Abstract
WHEN meeting in East Anglia it is appropriate that the Section of Anthropology should devote special attention to prehistoric archaeology. In this part of England so long ago as 1797, John Frere made the first scientific observations on palaeolithic implements which he had dug out of a superficial deposit at Hoxne. During recent years, Mr. J. Reid Moir has excited wide interest by his discoveries of the oldest known stone implements, which he has collected with remarkable zeal and discussed with acute observation. Here also arose the ‘Prehistoric Society of East Anglia’, which has been so well supported during its career of more than twenty years, that it has gradually widened its sphere until now it becomes the ‘Prehistoric Society’, devoted to advances in its subject in all parts of the world. We are, indeed, now confronted with problems much greater than those which the pioneers in western Europe dealt with, when they were laying the foundations of research in prehistory. Traces of men who lived before the dawn of history in widely separated parts of the earth's surface have been discovered in increasing abundance during recent years; and a study which at first was more or less local has now become one of world-wide scope. Among the several branches of science which contribute to our understanding of the subject, those of palaeontology and geology are of considerable importance. The period of man's existence on the earth has been so short that there has been no appreciable evolution among the mammals associated with successive human races; but many migrations and extinctions are observable, so that these mammals can often be used for determining the relative ages of the isolated deposits in which human remains and implements occur. In some cases also the mammals are probably enough to show the nature of the climate and the local conditions under which they lived. The contemporary geological changes, though small, likewise help in explaining migrations and perhaps some extinctions; while the peculiar circumstances of the Great Ice Age, under which early man flourished in the northern hemisphere, varied so much from time to time, that they have been used in forming a plausible chronology. As a palaeontologist and a geologist, therefore, I propose to discuss some of the latest developments of prehistory.
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Woodward, A. Recent Progress in the Study of Early Man. Nature 136, 419–423 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136419a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136419a0