INHABITANTS OF BRITAIN TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2049, 17 September 1880, Page 2

INHABITANTS OF BRITAIN TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO.

" The Man of the Caverns " waa recently (sayo the "Times ") the subject of a London Institution lecture, wlich was delivered in the theatre by Pressor Boyd Dawkine, E.R.S., who fills the Chair of Geology in Owen's College, Manchester. He said that, while the river-drift men and the cave men were living in Britain, the hills and valleys in the south of Eogland presented the same outlines as they did now. Could we take our stand in those times on Shooter's hill or on the Eisex heights, and look ever tho Thames valley in the direction of London, we should see a dense forest covered with oak, ash, and Scotch fir, and the course of the Thamec marked by lines of willows and alders. A few thin columns of smoke rising over the tops of the trees would mark the camping places of primevai man. In the forests wild boars, mammoths, and rhinoceroses, wild horses, stags, and Irish elks would meet our eyes, and in the summer time countless herds of bisons, like those now ranging over the plains of north-western America. In the winter were vast numbers of reinder, and a few musksheep, the most arctic of the mammalia in its habits. In the rivers were otters and beavers, and the explorer would be startled by the snort of the hippopotamus in the reaches of the Thames near Brentford. Beasts of prey also abounded, lions, leopards, hyenas, grizzly bears, wolves, and foxes. If we penetrated to one of the camp-fires we should have seen the river drift hunter chipping or using same of those rude flint implements which lie buried in the London gravels along with the remains of the animals which he hunted. The river-drift man, in the long course of ageß, was succeeded by the man of the cavern*, like him a hunter, living on the same animals, and more highly equipped for tho battle of life. In the course of time the cave man disappeared, the climate and geography of hie country became almost what it was now, the hunter stage of civilisation was superseded by that of the herdsman and the tiller of tho ground and the manufacturer of the Neolithic Age. From the Neolithio Age down to tho E resent time the progress of man had een unbroken in Britain and in Europe, and the present condition of the European peoples was to be looked upon as the result of a gradual series of changes by which civilisation succeeded civilisation, and race succeeded race, " the old order yielding place unto the new," because the new order was higher and nobler.