second expert declares
that the roots beat all records. They are of the kind that goes with
an immensely powerful jaw, needing a massive brow-ridge to counteract
the strain of the bite, and in general involving the type of skull
known as the Neanderthal, big-brained enough in its way, but uncommonly
ape-like all the same.

Finally, the banqueters have left plenty of their knives lying about.
These good folk had their special and regular way of striking off a
broad flat flake from the flint core; the cores are lying about, too,
and with luck you can restore some of the flakes to their original
position. Then, leaving one side of the flake untouched, they trimmed
the surface of the remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt with
use, kept touching them up with the hammer-stone--there it is also
lying by the hearth--until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval shape
and becomes a pointed triangle. A third expert is called in, and has
no difficulty in recognizing these knives as the characteristic
handiwork of the epoch known as the Mousterian. If one of these worked
flints from Jersey was placed side by side with another from the cave
of Le Moustier, near the right bank of the Vezere in south-central
France, whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly tell which was
which; whilst you would still see the same family likeness if you
compared the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, or from Northfleet
on the Thames, or from Icklingham in Suffolk.

Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion,
doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of a
hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woolly
rhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to
carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under the
very chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and to
keep his race going.

There is one other class of evidence on which the pre-historian may
with due caution draw, though the risks are certain and the profits
uncertain. The ruder peoples of to-day are living a life that in its
broad features cannot be wholly unlike the life of the men of long
ago. Thus the pre-historian should study Spencer and Gillen on the
natives of Central Australia, if only that he may take firm hold of
the fact that people with skulls inclining towards the Neanderthal
type, and using stone knives, may nevertheless have very active minds;
in short, that a