August 19, 1897 J 



NA TURE 



n^ 



Some among us may be able to call to mind the excitement, 

 not only among men of science, but among the general public, 

 when, in 1859, the discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes and 

 Dr. Rigollot in the gravels of the valley of the Somme, at Abbe- 

 ville and Amiens, were confirmed by the investigations of the 

 late Sir Joseph Prestwich, myself, and others, and the co- 

 existence of Man with the extinct animals of the Quaternary 

 fauna, such as the mammoth and woolly-haired rhinoceros, was 

 first virtually established. It was, at the same time, pointed out 

 that these relics belonged to a far earlier date than the ordinary 

 stone weapons found upon the surface, which usually showed 

 signs of grinding or polishing, and that, in fact, there were two 

 Stone Ages in Britain. To these the terms Neolithic and 

 Palixiolithic were subsequently applied by Sir John Lubbock. 



The excitement was not less, when, at the meeting of this 

 Association at Aberdeen in the autumn of that year, Sir Charles 

 Lyell, in the presence of the Prince Consort, called attention to 

 the discoveries in the valley of the Somme, the site of which he 

 had himself visited, and to the vast lapse of time indicated by the 

 position of the implements in drift-deposits a hundred feet above 

 the existing river. 



The conclusions forced upon those who examined the facts on 

 the spot did not receive immediate acceptance by all who were 

 interested in Geology and Archaeology, and fierce were the con- 

 troversies on the subject that were carried on both in the news- 

 papers and before various learned societies. 



It is at the same time instructive and amusing to look back 

 on the discussions of those days. While one class of objectors 

 accounted for the configuration of the flint implements from the 

 gravels by some unknown chemical agency, by the violent and 

 continued gyratory action of water, by fracture resulting from 

 pressure, by rapid cooling when hot or by rapid heating when 

 cold, or even regarded them as aberrant forms of fossil fishes, 

 there were others who, when compelled to acknowledge that the 

 implements were the work of men's hands, attempted to impugn 

 and set aside the evidence as to the circumstances under which 

 they had been discovered. In doing this they adopted the view 

 that the worked flints had either been introduced into the con- 

 taining beds at a comparatively recent date, or if they actually 

 formed constituent parts of the gravel then that this was a mere 

 modern alluvium resulting from floods at no very remote period. 



In the course of a few years the main stream of scientific 

 thought left this controversy behind, though a tendency to cut 

 down the lapse of time necessary for all the changes that have 

 taken place in the configuration of the surface of the earth and 

 in the character of its occupants since the time of the Palaeolithic 

 gravels, still survives in the inmost recesses of the hearts of not 

 a few observers. 



In his Address to this Association at the Bath meeting of 

 1864, Sir Charles Lyell struck so true a note that I am tempted 

 to reproduce the paragraph to which I refer : — 



" When speculations on the long series of events which 

 occurred in the glacial and post-glacial periods are indulged in, 

 the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the 

 time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all refer- 

 able to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the 

 number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a 

 disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in 

 prehistoric times by investing the causes which have modified 

 the animate and inanimate world with extraordinary and ex- 

 cessive energy. It is related of a great Irish orat9r of our day 

 that when he was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously 

 towards a public charity, he was persuaded by a friend to make 

 a more liberal donation. In doing so he apologised for his first 

 apparent want of generosity by saying that his early life had been 

 a constant struggle with scanty means, and that ' they who are 

 born to affluence cannot easily imagine how long a time it takes 

 to get the chill of poverty out of one's bones.' In like manner 

 we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of 

 thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is 

 called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making 

 what seems so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout 

 our early education we have been accustomed to such strict 

 economy in all that relates to the chronology of the earth and 

 its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by old 

 traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is convinced, and 

 we are persuaded that we ought to make more liberal grants of 

 time to the Geologist, we feel how hard it is to get the chill of 

 poverty out of our bones." 



Many, however, have at the present day got over this feeling, 



NO. 1 45 I, VOL. 56] 



and of late years the general tendency of those engaged upon 

 the question of the antiquity of the human race has been in the 

 direction of seeking for evidence by which the existence of Man 

 upon the earth could be carried Ijack to a date earlier than that 

 of the Quaternary gravels. 



There is little doubt that such evidence will eventually be 

 forthcoming, but, judging from all probability, it is not in 

 Northern Europe that the cradle of the human race will 

 eventually be discovered, but in some part of the world more 

 favoured by a tropical climate, where abundant means of sub- 

 sistence could be procured, and where the necessity for warm 

 clothing did not exist. 



Before entering into speculations on this subject, or attempting 

 to lay down the limits within which we may safely accept recent 

 discoveries as firmly established, it will be well to glance at some 

 of the cases in which implements are stated to have been found 

 under circumstances which raise a presumption of the existence 

 of man in pre-Glacial, Pliocene, or even Miocene times. 



Flint implements of ordinary Paleolithic type have, for 

 instance, been recorded as found in the Eastern Counties of 

 England, in beds beneath the Chalky Boulder Clay ; but on 

 careful examination the geological evidence has not to my mind 

 proved satisfactory, nor has it, I believe, been generally accepted. 

 Moreover, the archaeological difficulty that Man, at two such 

 remote epochs as the pre-Glacial and the post-Glacial, even if 

 the term Glacial be limited to the Chalky Boulder Clay, should 

 have manufactured implements so identical in character that 

 they cannot be distinguished apart, seems to have been entirely 

 ignored. 



Within the last few months we have had the report of worked 

 flints having been discovered in the late Pliocene Forest Bed of 

 Norfolk, but in that instance the signs of human workmanship 

 upon the flints are by no means apparent to all observers. 



But such an antiquity as that of the Forest Bed is as nothing 

 when compared with that which would be implied by the dis- 

 coveries of the work of men's hands in the Pliocene and Miocene 

 beds of England, France, Italy, and Portugal, which have been 

 accepted by some Geologists. There is one feature in these 

 cases which has hardly received due attention, and that is the 

 isolated character of the reputed discoveries. Had man, for 

 instance, been present in Britain during the Crag Period, it 

 would be strange indeed if the sole traces of his existence that 

 he left were a perforated tooth of a large shark, the sawn rib of 

 a manatee, and a beaming full face, carved on the shell of a 

 pectunculus ! 



In an address to the Anthropological Section at the Leeds 

 meeting of this Association in 1890 I dealt somewhat fully with 

 these supposed discoveries of the remains of human art in beds 

 of Tertiary date ; and I need not here go further into the ques- 

 tion. Suffice it to say that I see no reason why the verdict of 

 "not proven" at which I then arrived should be reversed. 



In the case of a more recent discovery in Upper Burma in 

 beds at first pronounced to be Upper Miocene, but subsequently 

 " definitely ascertained to be Pliocene," some of the flints are 

 of purely natural and not artificial origin, so that two questions 

 arise : first. Were the fossil remains associated with the worked 

 flints or with those of natural forms ? And second, Where they 

 actually found in the bed to which they have been assigned, or 

 did they merely lie together on the surface ? 



Even the Pithecanthropus erectus of Dr. Eugene Dubois from 

 Java meets with some incredulous objectors from both the 

 physiological and the geological sides. From the point of view 

 of the latter the difficulty lies in determining the exact age of 

 what are apparently alluvial beds in the bottom of a river valley. 



When we return to Palaeolithic man, it is satisfactory to feel 

 that we are treading on comparatively secure ground, and that 

 the discoveries of the last forty years in Britain alone enable us 

 to a great extent to reconstitute his history. We may not know 

 the exact geological period when first he settled in the British 

 area, but we have good evidence that he occupied it at a time 

 when the configuration of the surface was entirely different from 

 what it is at present : when the river valleys had not been cut 

 down to anything like their existing depth, when the fauna of 

 the country was of a totally different character from that of the 

 present day, when the extension of the southern part of the 

 island seaward was in places such that the land was continuous 

 with that of the continent, and when in all probability a far 

 more rainy climate prevailed. We have proofs of the occupation 

 of the country by man during the long lapse of time that was 

 necessary for the excavation of the river valleys. We have 



