Animal bones showing cuts or breaks supposed to be the work of man have been found in seventeen different localities in Europe. They can all, however, be accounted for as the result of natural movements or pressure of the soil acting in connection with sharp substances, like fractured flints, or else as having been made by the teeth of sharks, whose fossil remains are found in great abundance in the same formation. All the discoveries of flints supposed to show traces of intentional chipping are pronounced to be unsatisfactory, with the exception of those found in three localities--Thenay (near Tours) and Puy-Courny (near Aurillac), in France, and Otta, in the valley of the Tagus, in Portugal. As European archæologists at the present time are substantially in accord with Mortillet in restricting the discussion to these three places, I will follow their example. But although Mortillet believes that flints found at all these localities exhibit marks of intelligent action, he will not admit that they are the work of man. He attributes them to an intelligent ancestor of man, whom he calls by the name of anthropopithecus, or the precursor of man. Of this creature he distinguishes three different species, named respectively after the discoverers of the flints in the three localities just mentioned. The precursor, however, has found up to this time only a very limited acceptance among men of science, although a few believe in him on purely theoretical grounds. The discussion generally turns upon the question whether these flints were chipped intentionally or are the result of natural causes; and also upon the determination of the geological age of the formations in which they are found. [Illustration: Fig. 108.--Flint flakes collected by Abbé Bourgeois from Miocene strata at Thenay (after Gaudry). Natural size.]