lo PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1912 



found, he believes, under several feet of boulder clay on the 

 gravelly sand, possibly interglacial, the boulder clay having 

 worked its way down the hill slope from the material capping 

 the plateau ,while the whole river valley, at the head of which 

 the discovery was made, is pierced with rifts from land-slides. 



It would be premature to express a definite opinion on 

 the subject until we are in possession of expert examination 

 of the strata in which the body was found. Such enquiries 

 have, doubtless, been made, or are being made, by geologists 

 whose verdict will settle the question. It may, however, be 

 remarked that this is not the only case in which there is rea- 

 son to suspect that the evolutional seriation has been disturbed 

 by discoveries of remains which appear to be higher in type 

 than might have been expected from the character of the 

 strata in which they were found. 



Assuming the geological conditions to be those which 

 Professor Keith accepts, various important considerations 

 suggest themselves. In the first place, this Ipswich specimen 

 is obviously antecedent to the skeleton discovered at Galley 

 Hill, near Northfleet, in Kent, by Mr E. T. Newton, in 1895. 

 This, in spite of some adverse criticism, is now, on the high 

 authority of Dr W. L. H. Duckworth' and others, recognized 

 to be of great antiquity, and to belong to the Aurignacian 

 period. The pit in which it was found, according to Mr Hutton, 

 invades " the high-level terrace gravel " of the Thames valley, 

 this 100 feet terrace being part of the ancient bed of the river. 

 But this, in its turn, rests upon the boulder clay, and, there- 

 fore, assuming the correctness of the geological evidence 

 regarding the Ipswich skeleton, according to Professor Keith, it 

 belongs to a much earlier date than the Galley Hill man, who 

 is referred to a very advanced civilization of the flint age. If 

 this view be accepted, the Ipswich man, whose physical char- 

 acteristics do not essentially differ from those of modern 

 Englishmen, establishes what seems to be a break in the chain 

 of human evolution, by orderly stages, from some lower 

 anthropoid, a doctrine which has hitherto met with the accept- 

 ance of English palaeontologists. 



I. Prehistoric Man (1912) pp. 20, 32 et seqq., 56 et seqq. 



