FACES IN FLINTS.

Shannon News, 4 January 1927, Page 3

FACES IN FLINTS.

FOUND IN CRETACEOUS DEPOSITS AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ENIGMA. Scientists are completely puzzled (says the London Daily Express)' by human faces and animal figuies which peer out of a series of flints on exhibition at the Psychic Bookshop, run by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Abbey House, Victoria Street, London. There are forty or fifty of them, none larger than an egg. They were found by Mr W. H. Clarke, an amateur geologist, embedded in chalk near Brandon, in Suffolk. All of them were at least forty feet beneath the surface. These faces, which Mr Clark declare to be tens of thousands of years old, stir the imagination. Sonrhave an evil leer, some are crafty, some are sullen, and all, except one with a freakish resemblance to a modern woman in evening dress, have an elemen tal and primordial coarseness. Yet they are alive with character and personal- i ity. •

One arresting face might be the portrait of a Stone Age philosopher; A beetling brow, receding rapidly, hangs ever deep-set eyes. A supercilious mouth curls beneath an elongated nose, of which the bridge almost meets the forehead. The features appear in replica, in each half of tho flint, which has been split open. Another face is that of a woman who might have beea a Neolithic society matron. Plaits of hair, or some vaguely defined head-dresi, form a background for features similar to the man's, long, perpendicular and , almost Grecian in their straightness. A j surprising likeness to the shingle is shown in a third. This head is small, rlat on top and tilted in the air. Thick nostrils and dittended ears suggest a negioid origin. No psychic influence is suggested, but the mystery deepens even if the mai kings are assumed to be the work of prehistoric man. How did they come to be embedded in flint? They show up like ghostly white figures projected on a flinty grey background. They are not carved in the flint, for they do not stand out in relief. They are not painted, for the marking goes right through the grain and appears in irregular lines on the outside. Equally they fit much too close3y to be inlaid as in mosaie work, but when they are held up to the light they appear as dark objects in ths transparency of the flint. Mr Clarke puts forward an entrancing theory which explains this difficulty. He contends that the faces, none of which is much larger than a thumb-nail sketch, are the fossilised remains of a pigmy race. "I think they have lived,'' 1 he said. "They are absolutely true to life. Just as modern men are much toy large to wear the mediaeval armour : shown in the Tower, so it is possible that there was a tiny race of men millions of years ago. Flint would en close their bodies through the action of water which has in a similar way.preserved small fish and leaves. One of my find which is on show is a perfect/ human leg about three inches long. I found this in the hollow of a large flint, which I split open when I felt something rattle inside it." Others think that this leg may have formed part of a, stone doll,' and there are other more grotesque objects which might also have been toys. One is a cow's, head, another a snake's head, and a third shows a crude attempt at marking human features in a roughly formed head. A dainty squirrel takes precedence amongst the animals, but another flint shows the great garting jaws* of some forest-wandering monster, also in miniature, which may well have haunted the imagination of hunted cave-elwellers. There is also the profile of a gigantic bird resembling an eagle, but its beak has the thickness cf an animal snout.