It is hardly contended that the neolithic age could have been more than
four or five thousand years ago. There is always the greatest difficulty
in fixing any dates because from the nature of the case written records
are absent, and the stages of growth in the history of peoples overlap
so.
We know that sharp flakes of stone were still used for knives in the
time of Moses and Joshua. We are not out of the stone age yet, as
regards some portions of the globe; and it is quite possible that parts
of the earth, not so very remote, may have been still in the midst of a
stone age when Assyria, Chaldaea, and Egypt were comparatively highly
civilized.
It is also fairly certain that between the neolithic or smooth-stone
age, and the palaeolithic, certain important geological changes took
place, though those changes were not such as to have demanded any very
great length of time for their accomplishment.
The palaeolithic stone implements are found in river gravels and clays,
along the higher levels of our own Thames Valley, that of the Somme in
France, and in other places. They are also found at the bottom of
various natural caverns.
No human bones have been found as yet with the implements, but the bones
of large numbers of animals have. And it seems certain that the men who
made the implements were contemporaries of the animals, because in the
later part of the age, at any rate, they drew or scratched likenesses of
the animals on bone.
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