EARLY MAN 



mite contained but few remains, human or otherwise, and it is surmised that 

 these few may have fallen in from higher levels during the formation of the 

 deposit. There is thus apparently a great break of unknown dimensions 

 represented by the interposition of this stalagmitic floor between the earlier 

 forms of animal life and implements below, and the later forms and more 

 advanced tools above. Beneath are all the phases of the Palaeolithic Age, 

 and above we are suddenly brought face to face with a superior culture and 

 the incoming of existing forms of mammalian life. There is no transition 

 stage recorded in the annals of the cavern. Whether generally there was an 

 absolute and lengthened break between the disappearance of the cave-men and 

 the arrival of the new-comers is at present unknown. Such breach of con- 

 tinuity may have been local, for whilst the bulk of the cave-men followed the 

 retreating reindeer north, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that some 

 remained behind and became amalgamated with the new race which had 

 migrated from the East into Britain. Evidence may yet be forthcoming, 

 especially from the Continent, that there was an actual transitional period, 

 but up to the present nothing is furnished by Devonshire. Between the 

 disappearance of the cave-men and the advent of these human beings of more 

 advanced culture great changes had come over the face of Western Europe. 

 The climate had become more temperate, and there was a greater rainfall ; 

 Great Britain had become an island, and Devonshire possessed a coast line. 

 The waters of this coast line are often found to cover submerged forests, as at 

 Torbay ; Blackpool, nr. Dartmouth ; Bigbury, and Northam, nr. Bideford. 

 At Torbay there are considerable accumulations of vegetable matter, with 

 remains of trees projecting from a bluish clay, and there is reason to believe 

 that this extends beyond the five-fathom line. In this, and in similar deposits 

 in other localities in Devonshire, the bones of the red deer, horse, hog, and 

 long-fronted ox have been found. In addition to these some fishermen 

 dredged up the tooth of a mammoth, about i860, some four miles out in 

 Torbay, and in 1842 a piercing tool, fashioned from a red deer antler by the 

 hands of man, was found in the sub-aerial portion of the forest in Tor Abbey 

 Sands, twelve feet under the surface, during extensive drainage-excavations. ^ 

 These objects were found in varying circumstances, and too far apart to 

 establish contemporaneity between man and the mammoth, but they illustrate 

 the great antiquity of some of the submerged forests of Devonshire. 



The better-equipped man possessed domestic animals, cultivated cereals, 

 and had learnt the art of weaving, and of making rude vessels of pottery. 

 His implements and weapons were often hafted and of greater variety of form 

 and effectiveness. His stone axe-heads were sometimes ground and polished, 

 and he brought down his quarry with bow and arrow-sticks tipped with heads 

 of flint. He practised inhumation, and later on cremation, in the disposal of 

 the dead, placing the carnal remains in stone chambers covered with long 

 barrows. The cremated remains are mostly found in round barrows. 

 Although there is a sharp and well-defined break of apparently long duration 

 between the palaeolithic and the later periods of human culture, such is not 

 the case between what we term the neolithic and bronze periods (convenient 

 terms for indicating an age of stone and an age of bronze), for the former 

 overlaps the latter, and both actually run into that period when iron first 



' Trans. Devon. Assoc. (1865), pt. iv. 

 347 



