FURTHER EXAMPLES 
99 
down 30 to 40 feet in the chalk. The significance of 
these shafts or mines was also clear ; they were sunk to 
obtain the kind of flint most suitable for working into 
implements. They were flint mines. The veins of 
suitable flints were followed by driving horizontal 
galleries from the vertical shaft. The miners left tools 
o 
behind them — now preserved in the filled-up mines. It 
has been customary to regard the culture of the Cissbury 
miners as representative of the dawn of the Neolithic 
civilisation. Recently, Mr Reginald Smith, of the British 
Museum, has again examined the Cissbury culture, and 
the objects of the same period obtained from Grimes 
Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk, and, in the light of 
what is now known of the cave men of the Aurignacian 
period, has come to the conclusion that the Cissbury 
miners were not a Neolithic, but a Palaeolithic people. 
The evidence ^ he has produced is such that most students 
will now agree with Mr Smith that the flint implements 
probably belong to the period of the Aurignacian culture 
— the period of Cromagnon, of Grimaldi, and of Hailing. 
Remains of the reindeer, of the mammoth, and of the 
rhinoceros occur in the caves of that period of culture ; 
not a trace of them has been found at Cissbury. The 
ancient ox or urus {Bos primigenius)^ however, occurs. 
We scarcely expect the fauna of the period to be fully 
represented in mines. In Belgium, similar ancient flint 
mines occur. The Belgian miner — as may be seen 
in the Royal Natural History Museum of Brussels- 
was a short-headed or brachycephalic man, quite difl^erent 
from all Aurignacian races ; his civilisation was not 
Aurignacian, but that of the Neolithic period. The 
miners at Cissbury, on the other hand, had heads of the 
river-bed type. In the buried shafts at Cissbury, the 
skeletons of two individuals were found and described by 
Professor RoUeston. One is the skeleton of a man 
under 5 feet (1-500 m.) in height, and showing a 
left-sided palsy, contracted in boyhood." The length of 
• See Archieolo^ia, 1912, ser. 2, vol. xiii. p. 109. 
- See Rollesion",yo«r«. Anthrop. Jnstii., 1878, vol. viii. p. 377- 
