Abstract
INDIA is rich in relics of Stone Age man, and the prehistorian there has a wide field for research. Not a great deal of new information will be gleaned from "Pre- and Proto-history of Gujarat" (H. D. Sankalia, reprinted from "The Glory that was Gūrjaradesa", 1943), though the gazetteer of finds at the end of the article is useful so far as it goes. What the prehistorian asks from researchers in the field in India is definite stratigraphical data. Perhaps, therefore, the geological section of the right bank of the Sabarmati River at Pedhāmli appearing on p. 15 is the most important single item in the article. It would seem that, as throughout Madras, early Stone Age artefacts come from a gravel conglomerate which rests immediately upon laterite. The occurrence of a microlithic industry suggests that its makers were using composite tools in which several 'pigmy' flints were haffced together to form one efficient instrument. Such industries appear at various different periods when natural circumstances permit or encourage their development and may be of widely different ages; and one must enter a caveat against the wisdom of trying to correlate the microlithic finds of Gujarat with those of Europe. In India itself, Colonel Gordon, in "Indian Art and Letters" (1936), has shown that the rock-shelter paintings in the Mahadeo Hills are not very old—maybe first century B.C. to tenth century A.D. in date. There the only industries found in the rock-shelters below the paintings consist of typical Indian pigmy artefacts. Near the surface a little pottery occurs; in lower levels this is absent. The conclusion would seem to be that the pigmy industries themselves are not very old and certainly nothing to do with the European Mesolithic either culturally or in time. This is also true of the numerous microlithic industries in quartz found in Ceylon. Dr. Sankalia ("The Second Gujarat Prehistoric Expedition: A Preliminary Account of the Search of 'Microlithic Man in Gujarat'," by H. D. Sankalia and I. Karve, New Indian Antiquity, 7, No. 1; April 1944) has described the unearthing of some skeletons, believed to belong to the folk who made the pigmy objects described. Physical anthropologists will naturally await with interest a complete account of these finds when the final study of them has been made.
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Stone Age Implements in India. Nature 155, 386–387 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155386d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155386d0