If they left any remains we should find these in caverns or rock shelters, or in the old gravels belonging to this period which here and there project through the alluvial plain. At one of these places, Jebel Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied himself of the occurrence of flint chips which may have been of human workmanship;[65] but after a day's collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were other than accidental fragments. If they really are flint knives they are older than the period we are now considering, and must be much older than the first dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings.[66] These gravels were indeed, in early Egyptian times, so consolidated that tombs were excavated in them. Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy evidence of the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. Yet we know that at this time rude hunting tribes had spread themselves over Western Asia, and over Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and other animals now extinct. They were the so-called 'palæolithic' or historically antediluvian men, belonging, like the animals they hunted, to extinct races, quite dissimilar physically from the historical Egyptians. And yet in a recent review of the late Miss Edwards's charming work, _Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers_, she was taken to task by an eminent Egyptologist for statements similar to the above. On the evidence of two additional finds of flint implements _on the surface_, he affirms the existence of man in Egypt at a time when 'the Arabian deserts were covered with verdure and intersected by numerous streams,' that is, geologically speaking, in the early pleistocene or pliocene period, or even in the miocene! [65] _Journal of Archæological Society_, 1881. Haynes's _Journal of the American Academy of Sciences_. [66] Dawson, _Egypt and Syria_, p. 149. Singularly enough, therefore, Egypt is to the prehistoric annalist not an old country--less old indeed than France and England, in both of which we find evidence of the residence of the palæolithic cave men of the mammoth age. Thus, when we go beyond local history into the prehistoric past, our judgment as to the relative age of countries may be strangely reversed.