PEOPLE OF THE SUBMERGED FOREST 41 
skull. Dr Aubrey Strahan, who has investigated the 
geology of the district in which the skull was found, is 
of opinion that the deposits which lay over this skull 
may have been formed in the last two thousand years, and 
that a skull found at such a depth may not be Neolithic. 
In characters the skull agrees absolutely with the river- 
bed type. Another skull of this type was shown to me 
by Mr Robert Newstead, curator of the museum at 
Chester. The skeleton of which it formed part lay at 
a depth of 5 feet 3 inches, in a clay deposit in the valley 
of the Dee, near Chester. The skeleton is certainly 
older than the Roman period, for at a depth of i foot 
Fig. 19.— Side and full-face views of the skull found during excavations 
at Newport. 
in the clay, pottery of that period was found. The exact 
age of the remains cannot now be fixed ; evidence for 
regarding them as Neolithic is merely presumptive. 
In this group of doubtful early Neolithic English skulls 
recovered from river-bed deposits, we must place the 
" Mickleton " skull, one which gave rise to much dis- 
cussion in pre-Darwinian days. In 1852, the railway 
from Oxford to Worcester was being made. It crossed 
the Cotswold Hills in the northern part of Gloucestershire, 
where a tunnel had to be cut, near the village of Mickleton. 
During the excavations at one end of the tunnel a human 
skull was found, now preserved in the museum of the 
Royal College of Surgeons. The skull lay 17 feet 
