1 8 ANCESTRAL MAN. 



i. — Early Pleistocene, then, is properly that concluding portion 

 of the Pleiocene age which runs up to the commencement of the 

 corresponding glacial epoch. Temperate animals were appearing 

 in place of tropical ones, but arctic mammalia had not yet arrived 

 in Europe. Flints relating to this period have been found in 

 France, and recently in our own country. 



2.— Mid Pleistocene covers that lapse of time which intervened 

 between the outset of the glacial epoch and the period of greatest 

 cold, which was reached about 210,000 years ago. Tropical 

 animals had almost disappeared from Europe, arctic animals had 

 begun to arrive, and this country was covered with ice. 



3. — Late Pleistocene embraces the remaining portion of the 

 glacial epoch, when Europe was occupied by arctic animals in full 

 force. At its close, Britain was, for the first time, separated from 

 the continent, and was finally submerged to such an extent as to 

 become a cluster of islands. 



The earliest sign of man in Britain was discovered by Prof. 

 Dawkins, who witnessed the finding of a palaeolithic flint flake in 

 the deeper brick-earths of Crayford, in the valley of the lower 

 Thames. And since then Mr. Flaxman Spurrell has found, in the 

 same strata, a multitude of fresh-looking, unrolled flakes, a number 

 of cores, and several stones that had apparently been employed as 

 hammers for dressing the flints — all the workmanship of that 

 Palaeolithic race whose Early Pleistocene, or pre-glacial relations 

 we must now consider. 



South of a line drawn from Bristol to the Wash, and over a 

 region extending through Spain, Italy, and Greece, to Asia Minor 

 and the whole of India, are found, in ancient river gravels, un- 

 polished and somewhat clumsily made flint implements, massive 

 and pear-shaped, with the smaller end adapted for cutting and the 

 larger fitted for holding in the hand. There is no sign of hafted 

 weapons ; there had not dawned the idea or the power of fixing 

 them to handles ; and, consequently, there were no spears or 

 arrows. 



At the time when these tools were made, Britain had not been 

 severed from the continent, and their possessors hunted on the 

 banks of the Thames when that river joined its waters to those of 

 the Elbe and the Rhine, rolled in a confluent stream over the vast 

 plain now covered by the German ocean, and emptied itself into 

 the sea at the latitude of the Shetland Isles. 



The Palaeolithic or River Drift Race belonged to a tropical 

 fauna and their unweathered implements are seen in stratified 

 association with the undisturbed bones of the hippopotamus, the 

 big-nosed rhinoceros, the spotted hysena, and the lion. These 

 animals, unable to live in a cold climate, were all destroyed by 



