[6] _British Museum--A Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age_, p. 76 (1900).
[7] Miller had adopted the "stratification theory" of Professor William Robertson of Edinburgh University, who, in his _The History of America_ (1777), wrote: "Men in their savage state pass their days like the animals round them, without knowledge or veneration of any superior power".
He had written in this vein after seeing the collection of stone weapons and implements in the Northern Institution at Inverness. "The most practised eye", he commented, "can hardly distinguish between the weapons of the Old Scot and the New Zealander." Eyes have become more practised in dealing with flints since Miller's time. Andrew Lang remembered his Miller when he wrote:
"Now just as the flint arrowheads are scattered everywhere, in all the continents and isles--and everywhere are much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of race--so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of folk-lore".[8]
[8] _Custom and Myth_ (1910 edition), p. 13. Lang's views regarding flints are worthless.
The recent discovery that the early flints found in Western Europe and in England were shaped by the Neanderthals and the pre-Neanderthals compels a revision of this complacent view of an extraordinarily difficult and complex problem. It is obvious that the needs and constructive powers of the Neanderthals, whose big clumsy hands lacked "the delicate play between the thumb and fingers characteristic of modern races", could not have been the same as those of the Crô-Magnons, and that the finely shaped implements of the Crô-Magnons could not have been evolved from the rough implements of the Neanderthals. The craftsmen of one race may, however, have imitated, or attempted to imitate, the technique of those of another.
There was a distinct break in the continuity of culture during the Palæolithic Age, caused by the arrival in Western Europe of the ancestors of Modern Man. The advent of the Crô-Magnons in Europe "represents on the cultural side", as Professor Elliot Smith says in _Primitive Man_, "the most momentous event in its history".
[Illustration: Photos. Oxford University Press