214 Annals of the South African Museum. 



It has been shown also that the purport of the bouchers is better 

 explained here than that of similar implements found elsewhere, 

 especially those made of the same material. They are plainly 

 digging or cleaving tools, purposely trimmed. 



Here, as in Europe, we find palaeoliths in alluvium, on terraces, 

 on plateaux. But the situation of these finds cannot be said to be 

 as convincing regarding their relative age as, for example, those of 

 the Thames or Somme valleys. Yet it is impossible to deny to 

 some of our local finds an antiquity comparable with that of the 

 Eiver-Drift period of Europe. 



On the other hand, we meet in certain situations or sites with 

 palaeoliths of archaic form together with coarse chips, flakes, nuclei 

 of the Bush type which I term South African neohthic (Fishhook), 

 or so perilously near a "factory site" of similar implements 

 (Cradock) that the question may well be asked, Are not the palaeo- 

 liths and neoliths coeval ? Have they not kept pace, the one with 

 the other, without the first merging into the second, differing in this 

 manner from the Aurignacian following the Mousterian, but sup- 

 planting it? 



After the discovery in the Coldstream cave of implements asso- 

 ciated in the sepultures with bone implements, pounders, mullers, 

 braders, and also with polychrome and monochrome paintings on 

 stones, this question must be answered in the affirmative ; and we 

 have here no hiatus in the chronology of implements such as exists 

 still in Europe. 



Truly these implements have not the patina of those found on the 

 surface or exposed in cuttings, or talus, nor that indescribable some- 

 thing which, to the practised eye, tells of great antiquity. The 

 " altogether," however, is that of the bouchers and scrapers of 

 Fishhook, and also of those of the neighbourhood of the St. Blaize 

 rock-shelter, and of the scraper found in the raised beach of Braak 

 Eiver, It is therefore impossible now to doubt that the Strand 

 Looper aboriginal manufactured these pal^oliths, and moreover, 

 that some of them are of great antiquity. Whether all the palaeo- 

 lithic type artefacts are to be ascribed to him remains an open 

 question. 



But that the race is a very old one would seem also to receive 

 corroboration from the physical peculiarities which are essentially 

 his own. 



The occupier of the Knysna-Humansdorp caves is less dolicho- 

 cephalic than the other two South African groups of the San — he is 

 viesaticephalic but under BO in index. He was artistically gifted, 



