splinters of flint[1] found in the mid Meiocene strata at Thenay by the Abbé Bourgeois,[2] and on a notched fragment of a rib of an extinct kind of manatee (Halitherium) found at Pouancé by M. Delaunay. The data seem to me insufficient to establish the fact that man was a contemporary of the Deinothere and other members of the mid Meiocene fauna. Is it possible for the flints in question, which are very different from the Palæolithic implements of the caves and river deposits, to have been chipped or the bone to have been notched without the intervention of man? If we cannot assert the impossibility, we cannot say that these marks prove that man was living in this remote age in the earth's history. If they be artificial, then I would suggest that they were made by one of the higher apes then living in France rather than by man. As the evidence stands at present, we have no satisfactory proof either of the existence of man in the Meiocene or of any creature nearer akin to him than the anthropomorphous apes. These[3] views agree with those recently published by Professor Gaudry,[4] who suggests that the chipped flints and the cut rib may have been the work of the Dryopithecus, or the great anthropoid ape, then living in France. I am, however, not aware that any of the
- ↑ A collection of these flints is to be seen in the museum at St. Germain, some of which appeared to me, in 1876, non-artificial, while others had evidently, from the state of their surfaces, been exposed to the atmosphere for a considerable time. Those figured by Professor Gaudry (Les Enchainements, p, 239) are, to all appearance, artificial.
- ↑ Congres Intern. Préhist. Archéol., Paris vol. p. 67 et seq.; Brussels vol. p. 81 et seq.
- ↑ This was written in September 1877, and used in the Owen's College Lectures of November 1877.
- ↑ Les Enchainements, p. 241.
