To these may be added the cut bones of Halitherium, a Miocene species, from Pouancé (Maine et Loire), by M. Delaunay; and those on the tibia of a Rhinoceros Etruscus, and other fossil bones from the Upper Pliocene of the Val d'Arno. In addition to these are the numerous remains, certainly human and presumably Tertiary, from North and South America, which will be referred to later, and a considerable number of cases where there is a good deal of primâ facie evidence for Tertiary human remains, but where doubts remain and their authenticity is still denied by competent authorities. Among these ought to be placed the instance from Portugal, for although a large celt very like those of the oldest palæolithic type was undoubtedly found in strata which had always been considered as Miocene, the Congress of Palæontologists who assembled at Lisbon were divided in opinion as to the conclusiveness of the evidence.
But there remain six cases in the Old World, ranging from St. Prest in the Upper Pliocene to Thenay in the Lower Miocene, in which the preponderance of evidence and authority in support of Tertiary man seems so decisive, that nothing but a preconceived bias against the antiquity of the human race can refuse to accept it.
I have already discussed this evidence so fully in a former work (Problems of the Future, ch. v. on Tertiary Man) that I do not propose to go over the ground again, but merely to refer briefly to some of the more important points which come out in the above six instances. In three of them, those of the Halitherium of Pouancé, the Balæonotus of Monte Aperto, and the rhinoceros of the Val d'Arno, the evidence depends entirely on cut bones, and in the case of St. Prest on that of cut bones of Elephas Meridionalis combined with palæolithic implements.
The evidence from cut bones is for the reasons already stated very conclusive, and when a jury of four or five of the leading authorities, such as Quatrefages, Hamy, Mortillet, and Delaunay, who have devoted themselves to this branch of inquiry, and have shown their great care and conscientiousness by rejecting numbers of cases which did not satisfy the most rigid tests, arrive unanimously at the conclusion that many of the cuts on the bones of Tertiary animals are unmistakably of human origin, there seems no room left for any reasonable scepticism. I cannot doubt therefore that we have positive evidence to confirm the existence of man, at any rate from the Pliocene period, through the long series of ages intervening between it and the Quaternary.
But the discovery of flint implements at Puy Courny in the Upper Miocene, and at Thenay in the Lower Miocene, carry us back a long step further, and involves such important issues as to the origin of the human race, that it may be well to recapitulate the evidence upon which those discoveries rest.
The first question is as to the geological age of the deposits in which these chipped implements have been found. In the case of Puy Courny this is beyond dispute. In the central region of the Auvergne there have been two series of volcanic eruptions, the latest towards the close of the Pliocene or commencement of the Quaternary period, and an older one, which, from its position and fossils, is clearly of the Upper Miocene. The gravels in which the chipped flints were discovered by M. Rames, a very competent geologist, were interstratified with tuffs and lavas of these older volcanoes, and no doubt as to their geological age was raised by the Congress of French archæologists to whom they were submitted. The whole question turns therefore on the sufficiency of the proofs of human origin, as to which the same Congress expressed themselves as fully satisfied.
FLINT SCRAPER FROM HIGH LEVEL DRIFT, KENT. (Prestwich.)