Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/190

162 down beneath the alluvium of the river, many species of mammalia have been discovered along with Palæolithic implements, proving that the hunter of those times would not be likely to suffer from want of game in Wiltshire. In the spring, summer, and autumn, there Were stags, bisons, uri, horses, pouched marmots, woolly rhinoceroses, and mammoths, and in the depth of winter, lemmings, reindeer, and musk sheep. Wild boars were in the woodlands, and hares in the glades. The hunter had, however, formidable beasts of prey, the lion and the spotted hyæna, as his competitors in the chase. In the spring time Fisherton was a nesting-place for the wild goose, and the heavy floods, rushing down the valley of the Wily at the break up of winter, occasionally surprised the marmots before they awoke from their winter's sleep, and sometimes deposited their bodies in the sediment at the bottom of the river.

The implements in both these localities are oval, pointed, and pear-shaped (see Figs. 33, 37), as well as of the simple flake-like form, the whole group being the same as that of the valley of the Thames.

Similar traces of man living under similar conditions have been met with in the river-deposits over the greater part of northern and eastern England, from Chard and Axminster on the west, to the Straits of Dover on the east, and from the Bristol Channel as far north as Cambridge. They are conspicuous by their absence from the gravels north-west of a line passing through the midland counties from Bristol to the Wash.