Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/238

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PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

any traces of their existence and wanderings behind them? Unfortunately we have no skeletal remains of these primitive people, for we are not justified in assuming that the human skeletons found in the Oban cave were contemporary with the shell-eating troglodytes who frequented it. Here the evidence so far depends entirely on the character of the tools and implements they left among the remains of the marine and land faunas on which they feasted.

Again, it has been conclusively proved that, by a subsidence of the land in South Britain, archæological materials of the highest significance have been for a long time submerged, and, so were concealed from the immediate cognizance of modern antiquaries. We now know that man's handicraft-works have been found in widely separated localities which were formerly inhabited as ordinary land-surfaces, but which are now more or less under the level of the present-day sea. Notwithstanding the difficulties involved in subaqueous investigations, modern researches have brought to light, not only a goodly number of worked objects from these old land-surfaces, but actually two skeletons of the individuals who inhabited them, viz. the woman of Walton-on-Naze and the Tilbury man, both of which have already been described, as well as the circumstances in which they were found. The former belonged to the ordinary Neolithic type, and differed little