Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/278

250 flake which apparently had never been used. They were imbedded in the upper ferruginous portion of the angular detritus, and evidently had been dropped upon the surface-soil of the period, and not transported by water. On searching the shingle we found only one water-worn flint-pebble, which possibly may have been washed out of the angular detritus. It is therefore probable that the presence of flint and chert in that neighbourhood is due to their transport by man.

Encouraged by these results, we resolved to explore the submarine forest in the nearest bay to the east, close to Minehead. It there consists of oak, ash, alder, and hazel, which grow on a blue clay, full of rootlets that thicken considerably seawards. The blue clay in its lower part is full of angular fragments of Devonian rocks, which, as at Porlock, constitute a land-wash, and not a shingle. At the point between tides, where the angular fragments began to appear, splinters were found which had been struck off by the hand of man in the manufacture of implements. They were imbedded in a ferruginous band as at Porlock, and occurred as deep as one foot from the surface of the bed. We dug in several other spots without finding any other traces of man.

In both these localities it is clear that man had been living on the old land-surface before it was submerged, and that the remains of his handiwork had been dropped in the angular detritus which Mr. Godwin-Austen believes to be subaërial and glacial.

From these facts we mav infer that man was living in this region during the time that a dense forest overshadowed a large portion of what is now the Bristol Channel, and before the deposit of the blue freshwater