Two stages are distinguished in this first part of the Palaeolithic Age--the Acheulean and Chellean--but it will suffice for our purpose to take the two together as the earlier and longer section of the Old Stone Age. It was a time of temperate, if not genial, climate. The elephant (an extinct type), the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the hyaena, and many other forms of animal life that have since retired southward, were neighbours of the first human inhabitant of Europe. Unfortunately, we have only one bone of this primitive race, the jaw found at Mauer in 1907, but its massive size and chinless contour suggest a being midway between the Java man and the Neanderthal race. His culture confirms the supposition. There is at this stage no clear trace of fire, clothing, arrows, hefted weapons, spears, or social life. As the implements are generally found on old river-banks or the open soil, not in caves, we seem to see a squat and powerful race wandering, homeless and unclad, by the streams and broad, marshy rivers of the time. The Thames and the Seine had not yet scooped out the valleys on the slopes of which London and Paris are built. This period seems, from the vast number of stone implements referred to it, to have lasted a considerable time. There is a risk in venturing to give figures, but it may be said that few authorities would estimate it at less than a hundred thousand years. Man still advanced with very slow and uncertain steps, his whole progress in that vast period being measured by the invention of one or two new forms of stone implements and a little more skill in chipping them. At its close a great chill comes over Europe--the last ice-sheet is, it seems, spreading southward--and we enter the Mousterian period and encounter the Neanderthal race which we described in the preceding chapter.