32 EARLY MAN IN DORSET. 



extraordinary difference of opinion in regard to the 

 reconstruction of this skull, one authority, Professor Keith, 

 making the brain occupy 1,600 cubic centimetres, as large 

 as that of a modern European ; another, Dr. Smith 

 Woodward, making it 1,100, only just human. Another 

 claimant to the title of our earliest countryman is the 

 " Ipswich " man, and a little later comes the " Galley Hill 

 Man.'" These remains were certainly discovered in 

 interglacial beds, but, of course, everything depends on these 

 remains belonging to the bed in which they are found and 

 not being interments of a later date. The utmost care is 

 taken to ascertain that the soil above is undisturbed, but 

 it is difficult to get evidence that satisfies everybody. 



Here I must leave this introduction to my main subject 

 and come without further delay to Early Man in Dorset. 

 Let us see how his remains fit into the framework we have 

 constructed, and how we may understand the real interest 

 there is in the fresh discoveries and investigations that are 

 continually being made. River Drift implements, un- 

 questionably of pleistocene age, have been found at Dewlish 

 and at Hawkchurch, and that is all that Sir Bertram Windle 

 in his useful book, Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England, 

 gives us credit for. But the High Plateau gravels of East 

 Dorset are very rich in flint implements of a rude and early 

 type. Moreover, it is quite easy to find in these beds flints 

 which have been subjected to a long-continued action from 

 fire, and this can only have happened in connection with 

 human habitations. In the excursion of the Bournemouth 

 Natural Science Society on May 23, 1914, we at once found 

 these burnt flints in a gravel pit. Unfortunately none of 

 these finds can be said to be found in any definite horizon, 

 for the Plateau gravels are the deposit of huge floods which 

 have swept the materials down from higher levels and must 

 have shuffled them in this process like a pack of cards. An 

 extremely interesting find was lately made by two boys of 

 Sherborne School, let us hope within the borders of the 

 county, and exhibited when the South-Eastern Union of 



