Sir IT. H. Eoicorth—The Earliest Traces of Man. 343 



bound to say it appears to me a very crude and remote reason 

 upon which to base such a stupendous hypothesis. 



Apart from the characters of the stones themselves, there is the 

 difficulty of their geological age. In the book already referred to 

 which I am about to publish, the age of the southern gravels will, 

 among other things, be discussed. I have ventured to argue in it 

 once again that these plateau gravels, as now distributed, were not 

 the result of diurnal causes, fluviatile or otherwise, but of the same 

 general cause which laid down the great mass of the drift and which 

 acted independently of the contour of the country. I cannot, there- 

 fore, see in these gravels any traces of that vast lapse of time 

 postulated by the champions of the human origin of the eoliths, and 

 on the supposition that they were of vastly greater age than 

 paleeoliths. 



We must remember another fact, namely, that the types we style 

 PalEeolithic, which are well marked, can now, as we have seen, be 

 traced back to the horizon of the Forest Bed. It is very strange 

 that some of them should not occur with these eoliths in the plateau 

 gravels, that in many places they should not overlap and be found 

 mixed together, and that notohere, so far as we know, should these 

 same eoliths be found with the remains of extinct animals by which 

 their real age could be tested. How is it they do not occur in the 

 caverns or in the brickearths and gravels of the valleys, and how is 

 it there is no continuity of shape and contour with their successors ? 

 It is these questions which stiffen our obstinacy and increase our 

 scepticism about these so-called eoliths. 



A few words about another matter. As we have seen, the real 

 and logical distinction in Europe between the so-called Palaeolithic 

 and the so-called Neolithic age is the existence of a gap hitherto 

 unbridged. On the one side we find articles of human workmanship 

 associated with extinct beasts, and on the other with domesticated 

 animals, the two never having been found mixed together. This is 

 the real and supreme distinction ; for in regard to the shapes of the 

 implements, their mode of tooling, etc., intermediate forms occur — 

 perhaps I ought to say necessarily occur. The significance of 

 this gap is a polemical subject. To me it has always meant a great 

 catastrophe, and I have urged it in many ways and produced the 

 evidence for it in many quarters, and was never more convinced 

 of its occurrence than at this moment. I have never, however, 

 argued that this catastrophe, whatever it was, overwhelmed the 

 greater part of Africa. That continent seems to have a very long 

 history as a continuous subaerial surface. Its black races represent 

 very primitive forms of man, many of them hardly changed for 

 thousands of years, and living apparently very much in the same 

 way and with the same surroundings as Pala3olithic man had in 

 Europe. 



Palaeolithic man may therefore be said to still survive in Africa. It 

 is consequently not wonderful that in several places on that continent, 

 notably in South Africa, in Somaliland, and in the Sahara, implements 

 called Palaeolithic have occurred in large numbers, not buried in 



