Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 60.djvu/28

20 Before returning to Somaliland, Mr. Seton-K arr visited my collections, and studied the various forms of implements found in the river-gravels and Pleistocene deposits in different parts of the world, so as to become familiar with their leading features and on revisiting Somaliland during the past w inter, he was fortunate enough to meet with a large number of specimens in form absolutely identical with some from the valley of the Somme and other places which he had seen in my collection.

Of this identity in form there can be no doubt, and though at present no fossil mammalian or other remains have been found with the implements, we need not hesitate in claiming them .as palseolithic. They seem to be scattered all over the country, and to have been washed out of sandy or loamy deposits by the action of rain, or, in some instances, to have been laid bare by the wind. They appear also to occur most frequently in the neighbourhood of existing watercourses, which is at all events suggestive of the beds in which they occur having been in some manner the result of river-action. It is, however, at present premature to enlarge on the circumstances of their discovery. Their great interest consists in the identity of their forms with those of the implements found in the Pleistocene deposits of North Western Europe and elsewhere. Any one com paring the implements from such widely separated localities, the one with the other, must feel that if they have not been actually made by the same race of men, there must have been some contact of the closest kind between the races who manufactured implements of such identical forms. Those from Somaliland occur in both flint (much whitened and decomposed by exposure) and in quartzite, but the implements made from the two m aterials are almost indistinguishable in form. Those of lanceolate shape are most abundant, but the usual ovate and other forms are present in considerable numbers.

Turning westward from Somaliland we meet with flint implements of the same character found by Professor Flinders Petrie at a height of m any hundred feet above the valley of the Nile. A few have been discovered in Northern Africa, they recur in the valley of the Manzanares in Spain, in some districts in Central Italy, and abound in the river-valleys of France and England. Turning eastward we encounter implements of analogous forms, one found by M. Chantre in the valley of the Euphrates, and many made of quartzite in the laterite deposits of India ; while in Southern Africa almost similar types occur, though their age is somewhat uncertain.

That the cradle of the hum an family must have been situated in some part of the world where the climate was genial, and the means of subsistence readily obtained, seems almost self-evident; and that these discoveries in Somaliland may serve to elucidate the course by which human civilisation, such as it was, if not indeed the human