97 



THE PALAEOLITHIC PERIOD IN THE 



THAMES BASIN. 



By J. P. JOHNSON. 



THE earliest evidence of pre-historic man's presence in the 

 Thames Basin is afforded by an ancient deposit of gravel 

 which occurs in patches on the Chalk Plateau known as the 

 North Downs. The Plateau Gravel indeed is the oldest deposit 

 that has yielded relics of the primaeval savage. These consist of 

 pieces of flint, tlie edges of which in most cases have been 

 notched through use, though in many they have been chipped 

 into more or less regular curves suitable for scraping, which 

 is the commonest and no doubt one of the first uses to which a 

 piece of flint was put by primitive man. These rude implements 

 from the Plateau Gravel belong to the earliest, or Eolithic, 

 period of the Stone Age. 



After the deposition of the Plateau Gravel a great interval of 

 time elapsed during which no fluviatile beds w^ere laid down in 

 the area under consideration, so that when the next series of 

 deposits — the valley-drifts — began to be formed, man had reached 

 a much higher state of culture than that of the Eolithic period. 



The valley drifts occur on the sides of the valleys where they 

 have been left by the rivers at former epochs in their excavating 

 career. They may be grouped into a high and low-level series, 

 and consist chiefly of gravel, though the latter contain tliick 

 masses of b.rickearth or loam in places, especially in the main 

 valley below London. The implements found in these deposits 

 are termed Palaeolithic and difl"er very materially from those 

 from the Plateau Gravel ; indeed they mark a complete revolution 

 in the art of making flint implements. 



The scraping and allied tools, which still make up the bulk of 

 the implements, are now all fashioned out of artiflcially produced 

 flakes. Man had no longer any need to search for suitably 

 shaped splinters, as he had now learnt to make them for himself. 

 The method employed was to first obtain a flat surface by 

 breaking off" the end of a nodule and then driving oft slices at 

 right-angles to it by sharp blows with another stone. Some of 

 these flake tools can now be assigned to definite purposes but 

 the uses to which the majority were put are quite inexplicable. 

 Fig. I shows a scraper of average workmanship. 



