The Arrival of Man in Britain in the Pleistocene Age

No Evidence of Man in Eocene, Miocene, or Pliocene Periods.If this diagram, based upon the evolution of the mammalia, be used in our search for the first traces of man on the earth, it is obvious that we cannot expect to find the most highly organised of the mammalia in any portion of the geological Tecord, where there are no other living mammalian species, or, in other words, in the two earlier stages of the Tertiary period.In the Eocene there are no living Eutherian genera, and in the Miocene no living Eutherian species.In the latter the Primates are only represented by the higher anthropoid apes-the Dryopithecus and others.We can only look for man in the Pliocene age, when the living forms come in, and only expect to find him in the Pleistocene, when the living Eutherian forms were dominant, and the face of nature as a whole was almost as it is to-day.The general evidence as to this, as was pointed out in 1880,1 is simply overwhelming, and it still holds the field.The evidence that man was living in France in the Miocene age, based upon the flints collected by Bourgeois at Thenay, has long ago been rejected as worthless,2 because it is not certain that they really came from the Miocene strata of the district, and because some of them, now preserved in the museum at St. Germains

Archaeology · Geography · Pleistocene · Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

• Skeletal biology in the twentieth century

  Elizabeth M Salter, J Kolár et al.•Reviews in Anthropology•1993

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