Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/678

656 resting-place in the gravel. Lighter objects, such as those of wood and other organic materials, would, if exposed to the action of a stream, in many cases have been washed right away to the sea; or, if accidentally lodged, would have perished by the ordinary processes of decay. It is only in the case of bone implements that we can hope that future discoveries may bring them to light; but even this contingency depends mainly on their attracting the eye of some intelligent gravel-digger; since, for one yard of gravel examined by a scientific observer, it is probable that thousands pass through the hands of ordinary labourers, who require some instruction before they can be brought to recognize even the best-wrought forms of flint implements. Some few objects both of wood and bone, showing traces of having been cut by Palæolithic man, have been found near London by Mr. Worthington Smith, but these traces are but slight.

The comparative absence of human bones in these beds seems to be partly dependent on the same cause of deficient observation; but portions of a human skeleton, apparently contemporary with the beds in which they lay, and in which also palæolithic implements occurred, have been found in the neighbourhood of Paris, and a human skull near Bury St. Edmunds. The Galley Hill skeleton affords but a doubtful instance.

Living, as in all probability man must have done, by the chase, his numbers must necessarily have been small, as compared with those of the animals on which he subsisted. Sir John Lubbock has calculated that among the North American Indians the pro- portion is about 1 to 750: and as man is in all probability at least four times as long-lived as most of these animals, the proportion might be increased to 1 to 3,000. If this were so, and all the bones were preserved, it would follow that about 3,000 bones of the different animals of the chase would be found to one of human origin. But here again the fact comes in, which is also pointed out by Sir John Lubbock, that in most of the beds of gravel no trace has as yet been found of any animal so small as man. Other possible causes for this scarcity of human remains in the River-drift will be mentioned at a subsequent page. Even in sepulchres of the Neolithic period the bones of those buried have not unfrequently entirely disappeared.

Of what was the condition and stage of civilization of the men