PREHISTORIC CONGRESS

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 August 1932, Page 7

PREHISTORIC CONGRESS

WOMEN’S DISCOVERIES. LONDON, August 13. Mingling with elderly savants of all nations, women were prominent at the Prehistoric Congress. Although their archaeology investigations cover a period of probably 35,000 years ago, Misses Caton-Thompson and Garrod v/ore shingled hair and trim clothes, and looked as though they were ready to fly an aeroplane at a moment’s notice.

Miss Thompson, indeed, took her own aerial pictures of the excavations a: Kharga Oasis, in the Nile Valley. Superintending 200 Arab 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. Finally, the springs dried and there was a. long gap iu their history until the Persians bored a well in the sixth century B.C. Miss Thompson told the Congress that her camp was located in the wildest imaginable desolation. Though she had faced the dangers 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 Cunningham surprised the congress by declaring that, from the evidence of pottery discoveries, Stonehenge could not have been built before the Bronze Age. It was probably built bv the Beaker people, about. 1500 B.C.

Abbe Brueil. who accompanied Sir Elliot Smith to China, to investigate the Pekin man, produced evident' that the Pekin man living 1,000,000 year..; ago knew the use of fire. Sir Smith Woodward, discoverer of the Piltdown man, exhibited implements indicating that the antiquity of fire was at least as great in England as in the East.