Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/25

Rh two earlier elephants, the hippopotamus, the Rhinoceros merckii, sabre-toothed tiger (Machairodus), cave-bear, cave-lion, etc., found their way into Britain. But these animals were ultimately caught as in a trap by a subsequent recrudescence of a cold period, the consequence of which was that most of them became extinct, and left their carcases on the battlefield, as evidence of their former existence in these regions. It is also during this inter-glacial period that we first meet with evidence that Palæolithic man was an inhabitant of Britain.

These remarks will suffice to show that during the Pleistocene Age the geography of Western Europe was very different from what it is now. Since the appearance of man on the scene, at least one Ice Age has occurred, but the ice-fields which accompanied it did not spread so far out on the lower grounds, probably in consequence of a drier state of the atmosphere. It should also be noted that contemporary with the recrudescence of the ice there was again a subsidence of the land. Whether ice pressure and land submergence have any causal connection it is difficult to say but the affirmative is the more feasible answer.

—As an immigrant into Britain Palæolithic man had been subjected, like other animals, to the trials and discomforts which followed the changing vicissitudes of climate, but he, almost alone, survived the hardships of these cosmic persecutions. How he