Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.37

c6.s3.37

The other point is this. The transference of industries, or even cultures, from one part of the world to another does not necessarily imply mass-migration. It does not take a thousand men to carry an idea, particularly a revolutionary idea. Indeed, I sometimes think that ideas have wings and fertilize like casual butterflies. There is at least no need to imagine African hand-axe-battalions marching north and east and imposing a new colonialism upon backward pebble-using natives. If one thing is more certain than another, it is that the time-intervals represented by these various industrial modes were astonishingly lengthy, and that for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years cultural change must have been scarcely perceptible. Changes, when they came, may have been relatively sudden, whether actuated by violent alterations of environment, by disease or other accident, or by the even less predictable impact of human genius. There is no simple answer, nor ever will be.