Make a critical appraisal of the mesolithic culture of Ganga basin with reference to artifacts, faunal and human skeletal remains excavated from different sites. (Answer in 350 words)

- Make a critical appraisal of the mesolithic culture of Ganga basin with reference to artifacts, faunal and human skeletal remains excavated from different sites. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
The middle Ganga plain has yielded the largest Mesolithic skeletal series in South Asia, and it is the burials, not the microliths, that carry the argument.

Body
1. Setting and sites: a plain of oxbow lakes and sand dunes in Pratapgarh, Prayagraj and Jaunpur districts, where G. R. Sharma and his colleagues excavated Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha and Damdama, with Chopani Mando in the Belan valley supplying the long sequence from Epi-Palaeolithic to Proto-Neolithic and Lekhahia and Baghai Khor the Vindhyan rock shelters. Dates run from about ten thousand to eight thousand years ago, and the earliest of them are disputed.
2. The artefacts: geometric microliths on chert and chalcedony — lunates, triangles and trapezes, with backed blades, points and scrapers, most under three centimetres. Querns, mullers, hammerstones and anvils indicate plant processing; bone and antler arrowheads, points and ornaments are abundant at Mahadaha and Damdama; and Chopani Mando yields handmade cord-impressed pottery and wattle-and-daub floors in its latest phase.
3. The fauna: cattle and buffalo, sheep and goat, several deer, nilgai, pig, elephant, rhinoceros, tortoise, fish and molluscs — a broad-spectrum economy of hunting, fishing and collecting around seasonal lakes, with roasting hearths at Mahadaha. The claim that some bovids were already domesticated is contested and rests on measurement alone.
4. The human remains: fourteen burials at Sarai Nahar Rai, some thirty at Mahadaha and forty-one at Damdama, extended in shallow oblong graves within the habitation, oriented broadly west to east, with double and one triple burial and grave goods of microliths and bone ornaments. Kennedy and Lukacs found robust, tall individuals with large teeth, heavy attrition, minimal caries and marked osteoarthritis, and a microlith embedded in a rib at Sarai Nahar Rai.

Conclusion
The record establishes a settled, broad-spectrum foraging population with formal disposal of the dead. The stature estimates, the earliest radiocarbon dates and the inference of domestication all rest on thinner ground than the burials themselves.