Читать книгу Memorials of Old Lincolnshire - Various - Страница 14

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One of the most recent discoveries regarding Prehistoric Man in Lincolnshire is the finding of some thousands of diminutive flint implements at Scunthorpe, Manton Common, and Scotton, in North Lincolnshire. At the suggestion of the writer of this article, Mr. E. E. Brown made a careful search at Scunthorpe in A.D. 1900, and found some thirty or forty specimens.

Since then the Rev. Reginald Gatty, the Rev. Alfred Hunt, and others have found hundreds of specimens at Scunthorpe.

The Pygmy Flints are of various forms and sizes. Similar forms and shapes have been found in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Sussex, and elsewhere in England. On the Continent similar forms of Pygmy Flints have been found in Belgium, France, and Germany. They have also been found in Egypt, Palestine, North and Central Africa, and in great numbers on the Vindhya Mountains, India.

The bodies or bones of these Pygmy people have been found at Sohâgi Ghât, on the Vindhya Mountains, in Germany, and at Bungay, Suffolk, quite recently, by Mr. H. A. Dutt, of Lowestoft.[6]

The Pygmy Flints all show points characteristic of the work of man:—

 1. The Bulb of Percussion.

 2. The Conchoidal Fractures running down the flint.

 3. The Dorsal Ridges on the back of the flint.

 4. The Secondary Working along one edge.

 5. The Patina or Skin, the result of weathering.

Their shapes have been described as—

 Crescent-shaped.

 Triangular or Scalene.

 Arrow-head.

 Round-headed and pointed.

 Chisel-shaped.

 Trapezoid or Rhomboidal.

 Flint knives with serrated edges.

They are figured in the British Museum Handbook to the Stone Age, on p. 110, Fig. 132.

They are beautifully made, and show extraordinary keen sight in those who made them—frequently one side only shows secondary working, and the chipping is so finely done that often twenty and thirty different chips have been made on a fine thin edge of flint in the length of half an inch.

The question has been asked, how may we know Pygmy Flints are the work of mankind? Practically by the same method that we know other flint or stone implements are the handiwork of man. Examine these Pygmy Flints closely, and you will be able to trace—

 1. The Bulb of Percussion, showing where the blow was struck to separate the flake from the flint nodule.

 2. The Conchoidal Fracture running down the length of the flint.

 3. The Dorsal Ridges on the back of the flint.

 4. The Secondary Working along one edge.

 5. The Patina or Skin, the result of weathering or exposure.

These distinct characteristics prove these flints are no haphazard flakings from a flint core.

When you can pick up these Pygmy Flints, and show all these peculiarities, you are able to convince reasonable men that they are the work of a race of people, who, with keen vision and clever handiwork, were able to make tools which have outlived their own age and race by many thousands of years.