Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/166

154 valleys fifty or one hundred feet or more lower, leaving the remains of the ancient drift-beds exposed high on what are now the slopes. To fix our ideas on the picture of an actual locality, we may fancy ourselves standing with Mr. Spurrell on the old sandy beach of the Thames near Crayford, thirty-five feet above where the river now flows two miles away in the valley. Here we are on the very workshop-floor where palæolithic man sat chipping at the blocks of flint which had fallen out of the chalk-cliff above his head. There lie the broken remains of his blocks, the flint-chips he knocked off, and which can be fitted back into their places, the striking-stones with which the flaking was done; and with these the splintered bones of mammoth and tichorhine rhinoceros, possibly remains of meals. Moreover, as if to point the contrast between the rude palæolithic man who worked these coarse blocks, and apparently never troubled himself to seek for better material, the modern visitor sees within fifty yards of the spot the bottle-shaped pits dug out in later ages by neolithic man through the soil to a depth in the chalk where a layer of good workable flint supplied him with the material for his neat flakes and trimly-chipped arrowheads. The evidence of caverns such as those of Devonshire and Périgord, with their revelations of early European life and art, has been supplemented by many new explorations, without shaking the conclusion arrived at as to the age known as the reindeer period of the northern half of Europe, when the mammoth and cave-bear and their contemporary mammals had not yet disappeared, but the close of the Glacial period was merging into the times when in England and France savages hunted the reindeer for food as the Arctic tribe of America do still. Human remains of these early periods are still scarce and unsatisfactory for determining race-types. Among the latest finds is part of a skull from the loess at Potbaba, near Prague, with prominent brow-ridges, though less remarkable in this way than the celebrated Neanderthal skull. It remains the prevailing opinion of anatomists that these very ancient skulls are not apt to show extreme lowness of type, but to be higher in the scale than, for instance, the Tasmanian. The evidence increases as to the wide range of palæolithic man. He extended far into Asia, where his characteristic rude stone implements are plentifully found in the caves of Syria and the foot-hills of Madras. The question which this section may have especial means of dealing with is whether man likewise inhabited America with the great extinct animals of the Quaternary period, if not even earlier.

Among the statements brought forward as to this subject, a few are mere fictions, while others, though entirely genuine, are surrounded with doubts, making it difficult to use them for anthropological purposes. We shall not discuss the sandaled human giants, whose footprints, twenty inches long, are declared to have been found with the foot-prints of mammoths, among whom they walked, at Carson, Nevada. There is something picturesque in the idea of a man in a past