Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/138

130 beneath the prehistoric floor and, according to Dr. Keith (Ancient Types of Man, p. 7), was that of a female, five feet four inches in height, with a cephalic index of 78. This could not have been a recent burial, as until the result of recent sea-erosion, the skeleton lay twelve feet below the present surface of high-water mark. From these data the inference of submergence since Neolithic times is too patent to require further comment (see Chap. X).

But when these submerged land-areas and forests were inhabited by a maritime population, who lived principally on the produce of the sea, it cannot be supposed that the inland parts of the country remained uninhabited. Hence we ought to find some traces of these British people both on submerged and unsubmerged habitable areas. Indications of human occupancy on the latter have occasionally been observed by various writers, but the most suggestive evidence which has come under my cognizance is recorded in a communication to Man (1910, 48), by Canon Greenwell, F.R.S., and the Rev. R. A. Gatty, LL.B., entitled The Pit Dwellings at Holderness.

The foundations of these dwellings were excavated in the boulder clay to a depth of four or five feet, and varied in shape and size, some being as long as forty feet and nine to ten feet in breadth. They are distributed in groups in the vicinity of Atwick, some two miles from Hornsea, and not far from the present coast, but it appears that when they