Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1912 — MOST ANCIENT OF MEN [ARTICLE]

MOST ANCIENT OF MEN

RECENT DIBCOVERIEB IN ENG* LAND ARE INTERESTING. Flint Implements Made Before the Glacial Period of Europe Are Found by an Eminent Archaeologist in Buffolk. /// The new discovery in regard to ancient man (of which I am able to speak with full confidence since I have studied the specimens and the localities myself, and have just sent an illustrated account of the implement to the Royal society) is that of flint implements of very definite and peculiar shape, in some abundance, in a bed at the base of what geologists Class as a Pliocene deposit (that is, before the Pleistocene), namely, the “Red Crag” of Etejfolk. We owe this most important discovery entirely to Mr. J. Reid Moir of Ipswich, who found his first specimens in October, 1909, and after a year’s careful examination of the district and the finding of more specimens in crag pits ten miles and more around Ipswich, announced it in a letter to the Times in October, 1910. Now that another year has passed more specimens have been found and the matter is beyond dispute. / " Two distinguished geologists, past presidents of the Geological society, have certified that the bed in which Mr. Moir’s flints are obtained is certinly the undisturbed basement bed of the Red Crag, so that they may be justly spoken of as due to JtJie work of-pre-crag man. - ; V The implements are not at mi like those previously known. They are not flattened, almond-shaped, or kite-like (elongated, triangular or leaf-shaped), as are the large Paleolithic implement (the Chellean, Acheuilian and Moustierian) hitherto known. But they are shaped like the beak of an eagle, compressed from side to side with a keel or ridge extending from the front point backward. Their shape may be compared to the hull of a boat with its keel turned ufTward and Its beak-like prow in ,front. They are from four to ten inches in length, and all have been fabricated by a few well-directed blows given to an oblong piece of flint so as to knock off great pieces right said left, leaving a keel in the midline, while the lower face Is trimmed flat. These implements are, in fact, beaked hammer heads—probably used In the hand without halting—and applied to the smoothing and “dressing” of skins, as well as other purposes. Some are more symmetrical and carefully “trimmed” than others. With these, which I call “eagle’s beak implements,” or the “rostro-carinate type,” are found a few other large and heavy sculptured flints of very curious shape (like picks and axes) unlike any hitherto known, hut certainly and without the least doubt chipped into shape by man. The flint Implements—our eagle’s beaks made by men in the relatively warm Coralline Crag days—were actually carried off the land by an ice sheet and deposited in the earliest layers of the Red Crag deposit. The irrefragable proof of this Is that very many of the eagle’s beak flints are scratched and scored on their smooth surfaoes by those peculiar cross-run-ning grooves which we find on a pebble from a glacier’s “moraine,” or stone heap. Nothing but the immense pressure of the stones embedded in one sheet of ice, rasping by slow movement other stones embedded in another sheet of ice over which the first very slowly advances, can produce these markings. > The Red Crag marks the beginning of the Pleistocene and of the glacial condition of North Europe. A great question, difficult of decision, * is whether the earliest river gravels which we know In England and France were as early as the Red Crag, overlying which are vast marine deposits of glacial Bands and clays. In any case Mr. Moir’s flint implements are pre-Crag; they were made before the glacial conditions set in, and are qnite unlike those found In the river gravelS. The discovery is one which will profoundly interest the “pre-his-torians” of France and Germany, as well as English archaeologists and geologists.—London Times.