In the evening address, "On man as artist and sportsman in the Palæolithic period," which I had the honour of delivering at the Southport Meeting of the British Association (1903), I thus alluded to the hiatus theory :—
"When the physical conditions which called into being the accomplishments and special attainments of Palæolithic man had passed away, and the peculiar fauna of the glacial period disappeared from the lowlands of Central Europe some by extinction, and others by emigration to more northern regions or to the elevated mountains in the neighbourhood we find the inhabitants of these old hunting grounds in possession of new and altogether different sources of food. Finding the former supplies becoming so limited and precarious that it was no longer possible to live a roaming life, now gathering fruits and seeds, and now hunting wild animals, they fell somehow into the way of cultivating special plants and cereals, and rearing certain animals in a state of domestication. Whether this new departure was a product of the intelligence of the descendants of the Palæolithic people of Europe, or derived from new immigrants into the country, is a debatable question. At any rate the expedient was eminently successful. It was in reality the starting point of Neolithic civilisation, and henceforth there was a rapid increase in the population. They cultivated a variety of fruits, wheat, barley and other cereals ; they reared oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and dogs; they became skilled in the ceramic art, and in the manufacture of cloth by spinning and weaving wool and fibrous textures ; they ground stone implements so as to give them a sharp cutting edge in hunting the forest fauna of the period they used, in addition to spears, lances and daggers, the bow and arrow ; they built houses, both for the living and the dead thus showing that religiosity had become an active and governing principle among them. But of the artistic taste and skill of their predecessors they had scarcely a vestige, and whatever they did by the way of ornament consisted mainly of a few scratches, arranged in some simple geometrical pattern. The fundamental principles of the two civilisations are really so divergent that the Neolithic can hardly be regarded as a local development of the latest phase of that of the Palæolithic period in Europe. The probability is that, while the isolated colonies of reindeer hunters were still in existence, people, possibly of the same stock, were elsewhere passing through the evolutionary stages which connected the two civilisations together." (Proc. R. S. Edinburgh, vol. xxv., p. 123.)
It appears to me that the difficulty about this so-called hiatus arises partly from a misconception of the facts, and partly from a deficiency of our knowledge of existing archæological materials. If it be the case that it is a theoretical figment, time with some spade work will soon remedy the mistake. Although the progress of the Palæolithic people to a higher civilisation had been extremely slow, still their handicraft products, at successive stages, indicate not only an
