Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/207

] present in every part of the cave, and is at its thinnest in the above figure, its average being three to four feet. From this it may be concluded that while the breccia was being formed by calcareous infiltration in one part of the cavern, the upper part of the cave-earth was being accumulated in another, and that therefore, in point of time, the breccia and the upper portion of the cave-earth must be viewed as contemporaneous deposits.

The cave-earth rested upon a red sand, c, containing clay in its lower parts, underneath which was a light-coloured sand with limestone fragments, d, resting on the rocky floor, and devoid of traces of man or of the wild animals. These ossiferous strata are repeated in the Church Hole Cave in the same order. We shall treat them historically, beginning with the oldest and the lowest.

The red sand, c, the lowest bone-bearing stratum, contains remains of the same species as those already mentioned from the Pin Hole; the lion, however, must be added to the list, as well as the wild boar and the brown bear. With few exceptions the animal remains are marked by teeth of the hyænas, but they were not so closely eaten up as they usually are in hyæna dens, probably because of the abundance of food in the neighbourhood. Unexpected evidence of the presence of man in the cave at this time is offered by five pebbles of quartzite, used for hammers or pot-boilers, and three splinters of the same material, identical with those so numerous in the cave-earth immediately above. They show that savages of a low order came to the district from time to time, following the chase of the reindeer, bison,