EARLY MAN 



these palaeolithic men passed to the more carefully finished implements 

 of flint and bone which were found at Creswell in the cave earth. Doubt- 

 less they were akin to the race of men who, in the same age, hunted the 

 reindeer and the horse in Switzerland and the south of France. 



The diagram 1 (seep. 191) will show the conditions under which the 

 discoveries were made in the Church Hole Cave. While the red sand 

 only furnished rough quartzite tools, the cave earth above yielded objects- 

 of bone, antler, and flint. These included (a) a well-shaped needle, abso- 

 lutely perfect, made out of the metacarpal or metatarsal bone of a 

 ruminant, (b] two bone awls fashioned out of the tibiae of a hare and 

 polished by long and continued use, (c) a broad fragment of bone rounded 

 at the end and with its edges notched, (d) two carefully rounded rods 

 made of antler, (e) various tools of flint and quartzite. The bone awls 

 and needles suggest that the cave-men wore skin clothing like that of the 

 modern Australians and Fuegians, or like the pre-historic inhabitants of 

 Egypt described by Professor Flinders Petrie. 



The county is rich in caves other than those of Creswell. There 

 are some at Mansfield which have been used for dwellings up to now ; 

 and the city of Nottingham and its immediate neighbourhood are 

 honeycombed with hollows and openings in the rock. These have not 

 been explored systematically, but as far as may be learned there is nothing 

 to connect them with palaeolithic man. It will be most convenient to 

 consider them at the end of this article. 



THE NEOLITHIC AGE 



A long interval of time elapsed between the Palaeolithic Age and 

 the appearance of neolithic man. England no longer formed part of the 

 European continent, but was separated from it by the English Channel. 

 The abruptness of the transition from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone 

 Age suggests that some great cataclysm must have taken place by which 

 in England at least palaeolithic man was swept away, or driven out before 

 the arrival of his successor. The new comers were acquainted with many 

 of the arts upon which developed civilization was to rest. They were 

 not only hunters, but fishermen and miners. They had begun to culti- 

 vate the earth, and to breed domestic cattle. They had even begun to 

 make pottery. And towards the end of this period they had learned to 

 shape huge stones into monuments of the dead, and perhaps temples for 

 worship. Recent excavation seems to show that Stonehenge itself marks 

 the close of the New Stone Age. If we may compare palaeolithic man 

 to backward races, such as the Eskimo in the north, or the bushmen of 

 Africa, neolithic man is not only illustrated by, but is actually represented 

 by, the Iberians who inhabited these islands before the arrival of the 

 Celt, and whose descendants are still distinguishable in the populations of 

 the western coasts of Europe, notably in the Basques of the Spanish 

 peninsula. For it is more than probable that the dark-skinned type of 



1 Fig. i, from Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xxxiii, opp. p. 588. By kind permission of Rev. J. M. Mello. 

 I 185 24 



