CONCLUSION. S5i 



their old haunts in the north ; and we meet with their remains 

 not only in the late glacial deposits but in the postglacial 

 alluvia and peat of Central and ]STorth-western Europe. But 

 in these deposits they are never accompanied by the relics of 

 Palaeolithic man. If we take a map of Europe and colour accu- 

 rately all those areas over which are spread the deposits of the 

 last glacial epoch — the upper boulder-clay, the morainic debris, 

 diluvial gravel and sand, loss and lehm, and subaerial angular 

 drift — we shall find tbat the coloured part represents regions in 

 which the relics and remains of Palaeolithic man are entirely 

 wanting in all superficial accumulations of alluvia and peat. The 

 conclusion, therefore, seems inevitable that whithersoever the 

 reindeer-hunters of Perigord may have retreated, it could not 

 have been northward through the regions which they occupied 

 during Interglacial times. Nor can we escape from this conclu- 

 sion by pleading that Palaeolithic relics may yet be detected in 

 postglacial accumulations. It is true that our knowledge of 

 these accumulations, although abundant, is not exhaustive, but 

 had Palaeolithic man emigrated northwards we should certainly 

 long ere this have discovered some notable proof of that north- 

 ward migration in the many deposits which have already been 

 examined. The conspicuous fact that none such are forth- 

 coming, although .they have been sedulously searched for, must 

 be taken in the present state of our knowledge as proof that the 

 men of the Eeindeer period did not return with the gradually- 

 retreating northern forms. 



Other writers are of opinion that the man of the Eeindeer 

 period in Southern France probably remained where he was, to 

 become absorbed in the new wave of population that swept into 

 Europe at the close of the Glacial Period. If this were so, then 

 we should expect to find no gap or hiatus in Perigord and the 

 Pyrenean regions between Palaeolithic and Neolithic times ; but 

 in the caves of those districts the same line of demarcation — so 

 striking in the caves of Belgium, England, and elsewhere — 

 separates the accumulations of the two periods. There are 

 certain appearances, however, met with in some Pyrenean caves, 



