Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/48

24 deposits. The ancient character of these stone implements is made forcibly apparent by many of the older ones being quite honeycombed, rough, and grey, from sheer old age. There could be no better place than this for exemplifying the antiquity of the human race in this part of the world.”

Note 6.—According to Penck and Bruckner the glacial period in Europe covered from half a million to a million and a half years, and was the age of palæolithic implements, painting, and sculpture. There were four intensely cold, with three interglacial period, the last of which was of about one hundred thousand years duration, and in it the loess hunters lived. The carvings of late pleistocene fauna belong to this time, but man was in existence in the second interglacial period, as bouchers, the crudest form of stone implements, have been found in débris of that date. Penck maintains that pottery first appears in the neolithic period, which followed the melting away of the last sheet of ice. The writers upon this subject are very numerous, but nothing that can absolutely be relied on as incontrovertible has yet been established. Some, for instance, maintain that there were as many as six interglacial periods, others that there was only one. Penck's statement that pottery is first found in neolithic deposits does not apply to South Africa, for here, though in a very crude state, it is associated with palaeolithic implements. As to the cause of an ice age, the theory of Croll, worked out by the eminent astronomer Sir Robert Ball, that it was due to greater eccentricity of the earth's orbit, once generally accepted, is now as generally discarded, though nothing as plausible has been substituted for it.