The Fractured Flints of the Eocene “Bull-head” Bed at Coe's Pit, Bramford near Ipswich

Extract

During the past few years discoveries of flaked flints of various kinds have been made in certain pre-river-valley deposits in Suffolk and Norfolk, and the discoverers of these specimens have had to meet, from some quarters, a very determined opposition to the view that these stones have been fashioned by man at periods long anterior to those in which the earliest Palæolithic implements were made. The details of the discovery of these flaked flints have already been made public in various scientific publications, and papers have been published giving the discoverers' reasons for believing them to be of human manufacture, and their opponents' reasons for looking upon them as purely natural productions.

In the last part of our Proceedings I gave an account of the series of experiments I had carried through with flints subjected to natural pressure and percussion, and endeavoured to show how the flaking produced by these experiments differed from that seen upon undoubted examples of human handiwork. The chief objection brought against my conclusions was that it is impossible to imitate the forces of Nature which act upon flints by shaking stones in a sack and fracturing them by pressure in a screw-press, and I confess that at first sight this appears to be a very weighty argument and one difficult to refute. But a close and searching examination of these “mighty forces of Nature,” a phrase often used with marked effect upon an uncritical audience, will, I think, show that they are largely inoperative upon flints, and that if they are too “mighty” the flint succumbs and is shattered to fragments.