Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/328

242 resisted the gnawing tooth of time to the present day. For this reason the most ancient human relics now extant consist of objects made of such durable material as flint and other hard stones, which are incidentally met with on the highways and in the haunts of their primeval owners, or intentionally disinterred from the dustbins of ages.

The evidential materials, available in the discussion of the special problem which forms the heading of this chapter, are based on a combination of facts derived from stratigraphy, archæology, and palæontology, which, being supplementary to each other, strengthen the final deduction in proportion to the amount of agreement between the respective results elicited from these different lines of research. But, unfortunately, the data which might have been forthcoming through one or other of these departments are often wanting, or too fragmentary to be of ethnical value a condition of things which has sometimes led the most competent explorers to formulate conclusions on insufficient grounds. Apparently this accounts for the diversity of opinion which has long permeated archæological circles with regard to the relation between the Palæolithic and Neolithic civilisations of Europe. Before proceeding to the discussion of the main question a few preliminary remarks are necessary, by way of defining the special characteristics of the two civilisations, so as to bring into relief the nature of the so-called hiatus which, according to some authorities, separates them.

As described in the preceding chapters, the two chief sources of our knowledge of the earliest inhabitants of Europe are (1) some ancient river-gravels containing stone implements and bones of extinct animals reposing at various heights on the slopes of present, or former, river valleys, the waters of which now flow at considerably lower levels ; (2) a number of caves, rock-shelters, and other inhabited sites, which have yielded to the explorer not only stone implements but other objects made of various materials, as well as a heterogeneous mass of food-refuse, chiefly the broken bones of the animals on which their occupants feasted ; and (3) the fossil remains of man. Little is known ethnologically of the Drift-men, beyond the fact that they manufactured rude stone implements generally