Again, their painting was confined to the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects, that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something like them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems to be the early iron-age.

Had the rest of the palaeolithic men already followed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?
Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe out the lot?
Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us have a little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large dose of neolithic?
To all these questions it can only be replied that we do not yet know.
No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty things relating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a language that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spread over the west till they reached Great Britain--it probably was an island by this time--and erected the well-known long barrows and other monuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the round barrows, which are the work of a subsequent round-headed race of the bronze-age.

Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge.
Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at the neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.
In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon, just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.
Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and the other in the life of to-day.

When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime's Graves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pit some forty feet deep.

Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithic worker had found the layer of the best flint.