Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/54

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46
PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

was the large sabre-toothed tiger (Machairodus latidens) represented by a few teeth.

A human jaw, said to have been found below the sheet of stalagmite, was described at the meeting of the British Association, held last year (1912) at Dundee. It seems strange that such an important human bone should have been hitherto overlooked.

Above the sheet of stalagmite which covered the Palæolithic deposits containing the industrial remains and bones of extinct animals was a layer of black earth or mould, interspersed among a mass of fallen blocks from the roof, in which were found a number of objects belonging to different phases of the later periods. Among them were flint flakes, cores and chips, spindle-whorls, a socketed bronze knife, broken weaving combs, pottery (some of which were Roman), etc., all showing that the cave had been frequented in Neolithic and Proto-historic times. The intervention of the stalagmitic layer between the debris of the two civilizations, the deposition of which implies a long, though somewhat uncertain, time, renders it impossible to trace any evolutionary connection between the people who frequented the cave before and after its occurrence. Hence to find a satisfactory explanation of the hiatus in human civilization thus suggested is one of the most controverted problems of the day, to which we will return later on.

About the year 1875 Professor Boyd Dawkins and the Rev. J. Magens Mello carried