316 



DISCOVERY 



Did Man Exist in the 

 Tertiary Age? 



By E. N. Fallaize 



When once it had been established to the satisfac- 

 tion of the most prominent scientists of the day that 

 the flints — afterwards known as palaeoliths — discovered 

 by Bourcher de Perthes in the Somme Valley in 1848 

 had been shaped by human agencj', and were con- 

 temporary with the gravels in which they had been 

 found, a vast field of speculation and research was 

 opened up to the student of the history of man. These 

 implements came from deposits assigned to the 

 Pleistocene Age, which was the earliest stage of the 

 Quaternary Epoch — the last of the divisions into 

 which geologists had divided the earth's history as 

 revealed by its rocks, and their associated character- 

 istic fossils — and immediately preceded the " recent " 

 times of present conditions. The exploration of 

 Brixham Cave in 185S confirmed the suspicions aroused 

 bj' earlier discoveries in caves that man had lived 

 contemporaneously in Britain with animals now 

 extinct. These facts added thousands of years to the 

 period during which, it was traditionally held, man 

 had inhabited the earth. 



Origin of Eoliths — Opposing Theories 



The publications of Danvin and of writers of the 

 e\'olutionary school made familiar the idea that man 

 and his cultiu'e were the products of a long course of 

 development. By experiment archaeologists learned 

 the difficulties of manufacturing flint implements and 

 came to appreciate the fact that the paL-eolith was by 

 no means the rude stone implement of the popular 

 writer, but was the result of long experience and the 

 product of a highly developed technique. They turned, 

 therefore, to the deposits of the Tertiary Epoch, the 

 third of the great divisions of geological time, in the 

 hope of discovering examples of an earlier and more 

 primitive stjde in man's industry in stone which 

 would serve as evidence of his existence in that era. 

 Nor was it long before this was forthcoming. In 1867 

 L'Abbe Bourgeois announced at the International 

 Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology 

 that he had discovered flints which bore evidence of 

 human handiwork in the Tertiary gravels of Thenay. 

 From that date students of the early phases of man's 

 development ha\'e di\aded into two groups. On the 

 one side stand those who accept the human origin of 

 specimens for which Tertiary age is claimed, and 

 continue from time to time to bring forward fresh evi- 

 dence to support their case ; while on the other side 

 their opponents hotl}' contest the inferences which 



they draw. A vast literature has grown up around 

 the subject in which the violence of the opposing sides 

 is often more remarkable than the finality of their 

 arguments. 



It is not proposed here to examine in detail the 

 arguments of either side, or to discuss seriatim the 

 discoveries from various sites which have been held 

 to be examples of the handiwork of Tertiary man. 

 It is, however, necessary to review the question sum- 

 marily in order to appreciate the bearing of certain 

 recent investigations which appear to advance an 

 appreciable stage towards a final solution. 



To understand the nature of the problem of Ter- 

 tiary man, it must be remembered that there are two 

 questions involved : (i) What is the geological hori- 

 zon from which any given specimen is derived, and, 

 if the deposit is of Tertiary* age, is it undisturbed, so 

 that any specimen for which human origin is claimed 

 may without any question be regarded as a contem- 

 porary W'ith the associated gravels, fossil shells, re- 

 mains of animals, etc. ? (2) Are the chipping and 

 shaping of the flint the result of purposive human 

 action ? This is a question of extreme difficulty, and 

 in the majority of cases the one upon which opinion 

 is divided with little prospect of agreement. Its con- 

 sideration involves a highly technical knowledge of 

 the mode in which a flint will fracture in different 

 circumstances. It is well known that flint fractures 

 under pressure and under the influence of heat or cold. 

 The opponents of the eolith maintain that all speci- 

 mens for which human purposive action is claimed 

 are the result of the action of natural causes. Even 

 the bulb of percussion which arises when a flint is 

 broken by a violent blow, owing to the elasticity of 

 its substance, can be produced by these forces, al- 

 though it was once regarded as indubitable evidence 

 of human handiwork. M. Marcelhn Boule, some 

 j-ears ago, exhibited a number of specimens of typical 

 eolithic character which had been produced bj' a stone- 

 crushing machine in a cement factory. Mr. Hazzle- 

 dine Warren, possibly the most determined opponent 

 of the eolith in this country, has found in deposits in 

 Essex specimens which he regards as typicallj' eolithic 

 in form, but necessarily the products of natural 

 forces, as they belong to the first phase of the Tertiary 

 Period, the Eocene, whereas the primates from whom 

 man derives do not appear until the Oligocene, the 

 second phase of the Tertiary. 



The supporters of eoliths are not daunted by these 

 arguments. They point to the fact that it is possible 

 to classifj' the roughly fashioned flints into perfectly 

 well-defined types — scrapers, borers, etc. — of which 

 the uses may readily be conjectured, this obviously 

 pointing to purposive action and not to a fortuitous 

 result produced by natural causes. Secondly, they 



