16 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



from a palaeolithic culture to a dawning civilization would be looked 

 for in these deposits, reading from the bottom upward. 



8. The archaeological and early historic record of Ancient Egypt 

 is found upon the surface and within the upper layers of the 

 alluvium. 



Assuming that the foregoing geological interpretations are 

 correct, the record is tolerably complete from the times when 

 flint-working beings inhabited the plateau and lived along 

 the precipitous shores of the fiord and lakes, through the 

 diminishing stages of the river to the period in which a prim- 

 itive civilization made its appearance among the dwellers of 

 the modern valley. If the lacustrine deposits are correctly 

 placed in the late Pliocene and First Glacial periods and if 

 the presence of flint artifacts within these lake deposits and 

 upon the plateau has been correctly interpreted, beings 

 capable of producing rough stone implements existed in 

 Egypt even as early as the First Glacial Period of Europe, 

 which may be conservatively estimated as some 500,000 

 years from the present time. Only the most extreme placing 

 of the earliest European flint workers (Pre-Chellean) would 

 take us so far into the past. 4 



Perhaps the age of the lake deposits, by which the age of 

 the plateau implements is determined, has been overesti- 

 mated. The interpretation of the lacustrine flints as 

 washed in from the plateau may be incorrect. But in any 

 case it appears that implement-making beings existed in 

 northeastern Africa at a very remote period. It is generally 

 accepted that the Pre-Chellean flint workers entered Europe 

 from another continent. The region of southeastern Asia 

 has been most commonly looked to as their point of origin. 

 In view of the geological and cultural records of the Nile 

 valley we may well entertain the hypothesis that the im- 

 mediate migration into Europe may have been from Africa. 



4 The vexed question of the so-called eoliths is disregarded, since the flints 

 of the lake-beds and the plateau are comparable with the Chellean and Pre- 

 Chellean implements of western Europe. 



