Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/61

Rh cutting edge all round, and a knife flake, triangular on section, but not peculiar to any age. The first two types, the coup-de-poing of French writers (Pl. I.), have not been found in Britain north of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash; but to the south of this boundary they are widely distributed. Many specimens have been found in gravel-pits excavated for road metal along the higher ridges of the valleys of the Ouse and its tributaries (Cam, Lark, and Little Ouse). They appear to have been particularly abundant in the neighbourhood of Bedford, where the higher fluviatile beds are about 59 feet above the river, and contain materials derived from the boulder clay through which the river has cut its channel.

Mammalian remains have also been dug up from these drift-gravels, among which the following were identified—cave-bear, cave-hyæna, reindeer, stag, urus, bison, Hippopotamus major, Rhinoceros tichorhmus and megarhinus, Elephas antiquus, mammoth, and horse (Ancient Stone Implements, etc., p. 480). Here, then, we have a clear case of implements of the coup-de-poing type posterior to the boulder clay. Sir C. Lyell gives a section of the valley of the Ouse, 2 miles W.N.W. of Bedford, constructed by the experienced geologists Prestwich and Wyatt (Fig. 10), which clearly shows the relation of these implements to the boulder clay; not only so, but some of them are made from stones which must have been picked out of the latter. In concluding his remarks Lyell thus writes:—

"At Biddenham, and elsewhere in the same gravel, remains of Elephas antiquus have been discovered, and Mr Wyatt obtained, January 1863, a flint implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus from gravel at Summerhouse hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the valley of the Ouse, and 4 miles from Biddenham.