have been food animals. Closer examination of the considerable faunal remains from out Kentish river gravels is undoubtedly called for. There is also the question of clays and silts containing environmental evidence, even beetles, rafts of which have been encountered in deep deposits. Besides the handaxes there is also accumulative evidence that mankind, during the distant Pleistocene days, developed a considerable répertoire of not unsophisticated flake-tools. Many major rivers have changed their courses, notably our familiar Thames, for human development was accompanied by ice ages, Stringer’s third chapter. It was the Anglian ice-front which moved the Thames southwards and its gravels, from which came the Swanscombe skull fragments, are a product of the following warm Hoxnian interglacial. The Boxgrove site, which yielded the human shin-bone, may precede the Anglian glaciation. It could have had a considerable catchment area, evidence for which is the many handaxes from the back-slopes of the South Downs. The numerous handaxes from eastern Kent’s chalklands could point to a site, comparable with Boxgrove, somewhere at its periphery. The Hoxnian inter-glacial was the Great Interglacial and the person from whom came the Swanscombe skull pieces had her being during this great time-period. A double-page illustration (pp. 110-11) depicts, in fine detail, the three pieces. It has emerged that they are likely to have been from a female and that they have incipient Neanderthal affinities. The Ebbsfleet, Swanscombe, straight-tusked elephant, the skeleton of which was found with about a hundred Clactonian flint tools, when the Channel Tunnel was constructed, could be an extension of the Swanscombe sequence. There are thousands of handaxes from Swanscombe, and other Kentish gravels, and their possible uses are discussed but are largely unresolved. The onset of the Wolstonian glaciation is illustrated by the cold fauna encountered at Crayford where it was accompanied by fine flake tools struck from prepared cores. It is thought that at about this time bones were used as fuel. Their fatty content allows this, but much kindling is needed to ignite them. Thereafter it emerges that the land, that was to become our islands, was abandoned for more than 100,000 years.
   Chris Stringer is at home with the Neanderthals, who have been the subject of much of his wider research. Indeed, he sees them as ‘…close relatives who were as human as we are, but in their own unique way’. Their skulls contained a large brain and their faces had huge noses, receding cheekbones and large eye sockets which were surmounted by massive, double-arched, brow ridges. Their distinctive physiognomy would have been comparable with someone of the present day afflicted by acromegaly and thus it is not impossible that their pituitary systems functioned in a manner different to Homo sapiens. The Swanscombe skull pieces display a small pit, the supranic fossa, common to all Neanderthals, and it is considered as from an early such being. Many Kentish readers