Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
undisturbed beds of such antiquity. Few geologists visited Abbeville
in winter, when the sand-pits were open, and when they might have
opportunities of verifying the sections, and judging whether the
instruments had really been embedded by natural causes in the same
strata with the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other extinct
mammalia. Some of the tools figured in the "Antiquites Celtiques" were
so rudely shaped, that many imagined them to have owed their peculiar
forms to accidental fracture in a river's bed; others suspected frauds
on the part of the workmen, who might have fabricated them for sale, or
that the gravel had been disturbed, and that the worked flints had got
mingled with the bones of the mammoth long after that animal and its
associates had disappeared from the earth.
No one was more sceptical than the late eminent physician of Amiens, Dr.
Rigollot, who had long before (in the year 1819) written a memoir on the
fossil mammalia of the valley of the Somme. He was at length induced to
visit Abbeville, and, having inspected the collection of M. Boucher de
Perthes, returned home resolved to look for himself for flint tools in
the gravel-pits near Amiens. There, accordingly, at a distance of about
30 miles from Abbeville, he immediately found abundance of similar flint
implements, precisely the same in the rudeness of their make, and the
same in their geological position; some of them in gravel nearly on a
level with the Somme, others in similar deposits resting on Chalk at a
height of about 90 feet above the river.
Dr. Rigollot having in the course of four years obtained several hundred
specimens of these tools, most of them from St. Acheul in the south-east
suburbs of Amiens, lost no time in communicating an account of them to
the scientific world, in a memoir illustrated by good figures of the
worked flints and careful sections of the beds. These sections were
executed by M. Buteux, an engineer well qualified for the task, who had
written a good description of the geology of Picardy. Dr. Rigollot, in
this memoir, pointed out most clearly that it was not in the vegetable
soil, nor in the brick-earth with land and freshwater shells next below,
but in the lower beds of coarse flint-gravel, usually 12, 20, or 25 feet
below the surface, that the implements were met with, just as they had
been previously stated by M. Boucher de Perthes to occur at Abbeville.
The conclusion, therefore, which was legitimately deduced from all the
facts, was that the flint tools and their fabricators were coeval with
the extinct mammalia embedded in the same strata.
BRIXHAM CAVE, NEAR TORQUAY, DEVONSHIRE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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