98 FOSSIL MEN. 



are found in connection with its deposits; or to put 

 it more broadly, in the words of a recent writer, 

 Palaeolithic man was " ignorant of pottery " a very 

 bold statement of a negative, when it is considered 

 how little we know of the said men, and which might 

 be contradicted at once could we discover the site 

 of one of their villages instead of mere cave shelters 

 and drifted implements in river gravels. The theory 

 might, however, prevent any such discovery, for if the 

 site of a village of the men who used the Amiens flint 

 implements should be discovered, and if it contained 

 fragments of pottery and polished hatchets, we might 

 be told that it belonged to the Neolithic age, and it 

 should be separated by countless centuries from the 

 Palaeolithic period. We shall see in the sequel how 

 this applies to the remains of a " Palaeolithic " village^ 

 discovered at Soloutre, in France. If, however, it 

 should appear that neither Palaeolithic man nor his 

 wife actually did make pottery, this would prove not 

 so much their barbarism as their nomadic mode of 

 life, and they may have made and used, like the North 

 American hunter tribes, the most beautiful baskets 

 and bark boxes, which would serve their purposes 

 better than rude pottery. 



It must not, however, be lost sight of that Fournal 

 and Christie have recorded the discovery of fragments 

 of pottery in caverns in the south of France, in mud 

 and breccia containing bones of man mingled with 

 those of extinct animals, among which are mentioned 

 the hyaena and rhinoceros. As the material had been 



