Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/119

Rh narrow end, and other forms of implements associated with, a fauna in all essential respects identical with that of the present day.

Were the makers of these polished weapons the direct descendants of palæolithic ancestors whose occupation of the country was continuous from the days of the old river gravels? or had these long since died out, so that after western Europe had for ages remained uninhabited it was repeopled in neolithic times by the immigration of some new race of men? Was there, in fact, a "great gulf fixed" between the two occupations? or was there in Europe a gradual transition from the one stage of culture to the other? It has been said that "what song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture"; and though the questions now proposed may come under the same category, and must await the discovery of many more essential facts before they receive definite and satisfactory answers, we may, I think, throw some light upon them if we venture to take a few steps upon the seductive if insecure paths of conjecture. So far as I know we have as yet no trustworthy evidence of any transition from the one age to the other, and the gulf between them remains practically unbridged. We can, indeed, hardly name the part of the world in which to seek for the cradle of neolithic civilization, though we know that traces of what appear to have been a stone-using people have been discovered in Egypt, and that what must be among the latest of the relics of their industry have been assigned to a date some thirty-five hundred to four thousand years before our era. The men of that time had attained to the highest degree of skill in working flint that has ever been reached. Their beautifully made knives and spearheads seem indicative of a culminating point reached after long ages of experience; but whence these artists in flint came or who they were is at present absolutely unknown, and their handiworks afford no clew to help us in tracing their origin. Taking a wider survey, we may say that, generally speaking, not only the fauna but the surface configuration of the country were, in western Europe at all events, much the same at the commencement of the neolithic period as they are at the present day. We have, too, no geological indications to aid us in forming any chronological scale.

The occupation of some of the caves in the south of France seems to have been carried on after the erosion of the neighboring river valleys had ceased, and so far as our knowledge goes these caves offer evidence of being the latest in time of those occupied by man during the palæolithic period. It seems barely possible that though in the north of Europe there are no distinct signs of such late occupation, yet that in the south man may have lived on, though