Who were the race of men by whom these implements were fashioned, and at what exact period they lived, will probably be always a matter for conjecture. Whether the existence of man upon the earth is to be carried back far beyond the limits of Egyptian or Chinese chronology, or whether the formation of these beds of drift, and the period when the mammoth and rhinoceros, the great cave bear and its tiger-like associate, roamed at large through this country, should be brought down nearer to our own days than has hitherto been supposed, are questions that will not admit of a hasty decision.
It must, however, I think be granted that we have now strong, I may almost say conclusive, evidence of the co-existence of man with these extinct mammalia. The mere fact that the flint implements have been found as component parts of a gravel also containing the bones or teeth of the mammoth or rhinoceros does not of course prove that the men who fashioned them lived at the same period as these animals. Their bones might, under certain circumstances, have been washed out of an older gravel, (as, for instance, by the action of a flooded river,) have then been brought into association with relics of human workmanship, and re-deposited in their company in a re-constructed gravel. But there does not appear to be any probability of this having been the case at Hoxne or in the valley of the Somme. The bones are many of them but little if at all worn, as they would have been under such circumstances; especially as the only alteration in structure that they have undergone is the loss of their gelatine; but, above all, there is the fact that in the lower beds of the sand-pits at Menchecourt, those in which the flint implements have been found, the skeleton of a rhinoceros[1] was discovered nearly entire; which could not possibly have been the case in a re-constructed drift. The bones of the hind leg of a rhinoceros, all in their proper positions, as if the ligaments had still been attached at the time of its becoming imbedded, were found in the same place.
I have already remarked on the possibility of the Menchecourt beds which contained these remains being rather more recent than those at a higher level; but under any circumstances the presence of the nearly perfect frames and limbs of the extinct mammalia in them is a matter of the highest significance in the present inquiry.
But there is another argument in favour of the co-existence of man with these extinct animals which must not be overlooked. If there had been but a single instance of the discovery of the flint implements in conjunction with the bones and teeth of the animals, the assumption that the implements and the mammalian
- ↑ See M. Ravin's Mémoire Géologique sur le Bassin d'Amiens, in the Mémoires de la Société d'Emulation d'Abbeville, 1838, p. 196.
