HIE DATING OF EARLY HUMAN REMAINS. 
43 
PROBLEMS OF INTERMENT. 
The greatest difficulty in the dating of early human remains 
centres round the problems of interment. Many of the human 
remains which are alleged to be the earliest consist of complete 
skeletons—or at least so much of the skeleton was present as 
to show that it was originally complete when buried in the 
deposit. Fragmentary human remains also occur in Pleistocene 
deposits, but the number of complete skeletons, as compared 
with the extreme rarity of complete skeletons of wild animals, 
is strikingly disproportionate. The explanation of this anomaly 
is not far to seek—the human remains are for the most part 
interments and not contemporary fossils. 
We formerly thought that Palaeolithic man did not inter his 
dead, consequently it was an easy matter to say that if a skeleton 
was an interment it was not Palaeolithic. This simple solution 
of our difficulties must now be abandoned. The evidences 
obtained upon the continent during recent years have shown that 
Palaeolithic man carried on a somewhat elaborated ritual of 
interment. The problem is therefore much complicated. 
It is not, moreover, always certain that fragmentary human 
remains are not interments. Some years ago I excavated two 
Saxon graves near Walmer, in Kent. One contained a complete 
skeleton, the other had only four or five broken fragments of 
the skull, carefully placed together at the bottom of the grave 
(which was only a small hole) with two iron war knives. 
Broadly speaking, we are thus unable to accept as contem¬ 
porary fossils the human remains which may be found in a 
Pleistocene deposit with the same easy assurance which we 
grant to remains of extinct species of elephant or rhinoceros. 
After the lapse of centuries, the agencies of percolating water, 
roots, and earth-worms, tend to obliterate the signs of disturbance 
of the soil. Such evidences of disturbance can only be recognized 
by an expert, while even he is baffled in the case of an unstratified 
deposit. 
This was illustrated in a striking manner during the exploration 
of the Saxon graveyard at East Shefford (Berks), by Mr. H. 
Peake and Dr. E. A. Hooton. The sub-soil was unstratified 
clay-with-flints, but it was hoped that shallow trenching would 
reveal the disturbed soil of the graves, and thus save deeper 
digging over the area. It proved to be impossible to recognize 
