Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.24

c7.24

The small-stone (microlithic) industries of Europe, Africa, western Asia and India present, like the handaxes before them, a standard example of the problems of diffusion over a wide map. Their considerable degree of specialization and a vague but not entirely negligible approximation in their dating (as it seems) do indeed suggest some sort of cultural nexus in their distribution; but progress in the understanding of this remarkable possibility is dependent upon a closer analysis of the existing material and the acquisition of new. There is slight but accumulating evidence that Arabia formed a cultural, as indeed it forms a geographical, extension of the Sahara zone, and so may have constituted a central link between northern Africa and western Asia on the one hand and India on the other (cf. p. 58).