Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/196

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
168
EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN.
[CHAP. VI.

along with the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, ox, and stag. The skull was long and with simple sutures, and the bones of the thigh and leg presented characters which are commonly met with in human skeletons of the Neolithic age, the linea aspera of the femur being enormously developed, and the tibia being flattened.[1] Other fragments found in the same pit, at a depth of 4⋅20 mètres, by M. Reboux, are considered by Dr. Hamy to belong to a broad-headed race, but the fragment of a frontal bone and of a lower jaw, upon which this conclusion is founded, seem to me too imperfect to afford decided evidence as to the shape of the skull. A human parietal and occipital have been obtained by the same discoverer at a depth of 4 mètres, at Révolte, also in the valley of the Seine.

Human bones have also been met with in the valley of the Somme; those discovered by M. Emile Martin at Grenelle, along with flint implements and the mammoth, belong to a long-headed race with large brain, identical, according to Dr. Hamy, with those interred at Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the Vezère. The flint implements found at Grenelle are considered by M. de Mortillet to belong to the same stage of culture as those of the Cave-men of Moustier.

No human skeleton of undoubted Pleistocene age has as yet been discovered in river strata on the continent sufficiently perfect to allow us to form an idea of the physique of the River-drift men, and no human bones have as yet been recorded from the fluviatile deposits of Great Britain. The few fragments, however, which remain to us, prove that at this remote period man was present in Europe as man, and not as an inter-

  1. Cave-hunting, pp. 173-9.