i879-] 
Early Traces of Man. 
4°3 
illustrated with fine plates, gave figures of three flint imple- 
ments found at Luxor and at Abydos, which are undoubtedly 
St. Acheul hatchets. 
Among the wrought flints brought from Egypt and exhi- 
bited by Mr. Haynes are several which incontestably are of 
the quaternary type. Among them we see scrapers and 
arrow-heads, the latter belonging to a type which in France 
occurs only in glacial formations. The collection also em- 
braces more ancient forms, preglacial forms, referable to the 
early portion of the Quaternary period, viz., St. Acheul 
hatchets of flint. 
These St. Acheul hatchets come from two very distinct 
localities : one lot is from the neighbourhood of Luxor, in 
Upper Egypt ; the other from the environs of Cairo, in 
Lower Egypt. The flint used, as is clearly proved by Dela- 
noue, comes from the nummulitic formations. These forma- 
tions are found in situ in Upper Egypt ; and the St. Acheul 
hatchets of that region are as a rule heavier and better 
wrought, — above all, more completely wrought. In the en- 
virons of Cairo there are no rocks in situ ; and as for flint, 
only rounded nodules are found. These nodules have been 
wrought into the forms of implements. This is easily seen, 
for all the St. Acheul hatchets of that locality still bear at 
their base traces of the original rounded surface of the 
nodules. 
From these archaeological data — i.e., from the nature and 
form of the objects — we may conclude that the man of the 
earliest Quaternary times lived in Egypt simultaneously 
with his existence in Europe, and that in both of these 
regions his industrial development was about the same, ex- 
tremely primitive. And geological observation confirms 
these deductions. It was not on the surface of plateaus that 
Mr. Haynes found these St. Acheul implements. On the 
contrary, most of them, at least from the neighbourhood of 
Luxor (forming the greater number), were found in the 
bottom of the ravines of Bab-el-Moluk. These ravines are 
cut deep into the quaternary deposits by the torrents which, 
in seasons of heavy rainfall, carry to the Nile the waters 
from the mountains of Libya. 
Thus, then, thanks to the Exposition of the Anthropolo- 
gical Sciences, we are in a position to show that the oldest 
Egyptian civilisation, — that of the earliest dynasties, — which 
dates back 4000 years before our era, was preceded by an 
age of polished stone, and that before that period Egypt, 
like all the rest of the world, was occupied by quaternary 
man. 
