PREHISTORIANS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 306, 20 August 1932, Page 3

PREHISTORIANS

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY MODERN WOMEN TAKE A PROMINENT PART IN CONGRESS. REMARKABLE . RESEARCH. London, Saturday. Mingling with elderly savants of all nations, womeirwere prominent at the Prehistoric Gongress. Although their arehaeology investigations cover a period of probably 35,000 years ago, Misses Caton, Thompson and Garrod wore shingled hair and trim clothes, and looked as th'ough they were ready to fly an aeroplane at a moment's notice. Miss Thompson, indeed, took her own aerial pictures of the excavations at Kharga Oasis, in the Nile Yalley. Superintending 200 Arah workmen, she discovered fossil springs used by man probably 35,000 years ago, and also hundreds of prehistoric weapons and tools, showing a long occupation in paleolithic times. In the later Neolithic era the springs started drying. The remains showed that men had dug down to reach the failing supply. Finally the springs dried and there was a long gap in their history until the Persians bored a well in the sixth oentury, B.C. Miss Thompson told Gongress that her camp was located in the wildest imaginable desolution. Though she had faced th'e dan'gers of the desert unflinchingly, she blushed like a schoolgirl when the prehistorians broke into a storm of applause. Sir Flinders Petrie described her as an extremely brilliant young woman. Mrs. Cunnington surprised Congress by declaring that, from the evidence of pottery discoveries, Stonehenge could not have been built before the bronze age. It was probably built by the Beaker people, about 1500 B.C. Abbe Brueil, who accompanied Sir Elliot Smith to China to investigate the Peking man, produced evidence that the Peking man living a million years ago knew the use of fire. Sir Smith Woodwai'd, discoverc-r of the Piltdown man, exhibited implements indicating that the antiquity of fire was at least as great in England as in the East.