Notes and Comments. 325 
the find belongs to the early Pleistocene period. The associated 
implements are of the same Chellean or Acheulean type as 
those so abundant in the mid-Pleistocene Brick-earths of the 
Thames Valley between Crayford and Gravesend. They may 
imply that Eo-anthropus belongs to that horizon, in which 
the stag is present and the reindeer absent. It must not, 
however, be forgotten that the classificatory value of these 
implements is lessened by their wide range in Britain and the 
Continent through the later Pleistocene River deposits. The 
stag, the beaver, and the horse of Piltdown—leaving out of 
account the Pliocene fossil mammals more or less worn into 
pebbles—are common both to the pre-Glacial Forest-bed and 
the Lower Brick-earths of the Thames Valley. It must also 
be noted that the intermediate characters of the Piltdown 
skull and lower jaw point rather to the Pliocene than the Pleis- 
tocene stage of evolution. We must wait for further evidence 
before the exact horizon can be ascertained. On the Continent 
there is no such difficulty.’ 
EARLY MAN ON THE CONTINENT. 
‘The earliest traces of man are there represented at Mauer 
by a mandible associated with the peculiar fauna of the Forest- 
bed, showing that Homo Heidelbergensis, a chinless man, was 
living in the Rhine Valley during the earliest stage of the 
Pleistocene. The Neanderthal man, thick skulled and large- 
brained, with small chin and stooping gait, belongs to the 
Mousterian stage, that, in my opinion, is not clearly defined 
from the Chellean and Acheulian gravels of the Late Pleistocene. 
He ranged from the Rhine through France southwards as far 
as Gibraltar, and was probably the maker of the Paleolithic 
implements of those strata throughout this region. It is also 
probable that he visited Britain, then part of the Continent, 
in following the migration of the mammalia northward and 
westwards. While primitive men of these types inhabited 
Europe there was no place in the Pleistocene fauna for the 
thin-skulled men taken by Dr. Keith* and others to prove that 
modern types of men lived in Britain in the Pleistocene age. 
Man appears in Britain and the Continent at the period when 
he might be expected to appear, from the study of the evolution 
of the Tertiary Mammalia—at the beginning of the Pleistocene 
age when the existing Eutherian mammalian species were 
abundant. He may be looked for in the Pliocene when the 
existing species were few. In the older strata—Miocene, 
Oligocene, Eocene—he can only be represented by an ancestry 
of intermediate forms.’ 
* The skeletons of Galley Hill, in Kent, and that of Cheddar Cave in 
Somerset, have, in my opinion, been buried, and do not belong to the 
Pleistocene age. 
1915 Oct. 1. 
