Post-Pleistocene adaptations in the Vindhya-Ganga valley complex

Post-Pleistocene adaptations have been described in terms of two distinctive adaptive trajectories: the Near Eastern pathway leading to genetic domestication of certain species and the temperate pathway involving technological specialisation and intensive resource management. With a view to identifying alternative responses in warm tropical/sub-tropical regions, this paper explores the nature of adaptation of Mesolithic populations of the Gangetic plains and the Vindhya hills and plateau, north central India. The archaeological evidence suggests that the response here involved a process of population diversification leading to socio-economic niche specialisation. Hunter-gatherer complexity in the Ganga valley, within a hunting-gathering-fishing mode of subsistence, involving logistic mobility pattern, onsite burial practice, large-scale production of bone/antler artefacts and an exchange system in a wider area, is explained in terms of an alternative regional model of hunter-gatherer adaptations operating within a partitioned social network system based on the principle of inter-group complementarity. The paper suggests that the apparent regional variability in adaptive responses of the three regions could converge if comparisons are based on a unitary theme of security and saving manifested, though, in differing notions of storage-'social banking' in the case under consideration.