THE PEASANT IN INDIAN HISTORY 23 The domestication of plants and, possibly later, that of cattle, marked a notable stage in human progress; but the full-blooded agricultural revolution was yet to come; the draught potential of cattle was still unexploited, and there was no trace of the plough, which alone could assure a substantial seed:yield ratio. Moreover, given the paucity of the crops cultivated, there could only be one cropping season, 'khariF in the Belan valley and 'rabi' in the Kachhi plain. The cultivated tracts were in any case very restricted, since there were no means of clearing the dense forests and making land there fit for cultivation. It is difficult to conjecture what the internal structure of these crop-raising communities was like; cultivation might still be a continuation of food-gathering with women as the "principals", as Gordon Childe had thought.2 Men had to hunt and later on, also tend cattle for meat and milk. The "sexual" division of labour was not sufficient to produce a surplus which could create any class division or even occupational stratification. In a much more advanced hoe-using Neolithic community of Anatolia (6th millennium BC) WA Fairservice, Jr, finds evidence of social "equalitarianism",3 and this should have been even more true of the Indian communities. In India the agricultural revolution and the first urban revolution in fact coincide in the Indus (Harappan) civilisation, which calibrated carbon dating now places within BC 2600-1800.4 The fabric of Indus agriculture rested undoubtedly on plough cultivation. Since the ox had already been converted into a draught animal for pulling the bullock cart, the case for the Indus people using a plough should have been an unanswerable one in spite of Kosambi's strong objections.5 The discovery of the furrows of a 2 V Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, London, 1948, p 123. 3 The Threshold of Civilization, New York, 1975, pp 40 IT. Not all the evidence, specially such as inferences from art, can be beyond dispute. 4 The simple carbon dates (based on half-life of 5730 years) are given in Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Birth of Indian Civilization, Penguin Books, 1968, p 140; and there are useful discussions in D P Agarwal and A Ghosh (ed). Radio-carbon and Indian Archaeology, Bombay, 1973, pp 205-210, and in Puratattva, No 7 (1974), pp 65-73. Calibration has resulted in pushing back the lower date of the Indus culture and considerably lengthening its span. 5 For the toy clay wheeled carts and bronze oxen found at the Indus sites see, Stuart Piggott, Pre-liistoric India, Penguin Books, 1950, pp 176-177. The humped ox (zebu) of the Indus culture was particularly suited for traction; the hump made possible such an effective harness. Kosambi's objections (An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay. 1956, pp 63-67) were grounded on the lack of positive evideoce for the plough, and a conjectured small size of surplus owing to the presence of only two cities in contrast to Mesopotamia. There are some comments on the negative evidence in D H Gordon. The Prehistoric Background of Indian Culture, Bombay, 2nd cd., 1960, pp 70-71