Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/331

Rh of the Palæolithic races in the populations of Europe of the present day.

Before considering subsequent and more recent investigations, bearing on the solution of this problem, it may be interesting to note the opinions held on the subject by one or two British archæologists.

Writing in 1872, Sir John Evans thus expresses himself:—

Professor Huxley, in discussing the problem in his essay on the Aryan question (1890), was unable to take a side in the controversy, though the continuity of the races seemed to him the more likely to be right.

"As I have already mentioned," he writes, "there is not the least doubt that man existed in North-Western Europe during the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is not only certain that men were contemporaries of the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the reindeer, the cave bear, and other great carnivora, in England and in France, but a great deal has been ascertained about the modes of life of our predecessors. They were savage hunters, who took advantage of such natural shelters as overhanging rocks and caves, and perhaps built themselves rough wigwams ; but who had no domestic animals, and have left no sign that they cultivated plants. In many localities there is evidence that a very considerable interval the so-called hiatus intervened between the time when the Quaternary or Palæolithic men occupied particular caves and river basins, and the accumulation of the débris left by their Neolithic successors. And, in spite of all the warnings against negative evidence afforded by the history of geology, some have very positively asserted that this means a complete break between the Quaternary and the recent populations that the Quaternary population followed the retreating ice northwards and left behind them a desert which remained unpeopled for ages. Other high authorities, on the contrary, have maintained that the races of men who now inhabit Europe may all be traced back to the Great Ice Age. When a conflict of opinion of this kind obtains among reasonable and instructed men, it is generally a safe conclusion that the evidence for neither view is worth much. Certainly that is the result of my own cogitations with regard to both the hiatus doctrine (in its extreme form), and its opposite though I think the latter by much the more likely to