Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.41

c7.41

We seem to have here the vestiges of a hunting or fishing people settled or temporarily encamped in the vicinity of an old coast-line 20-30 feet higher than today, sometime before the advent of polished stone axes (rare in any event so far south) and the pottery-using Chalcolithic. The phrase 'Mesolithic Period' is still too nebulous in India for definitive use, but it would appear likely that, under the impact possibly of microlithic elements received via Arabia (p. 70), in the Peninsula as in Africa a microlithic trend in the Upper Palaeolithic was subsequently so emphasized as to represent a distinctive stage in the Stone Age sequence. The general absence of a true flint or obsidian deprived the Indian tool-maker of the apt materials which encouraged his opposite numbers in Africa and Europe to perfect the fabrication of these minute implements, and, with occasional exceptions, it must be confessed that the Indian