(5) 



THE PALAEOLITHIC. 



CHAPTER I. 



Situation and CoMrosiTiox of the Paleolithic and Neolithic 

 South African Implements. 



In 1866 the late Sir Langham Dale discovered close to his 

 residence on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town, stones showing plain 

 marks of artificial working. These examples were submitted to 

 experts in England, who pronounced them to be undoubtedly man's 

 handiwork. 



To the present generation it seems almost incredible that doubt 

 about the workmanship of these implements could have ever been 

 entertained, because among them were the best finished examples of 

 a Solutrian type ever found, and of which two more only have been 

 met with since. 



Willing searchers volunteered their services, and this discovery 

 was followed by numerous ones in the Cape Colony, the Transkei, 

 Griqualand West, where these artefacts were found embedded in 

 mining claims " intermixed with precious stones in the diamond- 

 diffiiiniis " ; later on in Natal, the Transvaal, Southern and Northern 

 Rhodesia, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, the Kalahari region, Mossamedes, 

 &c., &c. 



In fact, these relics of primitive civilisation, be they digging- 

 stones or hand-picks, cleaving-stones or axes, flakes having served 

 as knives, saws, burins, piercers, scrapers, or perforated disks for 

 weight-making, orbicular stones for hand-throwing, or perhaps 

 slinging, smoothed pounders, mullers, querns, or mortars, stones 

 grooved by sharpening Ijone skewers or liodkins, or by reducing to 

 shape the bone shaft of arrows, whether of huge size or ridiculously 

 small, they all abound in South .\frica from west to east, from south 

 to north. 



When they are of a type that might l)e assimilated perhaps to the 



