Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.33

c8.33

Nevertheless, these hoards are not completely dumb. The axes, up to a foot in length and five or six pounds in weight, are excellent woodmen's tools. The barbed harpoons, based perhaps on bone or horn prototypes, proclaim extensive food-gathering in the fishful rivers near which they are found. That they were also used for hunting animals as formidable as the rhinoceros is shown, as B. B. Lal reminds us,¹⁴ by cave paintings of unknown date in the Mirzapur district of the Ganges valley, south-west of Banaras. The unbarbed spear-heads anticipate in general fashion the iron spears which the peaceful peasantry sometimes carry in these regions at the present day. Only the swords which occur on four of the sites imply a more military element, symbolic perhaps of rank rather than recurrent peril. The general inference is that the hoards represent semi-nomadic food-gathering communities, capable of clearing patches of jungle and perhaps (though this we do not know) of some sort of garden-agriculture, but living mainly by hunting and fishing. The likelihood fits well into far more modern pictures of tribal India.