President's Address. 
xi 
Hitherto no human remaias have been discovered that could go to sub- 
stantiate the presence in South Africa of a Middle Palaeolithic man 
belonging to the Neanderthal race. 
But we have his tools in abundance. The shape of these tools, 
bouchers and scrapers, is identical in spite of difference in the material, 
whether of flint or not ; and the quartzitic implements of the Pyrenees, 
ascribed to the Middle Palaeolithic, cannot be distinguished from our 
quartzitic ones. 
It is indeed difficult to accept the proposition that the amygdaloidal 
boucher has originated simultaneously as a well-finished tool in Europe, 
Africa, Asia, America. (It has not been met with in Australia.) 
But if we adopt the theory of intercourse through migration, its 
presence in lands so very far distant is to some extent explained. 
These migrations are the more probable in that the climatic conditions 
of the Pleistocene before the advent of the great ice sheet, in Northern 
Europe, Asia, and America, could not have proved an obstacle. 
Let us examine rapidly the evidence of these climatic conditions as a 
possible key to this intercourse. South Africa is one of the few parts of 
the world known to offer no indication of a Pleistocene glaciation. 
Diligent search has been made for it by three geological surveys, Cape, 
Transvaal, Southern Ehodesia ; all three have failed to find traces of its 
existence. Thus the Great Ice Age has affected the whole world, even the 
tropics in part, except South Africa, and perhaps part of Central Africa. 
It brought in its train conditions which have not failed to influence the 
animals, and also the man of the period, were it only by the considerable 
lowering of temperature. The large short-haired animals of the Chellean 
were gradually replaced by other large animals with thick shaggy hair 
suitable for an Arctic or semi-Arctic climate for at least a part of 
the year. 
No such thing took place in Southern or Central Africa, where it can 
safely be assumed that the climatic conditions were the same as they are 
to-day, and differed little from those of the Chellean period in Europe, &c., 
as shown by the fauna of this period. Thus, the migrant early-Palaeo- 
lithic man proceeding from the South would find, even in parts of 
England, identical climatic conditions and would meet there some, if not 
most, of the animals he knew. And the same can be said of the Northern 
Chellean man if he proceeded South. 
Later on, however, climatic changes began to oppose barriers to the 
continuation of this probably intermittent intercourse, if we accept the 
evidence of the lithic industry. During the Mousterian with its cold, 
moist climate the Chellean-Acheulean boucher is no longer manufactured, 
and if examples are found still in use, as in the case of the " Le Moustier " 
Middle Palaeolithic man, they appear to have been so highly valued as to 
