“The bone is, I have no doubt, human; a portion of an unusually clumsy fibula, and in that respect not unlike the same bone in the Mentone skeleton.”
The deposit from which the bone was obtained is overlaid “by a bed of stiff glacial clay, containing ice-scratched bowlders.” “Here then,” says Geikie, “is direct proof that men lived in England prior to the last inter-glacial period."
The evidences are numerous, as I have shown, that when these deposits came upon the earth the face of the land was above the sea, and occupied by plants and animals.
SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL.
The accompanying cut, taken from Sir John Lubbock’s “Prehistoric Times,” page 364, represents the strata at St. Acheul, near Amiens, France.
[1. Dawkins’s “Early Man in Britain,” p. 137.
2. “Nature,” November 6, 1873.
3. “The Great Ice Age,” p. 475.]
The upper stratum (a) represents a brick earth, four to five feet in thickness, and containing a few angular flints. The next (b) is a thin layer of angular gravel, one to two feet in thickness. The next (c) is a bed of sandy marl, five to six feet in thickness. The lowest deposit (d) immediately overlies the chalk; it is a bed of partially rounded gravel, and, in this, human implements of flint have been found. The spot was used in the early Christian period as a cemetery; f represents one of the graves, made fifteen hundred years ago; e represents one of the ancient coffins, of which only the nails and clamps are left, every particle of the wood having perished.
And, says Sir John Lubbock:
“It is especially at the lower part” of these lowest deposits “that the flint implements occur.”
The bones of the mammoth, the wild bull, the deer, the horse, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer are found near the bottom of these strata mixed with the flint implements of men.
“All the fossils belong to animals which live on land; . . . we find no marine remains."
Remember that the Drift is unfossiliferous and unstratified; that it fell en masse, and that these remains are found in its lower part, or caught between it and the rocks below it, and you can form a vivid picture of the sudden and terrible catastrophe. The trees were imbedded with man and the animals; the bones of men, smaller and more friable, probably perished, ground up in the tempest, while only their flint implements and the great bones of the larger animals, hard as stones, remain to tell the dreadful story. And yet some human bones
[1. “Prehistoric Times,” p. 366.
2. Ibid., pp. 366, 367.]
have been found; a lower jaw-bone was discovered in a pit at Moulinguignon, and a skull and other bones were found in the valley of the Seine by M. Bertrand.