Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/239

Rh in physical characters from women of the present day. The body was buried two feet beneath the prehistoric floor, over which eight to ten feet of silt had accumulated since then. The latter lay in a sand-bank, thirty-four feet below the present surface of the land, and above it rested a succession of deposits of silt, peat and old habitable land-surfaces, indicating, on precise geological grounds, the time that has elapsed since the Tilbury man was in life. Dr. Keith, on well-defined archæological data, estimates that 4000 years is the probable antiquity of the Essex woman. He then calculates, from a comparison between the respective depths below sea-level at which the bodies were found, the antiquity of the Tilbury man at not less than 15,000 years. (Ancient Types of Man, p. 12.)

On the other hand, Mr. Clement Reid gives in the following extracts a different estimate of the rate of submergence:—

"Our next inquiry (Submerged Forests, p. 117) must be into the length of time represented by the series of submerged forests and associated deposits described in the foregoing pages. The newest of them belongs certainly to the age of polished stone, and the earliest also probably comes within the Neolithic Period. Within the period represented by the submerged forests, we have seen that there has been a change of the sea-level to the extent of eighty feet, or perhaps rather more.