Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/202

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A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE pended upon them as was necessary. The man who made the original of fig. 34 could have made the original of fig. 33 had he felt so disposed. The rude specimen doubtlessly possesses primitive characters, but the man who made it was not more primitive than the man who made the elab- orately worked implement. An example of a scraper is illustrated in fig. 35 ; and a smaller, finer, and more elaborate specimen in fig. 36. Both these have a well marked bulb of percussion on the plain side. A rude and remarkable palaeolithic implement, roughly hewn from a massive bulbed flake of Hertfordshire conglo- merate, is illustrated in fig. 37. It is faintly ochreous and lustrous, and very different in appearance as regards colour from newly broken conglomerate. It was found in an excavation of contorted drift on Caddington Common. It appears to be an attempt at an implement of the well known hump-backed form, rather Fig. 37. Fig. 38. than a finished tool, and perhaps owing to the highly intractable nature of the stone it was left in a roughly hewn state. A flake of Hertfordshire conglomerate, found in a field near by, is illustrated in fig. 38, and two other palaeolithic flakes of the same material have been procured from Caddington. 1 THE NEOLITHIC AGE There appears to have been a gap of unknown centuries between the departure of palaeolithic man from Britain and the arrival of his Iberian, non-Aryan, neolithic successor. The lapse of time was suffi- ciently long to allow of the covering up of such of man's implements 1 All the examples of paleolithic implements illustrated in this article, with the exception of one or two given to Sir John Evans, have been presented to the British Museum. 158