Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c6.s3.38

c6.s3.38

Finally, let us glance back over this chapter as a whole. By and large, it must be admitted that the story of Old Stone Age man in India is at present monotonous, inhuman stuff. We have no solitary tooth of his, upon which we can exercise our humane imaginations, still less a skull wherein we can enclose that intelligence which was content, age after age, to batter quartzite pebbles into some crudely utile shape. It may be that sometime before 1881 we came nearer to a little knowledge of his likeness if a human cranium discovered by W. Theobald in what may have been a Pleistocene bone-bed in central India was truly of that geologic age.²⁷ But the skull was subsequently lost in the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and we can only wait, with a proper impatience, for Indian palaeontology to get to work anew.