iv Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 
must be considered in the light of our present Palaeontological knowledge 
— with the cunning necessary for the production of artefacts, the utility to 
them of which has also never been clearly explained. 
I may state at present that all these so-called precursors of the lithic 
industry are invariably made of flint, and of no other hard material such 
as quartzite, indurated shale, basalt or hard volcanic rocks, or quartz, 
materials of which the majority of our South African implements consist. 
This is a point of great importance. 
It was in 1867, not very long, therefore, after Boucher de Perthes' 
interpretation of the human artefacts found in the Somme Valley (France) 
had been accepted as valid (namely, that there existed in Europe a race 
of men contemporaneous with the Eeindeer and the Mammoth, that 
fashioned weapons and tools out of " rognons de silex " nodules of flint) 
that the problem of the Tertiary man was introduced by the discovery of 
flints at Thenay, in beds of the Upper Oligocene, at the dawn of the 
Miocene. That is to say,' if these implements were accepted as artefacts 
it would prove that the makers w^ere contemporaries of the Anthracotherium, 
a pachyderm older than the Mastodon, an ancestor, but not the first, of 
the Elephant. To solve the difficulty, a very obvious one, G. de Mortillet 
suggested that the maker might be an Anthropoid Ape, somewhat like 
Dryopithecus, found in the Miocene of the geologists. But it is now 
generally accepted that neither Dryointhecus nor Palaeopithecus, from 
Siwalik, belong to the human phylum. 
Ten years later (1877) were found at Aurillac, also in France, numerous 
flints which have undoubtedly the appearance of artefacts. The geological 
horizon of this locality is undoubtedly that of Upper Miocene Age ; and 
the makers of these artefacts, were they such, would have lived with the 
Dinotheriwn giganteum, the first horse, HipjJarion gracille, the sabre- 
tooth tiger, Machairodus, &c. There again to solve the difficulty, a 
hypothetical man-monkey or monkey-man is invented by Mortillet, to 
serve as an explanation, namely, Homosimius rainesi. From that time war 
began to rage between these archaeologists, who, ascribing these artefacts 
to man, relegated him to the Miocene, and those who saw only in the 
so-called " silex tertiaires " flint nodules washed from the upper layers and 
broken by the waters of the Tortonian river. Subsidence of deposits, 
great variation of temperature, and especially frost, producing the well- 
known " eclatement " or splitting of nodules which are not necessarily 
completely homogenous, and other causes, of which violent natural shock 
or projection against an equally hard body may prove to have been a most 
important one, such, according to these adversaries of Miocene man, are 
the causes which produced the artefact appearance of the Thenay flints. 
Similar discoveries followed in the valley of the Tagus, in 1871 ; the 
horizon being a little more recent than that of the Thenay, and 
