Several results of vast importance would follow, should the tabulated suggestions be accepted unreservedly in their entirety.
An inference of immediate interest is to the effect that if Professor Rutot's view be adopted, the high-level terrace of the Thames valley is not contrasted so strongly with continental deposits containing the same mammals, as Mr Hinton suggests. For Professor Rutot's Strépyan period is earlier than the Chellean. It may be questioned whether Mr Hinton is right in assigning only Acheulean implements to the high-terrace gravels. Indeed Mr E. T. Newton (1895) expressly records the occurrence at Galley Hill, of implements more primitive than those of Acheulean form, and ‘similar to those found by Mr B. Harrison on the high plateau near Ightham,’—i.e. the Mesvinian type of Professor Rutot. A final decision is perhaps unattainable at present. But on the whole, the balance of evidence seems to go against Mr Hinton; though per contra it will not escape notice that since 1903, Professor Rutot has ‘reduced’ the Galley Hill skeleton from the Mafflian to the Strépyan stage, and it is therefore possible that further reduction may follow.
Leaving these problems of the Galley Hill implements and the Strépyan period, the Mesvinian and Mafflian types are described by Professor Rutot as representatives of yet older and more primitive stages in the evolution of these objects. As remarked above (Chapter III), the Mauer jaw is referred by Professor Rutot to the Mafflian (implement) period of the early Pleistocene age, though the grounds for so definite a statement are uncertain.
More primitive, and less shapely therefore, than the Mafflian implements, are the forms designated ‘Reutelian.’ They are referred to the dawn of the Quaternary or Pleistocene period. But with these the initial stage of evolution seems to be reached. Such ‘eoliths,’ as they have been termed, are only to be distinguished by experts, and even these are by no means agreed in regarding them as products of human industry. If judgment on this vital point be suspended for the moment, it will be seen that Professor Rutot's scheme carries this evidence of human existence far back into the antiquity denoted by the lapse of the Pliocene and Miocene periods of geological chronology. But let it be remarked that when the names Kentian, Cantalian and Fagnian are employed, no claim is made or implied that three distinctive types of implement are distinguished, for in respect of form they are all Reutelian.
Herein the work of M. Commont must be contrasted with that of Professor Rutot. For the gist of M. Commont's researches lies in the demonstration of a succession of types from the more perfect to the less finished, arranged in correspondence with the superimposed strata of a single locality. A vertical succession of implements accompanies a similar sequence of strata.
Professor Rutot examines the Pliocene deposits in England, Miocene in France and Oligocene in Belgium, and finds the same Reutelian type in all. The names Kentian, Cantalian, and Fagnian should therefore be abandoned, for they are only synonyms for Pliocene-Reutelian, etc.
It is hard to gain an idea of the enormous duration of human existence thus suggested. But a diagram (Fig. 24) constructed by Professor Penck[32] is appended with a view to the graphic illustration of this subject. The years that have elapsed since the commencement of the Oligocene period must be numbered by millions. The human type would be shewn thus not merely to have survived the Hipparion, Mastodon and Deinotherium but to have witnessed their evolution and the parental forms whence they arose.
Such is the principal outcome of the opinions embodied in the tabulation of Professor Rutot. That observer is not isolated in his views, though doubtless their most energetic advocate at the present day. We must admire the industry which has conferred upon this subject the support of evidence neither scanty in amount, nor negligible in weight. But the court is still sitting, no final verdict being yet within sight.
While the so-called Eocene eoliths of Duan (Eure-et-Loire) fail to receive acceptance (Laville[33], 1906), even at Professor Rutot's hands (1911), it is otherwise with those ascribed to the Oligocene period. Mr Moir[34] of Ipswich has lately recognised prepalaeoliths beneath the Suffolk Crag (Newbourn) at Ipswich resting 011 the underlying London Clay.