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The tool-bearing gravel here, as in the case to which it has been compared near Bedford, is proved to be newer than the glacial drift, by containing pebbles of basalt and other rocks derived from that formation. Flint Implements in Cave containing Hyaena and other extinct Mammalia in Somersetshire. Caves of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales. Rhinoceros hemitoechus. Ossiferous Caves near Palermo.
If we accept M. Lartet's interpretation of the ossiferous deposits of Aurignac, both inside and outside the grotto, they add nothing to the palaeontological evidence in favour of Man's antiquity, for we have seen all the same mammalia associated elsewhere with flint implements, and some species, such as the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and Hippopotamus major, missing here, have been met with in other places.
It is clear from their position that Man was coeval with these two species. We have elsewhere independent proofs of his co-existence with every other species of the cave-fauna of Glamorganshire; but this is the first well-authenticated example of the occurrence of R. hemitoechus in connection with human implements.
Judging from the evidence at present before us, the first appearance of Man, when, together with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or with the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and Hippopotamus major, he ranged freely from all parts of the Continent into the British area, took place during this second continental period.
But the discovery of most importance, as bearing on the subject of the present work, is the occurrence in a newly-discovered cave, called Long Hole, by Colonel Wood, in 1861, of the remains of two species of rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus and R. hemitoechus, Falconer, in an undisturbed deposit, in the lower part of which were some well-shaped flint knives, evidently of human workmanship.
R. hemitoechus, Falconer, in which the ossification of the septum dividing the nostrils is incomplete in the middle, besides other cranial and dental characters distinguishing it from R. tichorhinus, accompanies Elephas antiquus in most of the oldest British bone-caves, such as Kirkdale, Cefn, Durdham Down, Minchin Hole, and other Gower caverns also found at Clacton, in Essex, and in Northamptonshire.
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