by Professor Capellini,[1] to whose kindness I owe the opportunity of examining them in 1876, seem to me to have been notched artificially. In one case, a bone had been partially cut through and broken off at the line of cutting (Fig. 19), in the same way as many cut antlers of stag obtained from the Swiss lake-dwellings. The cuts have been made before the mineralisation of the fragments, one of them in particular being covered with an incrustation of sulphate of barytes. Now they are so hard that they could not be scratched by any stone implement. Along with them were flint flakes and a fragment of rude pottery. It is not, however, to my mind satisfactorily shown that these were obtained from undisturbed strata. Nor is the mineralisation a proof of their high antiquity, since we know how rapidly deposits of sulphate of barytes have sometimes been formed in the the wooden pipes of coal mines. It seems to me more prudent to wait for further proof of the presence of man in Europe at this time, for although it be allowed that the cuts are artificial and made by flint flakes, there is no proof that the mineralisation of the bones may not have taken place in comparatively modern times. Pottery was unknown in Europe in the Pleistocene, and therefore is unlikely to have been known in the Pleiocene age.
There is an argument against the probability of man having lived in Italy in Pleiocene times that seems to me unanswerable. Twenty-one fossil mammalia have been recently proved by Dr. Forsyth Major to have inhabited Tuscany in the Pleiocene age: of these there is only one species, the hippopotamus, now alive
- ↑ L'uomo Pliocenico in Toscana, Letta alla Reale Acad. dei Lincei. 7 May 1876.
