PLEISTOCENE CLASSIFICATIONS. 277
How are we to explain the not infrequent occurrence of the
thoroughly northern forms, such as Elephas primigenius, that
occur on the same horizon ?* My view is, that the northern
fauna and the southern fauna lived side by side in different
biological provinces at the same time, just as the Indian and the
African elephants (with their respective associates) co-exist at
the present day. The Forest Bed being an estuarine deposit
of what is believed to have been an important continental river,
it seems to me that animal remains could very easily have been
brought in from northern and southern tributaries and mingled
together, although they did not live together on the same area.
We now, unfortunately, reach a stage in our enquiry at which
almost every point is involved in the thorny controversy of flint
flaking determinations. Last year it was my privilege to bring
before you certain evidences relative to the eolithic controversy,
but our flint flaking difficulties are by no means confined to the
problem of the eoliths. As one illustration among a host of
debatable questions, we have the inference before us that certain
flint flakings found upon the open sea-beach of the Norfolk coast
represent the debris of a prehistoric workshop of Chellian age
washed out of the Cromer Forest Bed† (32). If those inferences
had any justification, they would profoundly modify our classi-
fication, but to me, after repeated examination of the site, it
appears abundantly clear that the flakings (as a group) are not
those of an industry of Chellian or any other prehistoric
affinities, and that they have not been washed out of the Forest
Bed but belong exclusively to the sea-beach. ‡
No one can doubt that an ancestor of man must have lived
in contemporary association with the Cromerian fauna, but I
know of no authentic evidence of contemporary association
between that fauna and Chellian man.
We are too apt to assume it as axiomatic that a stone age cul-
ture of some sort would inevitably be the primitive condition of
mankind. I think it open to doubt. From the point of view of
human origins, it seems to me, on the contrary, that any stone
age culture (that is to say the idea of manufacturing stone into
artificial implements) is not primitive, but advanced. The apes
have had some millenniums of accumulated experience since the
Pliocene, they have had the advantage of contact with the
example of man, but they have not acquired the first notion of
manufacture. So far then as a priori considerations have any
* I am fairly familiar with the true Arctic Mammoth of the Lea Valley deposits. Mr. Savin
of Cromer, has shown me molars from the Forest Bed, which he assures me are from the same
horizon as those of E. Meridionalis, and they are astonishingly similar to these from the Arctic
beds of the Lea Valley. 
† The palaeolith from the beach at Palling is clearly derived from one of the river gravels
which overlie the glacial deposits of the Norfolk coast, and some of the flakes from the Cromer
beach site may have a similar origin, but it is not easy to identify any with confidence.
‡ The flakings from the basement bed (see Geol. Mag., 1924, p. 309) are different in
patination and characteristics ; these also may often be found on the modern beach, and
can be recognized at a glance.