THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN 71 



implements and his monuments or works of art. But we 

 must remember that the earliest men left no archeo- 

 logical remains; indeed, "They had not advanced be- 

 yond the use of sticks and unchipped stones. ... If no 

 paleolithic remains earlier than the late quaternary 

 period are found, it does not follow that man did not 

 exist until the late quaternary. On the contrary, it is 

 certain that, if flints were then chipped by men, earlier 

 men had lived, who had not thought of chipping flints." 29 

 The implements form a valuable part of our evidence 

 because they are most numerous and widespread and 

 occur under conditions which afford the best proof of 

 their antiquity. When we find chipped stone imple- 

 ments buried beneath the drift and undisturbed boulder 

 clay which some glacier gouged out of the valley wall 

 and piled up hundreds of thousands of years ago, we 

 must regard the age of the glacial deposit as a measure 

 of the age of the stone implements. Or, if an excava- 

 tion in the floor of some ancient cave uncovers humanly 

 fashioned stone tools under a thick stalagmite formation, 

 we can only regard the undisturbed position of the im- 

 plements as an indication of extreme age. Many primi- 

 tive peoples to-day live upon shell-fish and leave the dis- 

 carded shells near their dwellings. As time goes on the 

 pile of shells accumulates. We call such heaps of shells, 

 "Kitchen-Middens." If now we find under such 

 kitchen-middens among the shells, rude unpolished spear 

 heads, these implements must be at least as old as the 

 accumulation. In Tierra del Fuego (Elizabeth Island), 

 there are kitchen-middens upon old beaches raised to 

 considerable heights above the present sea-level, so an- 

 cient that the shells of which they are composed are ex- 



29 Giddings, op. cit., p. 211. 



