Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.14

c9.14

In India itself, unfortunately, no remains of the skeletons of Palaeolithic man have been discovered, though Asia has produced some of the most important evidence of man's early evolution. In the Upper Miocene deposits of the Siwalik Hills (within the Tertiary geological period, and separated from the Pleistocene by the intervening Pliocene phase, and many million years) have been discovered important remains of fossil apes which seem to have occupied a place in the evolution of the common stock from which man and the contemporary anthropoids eventually sprung. The evidence of these apes, and of others from Africa, probably equally ancient, suggests that certain elements in the skull of modern man (the structure of the lower jaw, for instance) are extremely ancient, and are foreshadowed in these fossils, and that the process of divergent specialization, which has gone on over the millennia, is partly one in which the skulls of contemporary apes are more specialized, and more remote from the common ancestral form, than our own.