THE ROUGH STONE AGE

=Gravel Débris.=--The oldest remains of the Stone Age have been found
in the gravels. A French scholar found between 1841 and 1853, in the
valley of the Somme, certain sharp instruments made of flint. They
were buried to a depth of six metres in gravel under three layers of
clay, gravel, and marl which had never been broken up. In the same
place they discovered bones of cattle, deer, and elephants. For a long
time people made light of this discovery. They said that the chipping
of the flints was due to chance. At last, in 1860, several scholars
came to study the remains in the valley of the Somme and recognized
that the flints had certainly been cut by men. Since then there have
been found more than 5,000 similar flints in strata of the same order
either in the valley of the Seine or in England, and some of them by
the side of human bones. There is no longer any doubt that men were
living at the epoch when the gravel strata were in process of
formation. If the strata that cover these remains have always been
deposited as slowly as they are today, these men whose bones and tools
we unearth must have lived more than 200,000 years ago.

=The Cave Men.=--Remains are also found in caverns cut in rock, often
above a river. The most noted are those on the banks of the Vézère,
but they exist in many other places. Sometimes they have been used as
habitations and even as graves for men. Skeletons, weapons, and tools
are found here together. There are axes, knives, scrapers,
lance-points of flint; arrows, harpoon-points, needles of bone like
those used by certain savages to this day. The soil is strewn with the
bones of animals which these men, untidy like all savages, threw into
a corner after they had eaten the meat; they even split the bones to