Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.40

c6.s3.40

An ingenious Dutch psychiatrist suggests that handaxes were made symmetrical for ambidexterous users, whereas the emergent flake-industries were connected with nascent right-handedness; and that this right-handedness was in turn linked with the development of speech-centres on the left side of the brain.²⁸ That may be sound physiology but it is perhaps not very good archaeology since flakes occur as early as handaxes. It may of course be that men with the gift of articulate speech co-existed with others, grunting *mlechchhas*, who lacked it. We simply do not know.