Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/197

] form connecting the human race with the lower animals.

The Palæolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature produced glaciers and icebergs in our country; he may therefore be viewed as being probably pre-glacial. When the temperature was lowest he probably retreated southwards, and returned northwards as it grew warmer, precisely in the same manner as the mammalia on which he depended for food. From these à priori considerations he may also be viewed as interglacial; but it must be remarked that the proof of this, brought forward by Mr. Skertchly from his discoveries at Brandon and elsewhere in Norfolk and Suffolk, is still under discussion, and that it is not established by any other discovery, unless the lower brick-earths of Crayford and Erith be considered pre- or inter-glacial. He was, however, in this country after the retreat of the ice and the disappearance of the icebergs from the area of south-eastern England,