In Professor Garstang's two final seasons’ work at Jericho, he established the remote antiquity of the origin of the settlement on that site. He showed that beneath the long sequence of Bronze Age levels lay a considerable depth of Neolithic occupation, with beneath it again soil containing flints of the Palestinian Mesolithic period. At Jericho, therefore, there was evidence of the earliest settled occupation hitherto discovered in Palestine, and the underlying Mesolithic levels suggested that the site might provide evidence for the transition from a food-gathering to a food-producing economy.

[It should be observed that the Milankovich Chronology, the alternation of core and flake cultures, and the association of flake-tools with Neanderthaloid types and of bifaces with Homo Supiens are all very much in question at the present time. But subject to this qualification, the figures here printed may give some sort of approximation to the length of the periods covered. EDITOR].

Our knowledge of man's ancestry and of the early phases of his own existence can only be increased by new discoveries of flint tools and fossil man in association. Such finds have been very rare because industrial excavations like gravel pits, which might yield the evidence if carefully watched by skilled observers, do in fact destroy it. The unearthing of the Swanscombe skull in 1935 shows what might happen if the ability to recognise flint forms became more widespread and it therefore seems worth while to give a popular summary of our present knowledge.

The place of the oval house in the evolutionary development of folk architecture is of particular interest. Although sporadic in occurrence it has been responsible for one of the principal present-day dwelling types, the hipped-roof. Innocent contends that the round house was the earliest and that the rectangular plan evolved through the intermediate oval stage which was produced by the joining of two circular frameworks. He further postulates that the ridge-pole was devised to connect two such frameworks.

I have already indicated elsewhere that simple rectangular plans have been employed at least from the Iron Age and it is apparent that the rectangular gable-ended structure is certainly as primitive as the circular. Some oval houses undoubtedly resulted from the union of two circular frameworks but the motive force behind this development was a desire on the part of peoples accustomed to building circular huts to emulate the rectangular type. Having seen the increased living space afforded by the rectangular plan, these peoples tried to copy it by joining two of their circular frameworks. This was not the only way in which oval houses originated.