14 REPORT— 1897. 



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 Palffiolithic 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 pro- 

 bability 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 Palaeolithic 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 Poi'tugal. Some few 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 discovered ; 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 farther east in the lateritic deposits 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 imple- 

 ments from the very ancient gravels of the Manzanares at Madrid. In 

 the case of the African discoveries we have as yet no definite Palseonto- 

 logical evidence by which to fix their antiquity, but in the Narbada 

 Valley of Western India Palaeolithic implements of quartzite seem to be 

 associated with a local fauna of Pleistocene age, comprising, like that of 

 Europe, the elephant, hippopotamus, ox, and other mammals of species 

 now extinct. A correlation of the two faunas with a view of ascertaining 

 their chronological relations is beset with many difficulties, but there 

 seems reason for accepting this Indian Pleistocene fauna as in some 

 degree more ancient than the European. 



