372 



NA TURE 



[August 19, 1897 



found the old floors on which his habitations were fixed, we 

 have been able to trace him at work on the manufacture of flint 

 instruments, and by building up the one upon the other the 

 flakes struck off" by the primeval workman in those remote times 

 we have been able to reconstruct the blocks of flint which served 

 as his material. 



That the duration of the Palaeolithic Period must have ex- 

 tended over an almost incredible length of time is sufticiently 

 proved by the fact that valleys, some miles in width and of a 

 depth of from lOO to 1 50 feet, have been eroded since the deposit 

 of the earliest implement-bearing beds. Nor is the apparent 

 duration of this period diminished by the consideration that the 

 floods which hollowed out the valleys were not in all probability 

 of such frequent occurrence as to teach Palaeolithic man by ex- 

 perience the danger of settling too near to the streams, for had 

 he kept to the higher slopes of the valley there would have 

 been but little chance of his implements having so constantly 

 formed constituent parts of the gravels deposited by the floods. 



The examination of British cave-deposits aff"ords corroborative 

 evidence of this extended duration of the Palaeolithic Period. 

 In Kent's Cavern at Torijuay, for instance, we find in the lowest 

 deposit, the breccia below the red cave-earth, implements of 

 flint and chert corresponding in all respects with those of the 

 high level and most ancient river gravels. In the cave-earth 

 these are scarcer, though implements occur which also have their 

 analogues in the river deposits ; but, what is more remarkable, 

 harpoons of reindeer's horn and needles of bone are present, 

 identical in form and character with those of the caverns of the 

 Reindeer Period in the South of France, and suggestive of some 

 bond of union or identity of descent between the early tro- 

 glodytes, whose habitations were geographically so widely 

 separated the one from the other. 



In a cavern at Creswell Crags, on the confines of Derbyshire 

 and Nottinghamshire, a bone has moreover been found engraved 

 with a representation of parts of a horse in precisely the same 

 style as the engraved bones of the French caves. 



It is uncertain whether any of the River-drift specimens 

 belong to so late a date as these artistic cavern -remains ; but 

 the greatly superior antiquity of even these to any Neolithic 

 relics is testified by the thick layer of stalagmite, which had 

 been deposited in Kent's Cavern before its occupation by men 

 of the Neolithic and Bronze Periods. 



Towards the close of the period covered by the human occu- 

 pation of the French caves, there seems to have been a dwindling 

 in the number of the larger animals constituting the Quaternary 

 fauna, whereas their remains are present in abundance in the 

 lower and therefore more recent of the valley gravels. This 

 circumstance may aff'ord an argument in favour of regarding the 

 period represented by the later French caves as a continuation 

 of that during which the old river gravels were deposited, and 

 yet the great change in the fauna that has taken place since the 

 latest of the cave-deposits included in the Paleolithic Period 

 is indicative of an immense lapse of time. 



How much greater must have been the time required for the 

 more conspicuous change between the old Quaternary fauna of 

 the river gravels and that characteristic of the Neolithic Period ! 



As has been pointed out by Prof. Boyd Dawkins, only thirty- 

 one out of the forty eight well-ascertained species living in the 

 post-Glacial or River-drift Period survived into prehistoric or 

 Neolithic times. We have not, indeed, any means at command 

 for estimating the number of centuries which such an important 

 change indicates ; but when we remember that the date of the 

 commencement of the Neolithic or Surface Stone Period is 

 still shrouded in the mist of a dim antiquity, and that prior to 

 that commencement the River-drift Period had long come to an 

 end ; and when we further take into account the almost incon- 

 ceivable ages that even under the most favourable conditions the 

 excavation of wide and deep valleys by river action implies, the 

 remoteness of the date at which the Palaeolithic Period had its 

 beginning almost transcends our power of imagination. 



We find distinct traces of river action from 100 to 200 feet 

 above the level of existing streams and rivers, and sometimes at 

 a great distance from them ; we observe old fresh-water deposits 

 on the slopes of valleys several miles in width ; we find that 

 long and lofty escarpments of rock have receded unknown dis- 

 tances since their summits were first occupied by Palaeolithic 

 man ; we see that the whole side of a wide river valley has been 

 carried away by an invasion of the sea, which attacked and re- 

 moved a barrier of chalk clifl's from 400 to 600 feet in height ; 

 we find that what was formerly an inland river has been widened 



NO. 1 45 I, VOL. 56] 



out into an arm of the sea, now the highway of our fleets, and 

 that gravels which were originally deposited in the bed of some 

 ancient river now cap isolated and lofty hills. 



And yet, remote as the date of the first known occupation ot 

 Britain by man may be, it belongs to what, geologically speak- 

 ing, must be regarded as a quite recent period, for we are now 

 in a position to fix with some degree of accuracy its place on the 

 geological scale. Thanks to investigations ably carried out at 

 Hoxne in Suffolk, and at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, by Mr. 

 Clement Reid, under the auspices of this Association and of the 

 Royal Society, we know that the implement-bearing beds at 

 those places undoubtedly belong to a time subsequent to the 

 deposit of the Great Chalky Boulder Clay of the Eastern 

 Counties of England. It is, of course, self-evident that this 

 vast deposit, in whatever manner it may have been formed, 

 could not, for centuries after its deposition was complete, have 

 presented a surface inhabitable by man. Moreover, at a dis- 

 tance but little further north, beds exist which also, though at a 

 somewhat later date, were apparently formed under Glacial 

 conditions. At Hoxne the interval between the deposit of the 

 Boulder Clay and of the implement bearing beds is distinctly 

 proved to have witnessed at least two noteworthy changes in 

 climate. The beds immediately reposing on the Clay are char- 

 acterised by the presence of alder in abundance, of hazel, and 

 yew, as well as by that of numerous flowering plants indicative 

 of a temperate climate very diflerent from that under which the 

 Boulder Clay itself was formed. Above these beds characterised 

 by temperate plants, comes a thick and more recent series of 

 strata, in which leaves of the dwarf Arctic willow and birch 

 abound, and which were in all probability deposited under 

 conditions like those of the cold regions of Siberia and North 

 America. 



At a higher level and of more recent date than these — from 

 which they are entirely distinct— are the beds containing Pateo- 

 lithic implements, formed in all probability under conditions not 

 essentially different from those of the present day. However 

 this may be, we have now conclusive evidence that the Palaeo- 

 lithic implements are, in the Eastern Counties of England, of a 

 date long posterior to that of the Great Chalky Boulder Clay. 



It may be said, and said truly, that the implements at Hoxne 

 cannot be shown to belong to the beginning rather than to some 

 later stage of the Palaeolithic Period. The changes, however, 

 that have taken place at Hoxne in the surface configuration of 

 the country prove that the beds containing the implements 

 cannot belong to the close of that period. 



It must, moreover, be remembered that in what are probably 

 the earliest of the Palaeolithic deposits of the Eastern Counties, 

 those at the highest level, near Brandon in Norfolk, where the 

 gravels contain the largest proportion of pebbles derived from 

 Glacial beds, some of the implements themselves have been 

 manufactured from materials not native to the spot but brought 

 from a distance, and derived in all probability either from the 

 Boulder Clay or from some of the beds associated with it. 



We must, however, take a wider view of the whole question, 

 for it must not for a moment be supposed that there are the 

 slightest grounds for believing that the civilisation, such as it 

 was, of the Paleolithic Period originated in the British Isles. 

 We find in other countries implements so identical in form and 

 character with British specimens that they might have been 

 manufactured by the same hands. These occur over large areas 

 in France under similar conditions to those that prevail in 

 England. The same forms have been discovered in the ancient 

 river gravels of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Some fesv have 

 been recorded from the north of Africa, and analogous types 

 occur in considerable numbers in the south of that continent. 

 On the banks of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above its 

 present level, implements of the European types have been dis- 

 covered ; while in Somaliland, in an ancient river valley at a 

 great elevation above the sea, Mr. Seton-Karr has collected a 

 large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, 

 judging from their form and character, might have been. dug 

 out of the drift deposits of the Somme or the Seine, the Thames 

 or the ancient Solent. 



In the valley of the Euphrates implements of the same kind 

 have also been found, and again further east in. the lateritic de- 

 posits of Southern India they have been obtained in considerable 

 numbers. It is not a little remarkable, and is at the same time 

 highly suggestive, that a form of implement almost peculiar to 

 Madras reappears among implements from the very ancient 

 gravels of the Manzanares at Madrid. In the case of the 



