xii Transactions of the Boyal Society of South Africa. 
have been interred with the body of the owner. The trimming of the 
Mousterian boucher is poor, as if intended to satisfy merely a passing 
want. That art of any kind, industrial or other, seems to reach an apogee 
and then declines mitil it learns to develop into a new but different direc- 
tion is a truism among antiquarians, whether prehistorians or not. In 
this case I deem the retrogression in the lithic industry to be due to the 
w^ant of continuance in intercourse. 
In South Africa, however, the execution remains not only what it was 
in the earlier days, as shown by specimens found in the most ancient 
deposits, but the two industries are, and remain contemporaneous, that is 
to say the finished Chellean and unfinished Mousterian are found side by 
side, and sometimes also mingled with the Aurignacian type. 
It is, of course, a matter of speculation if the evolution of the amyg- 
daloid boucher, w^ith its concomitants, sharp spalls, scrapers, flakes, &c., 
emanated in the Palaearctic region or in South Africa. But the incredible 
number of these tools or weapons in South Africa, and north of it, seems to 
imply that if it did not originate here it was in use among a population 
much more dense in all likehhood than that of the Middle Palaeolithic of 
Europe. As for the connection of a part of our lithic industry with the 
Aurignacian Solutrian types of the Upper Palaeolithic, the evidence is no 
longer speculative. But this contemporaneity of the Chellean and 
Mousterian forms of bouchers point to the evolution of the boucher in 
South or Central Africa, and postulates therefore for its maker a greater 
antiquity than that of Le Moustier's Neanderthal man. 
If we now leave for a time the purely lithological side of the subject of 
the Antiquity of Man in South Africa, and we turn to the palaeontological 
as corroborative evidence, then disappointment awaits us, mostly because 
the large animals of the early Pleistocene, even of the Pliocene are still 
with us, and thus afford no help in the unravelling of the implements 
occasionally found with their remains. 
But lately tw^o extinct Antelopes, a Connochaetes and a Cobus * (Gnu 
and Pallah-like creatures) have been discovered in the Free State with 
large flakes and other implements of Palaeolithic type. With these were 
the remains of Buhalus baini, an extinct buffalo, the remains of which had 
previously been found in a probably later deposit, together with an also 
extinct horse, &c. 
More important, however, than these finds may possibly be that of 
several molar teeth of a Mastodon found in the Vaal Eiver gravels, which 
if they were proved to be contemporaneous with the numerous palaeoliths 
occurring with them, would greatly prolong the antiquity of man. But it 
is quite possible, however, for this Mastodon to have lasted longer in South 
* Fossil Antelopes, referred to Cobus or allied to it occur in the Pliocene of India and 
Lower Pliocene of Attica. 
