of pebbles from which one or two flakes have been struck to produce an irregular cutting edge. The industry is ascribable to the Lower Pleistocene, but it was of long duration and an alleged East African manifestation, known as the Kafuan from the river Kafu in Uganda, has been thought to exhibit a modest evolution. Here however a word of warning, applicable alike to India and to Africa, must be interpolated. The most primitive of human industries, whether in Europe, Africa or elsewhere, are necessarily liable to approximate to natural forms; and conversely, natural forms are sometimes liable to pass for primitive human artifacts. Various factors such as the quantitive occurrence of these 'artifacts' in a given deposit, and their occurrence or non-occurrence with human bones or other vestiges, help to shape a final judgement, but a subjective element is likely to remain. And so it is that the Kafuan series is not universally accepted as a human industry at all, and must be used with caution as a supporting analogue to Indian industries, whilst these in turn, in their more rudimentary forms, should only be accepted with the greatest circumspection. I have, in fact, little doubt that already in India more chipped pebbles have been received as artifacts than are, or should be, dreamt of in our archaeology.