DISCOVERY OF REMAINS OF PREHISTORIC MAN 73 



rock shelters and caves of Central and Southern France, of the 

 Pyrenees, and along the shores of the Mediterranean, but when 

 the severe conditions of that time came to an end and the climate 

 improved, there seems to be no evidence that he moved back 

 to his old haunts and hunting grounds, but passed eastward 

 into Switzerland and the region about the headwaters of the 

 Danube and the Rhine. 



From this time on, we lose sight of Palaeolithic man, there is 

 no trace of him to be found in any deposit which overlies or is 

 more recent than the accumulations of the third glacial epoch. 

 Beyond this, before man reappears at the beginning of the Neo- 

 lithic age, there seems to be a gap, a considerable interval of 

 time in which he is entirely lost from sight. In almost every 

 series of deposits containing the remains or implements of both 

 Palaeolithic and Neolithic man, there is a sterile layer of greater 

 or less thickness which separates the two ; sometimes it is a 

 stalagmite floor of considerable thickness and representing a great 

 period of time. Man must have been somewhere, evolving and 

 developing, and acquiring the arts and culture with which we 

 find him when he again appears at the beginning of the Neo- 

 lithic, and some deposit in some region will one day reward 

 the labors of archaeologists by filling in this gap, if it has not 

 already done so, in some of the more recent discoveries. 



Before closing our brief investigation into the subject of 

 Palaeolithic man, it will be well for us to realize his great an- 

 tiquity, the immense period of time which has rolled away since 

 we first find him, hunting the mammoth and the reindeer with 

 his rude flint weapons, and seeking refuge in the old caves and 

 rock shelters of that remote period. 



The tourist looks with awe upon that megalithic monument 

 or Salisbury Plain on account of its great antiquity and the un- 

 known people who built it, but it is certainly not older than the 

 Bronze Age and does not antedate the Roman Invasion oi 

 England more than 1700 years. Even the oldest tombs and 

 temples of P^gypt are modern compared with the rude imple- 

 ments from the river drifts of the Somme, the Seine and the 

 Thames. There has been no considerable change in the physi- 



