20,000 B.C.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15160, 22 February 1922, Page 6

20,000 B.C.

PRIMITIVE MAN. WHEN ENGLAND WAS REALLY COLD. How primitive man enjoyed himself and what he did in the ages before history began is told very simply and clearly by Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell in “Everyday Life in the Stone Age,” recently published.

Nothing is more wonderful than the wide and various knowledge of prehistoric man- which modern archaeology has given in the last few years. Implements made by him have been found dating back 27,000 years, and perhaps much more, in certain gravels on' the Somme. In those far-off; days — “The climate was warm, as remains are found of Elephas antiquus, a southern type of elephant which preceded the mammoth, England was connected to Europe by a watershed of dry land where the Straits of Dover now are. There was an isthmus across the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and another south of Sicily. There is the explanation of the hippopotamus in England; he did not need to swim; he walked here.”

The first-known Englishman was the Piltdown fnan, so called from a part of a skull found at Piltdown, in the Sussex weald, of whom a most unflattering portrait is given—reconstructed from the skull. “The brain capacity is about equal to the smaller human brain of to-day. The skull is extraordinarily thick. The Piltdown man could, and probably ■did, butt a rival away. He was probably right-handed.” A He had np easy existence. One of his foes must have been the sabretoothed tiger, a fierce and formidable creatui’e whose bones have been found in Kent’s Cavern and elsewhere in Britain. How' such antagonists v r ere combated by our remote progenitors is told: ( “To dig a pit Avould not have been beyond the wit of the prehistoric man, and stakes for it could have been sharpened and the points hardened by fire.. Such a pit would have been the beginning of the long battle betAveen brain and mere bulk. This ■would have been one Avay in which prehistoric man obtained the meat ■that he needed for his'food. He Avas, of course, as carnivorous as his foe the tiger.” Still later, some 22’,000 years ago, prehistoric man had developed an ■art, the recent discovery of Avhich has startled the Avorld in the wonderful coloured drawings of the Altamira cave in Spain. Here Avere found: “Drawings and paintings of bulls, bison, deer, horses, and many other animals, some life-size. There is no light in the cave and the figures occur all over the walls. They cannot be seen now without a. light, and a lamp must have been used when they w r ere painted. Many of the animals ai;e drawn with arrows sticking in their bodies; on some the heart is shown in red.”

The appearance of such animals as the Arctic hare and musk-ox in this ■strange picture gallery shows that the climate about 20,000 B.C. must have been much colder than it is today. But this can easily be explained : “Scientists tell us that it only wants a fall of about sdeg. centigrade (9deg. Fahrenheit) below the mean annual temperature of Europe to have all the rigour of the glacial periods back again, or that a rise of 4 to 5 degrees would cause all the Swiss glaciers to disappear.” Such an alteration might be compassed by that mysterious thing known as the Procession of the Equinoxes.