2 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
Downs, stretching northward from the steep slope which 
now faces us until it sinks into the valley of the Thames, 
Mr Harrison has gathered those rudely worked flints — 
eoliths — the earliest form of tool ascribed to man. Close 
by Igtham, hid in a wood, are the Oldbury rock-shelters 
where Mr Harrison has found over three hundred flints 
worked in exactly the same fashion as those chipped by 
the cavemen in the south of France when the rigorous 
climate of the Ice age was giving place to our more 
genial times. On the plateau a few miles away lie the 
oldest and rudest of human tools — for I am assuming that 
the reader admits the humanity of Mr Harrison's eoliths, 
while here, amongst the earth that has gathered at the 
foot of the projecting rock, almost burying it, are the 
stone implements — palasoliths — which mark the last phase 
of the Palaeolithic period. 
We are not concerned at this point with the im- 
measurable stretch of time that lies between the earliest 
of the eoliths and the latest of the palaeoliths ; in follow- 
ing man into the past we are to start from that period 
or age of culture which succeeded the Palaeolithic — the 
Neolithic. All over this district, on the ploughed fields 
and in the woods, the keen and delicately worked flints 
which are characteristic of the Neolithic stage of man's 
history can be picked up. How long the Neolithic period 
lasted in England we cannot yet say with any degree of 
certainty, but we are all agreed that it came to an end 
about 2000 B.C., when bronze became known to the men 
of Western Europe. We have only to visit Rose 
Wood, within a short distance of Mr Harrison's house 
in Igtham, to see that the passage from the Palaeolithic to 
the Neolithic period was marked by a much greater 
change than a mere alteration in the manner in which 
flint implements were fashioned. In Rose Wood is 
the evidence that men were no longer vagabonds and 
wanderers, but had settled down in communities. Hid 
in the undergrowth of this coppice ^ is a series of circular 
' For an account of the antiquities of the Igtham district, see Igtiiain 
—the History of a Kentish Village, by F. J. Bennett, F.G.S., 1907. 
