Part 14 (1/2)

The arguments from geology in favor of a great antiquity for man may be summarized thus: (1) Human remains are found in caverns under very thick stalagmitic crusts, and in deposits of earth which must have acc.u.mulated before these stalagmites began to form, and when the caverns were differently situated with reference to the local drainages. (2) Remains of man are found under peat-bogs which have grown so little in modern times that their antiquity on the whole must be very great. (3) Implements, presumably made by men, are found in river-gravels so high above existing riverbeds that great physical changes must have occurred since they were acc.u.mulated. (4) One case is on record where a human bone is believed to have been found under a deposit of glacial age. (5) Human remains have been found under circ.u.mstances which indicate that very important changes of level have taken place since their acc.u.mulation. (6) Human remains have been found under circ.u.mstances which indicate great changes of climate as intervening between their date and that of the modern period. (7) Man is known to have existed, in Europe at least, at the same time with some quadrupeds formerly supposed to have been extinct before his introduction. (8) The implements, weapons, etc., found in the oldest of these repositories are different from those known to have been used in historic times.

These several heads include, I think, all the really material evidence of a geological character. It is evidence of a kind not easily reducible into definite dates, but there can be no doubt that its nature, and the rapid acc.u.mulation of facts within a small number of years, have created a deep and widespread conviction among geologists and archaeologists that we must relegate the origin of man to a much more remote antiquity than that sanctioned by history or by the Biblical chronology. I shall first review the character of this evidence, and then state a number of geological facts which bear in the other direction, and have been somewhat lost sight of in recent discussions. Of the facts above referred to, the most important are those which relate to caverns, peat-bogs, and river-gravels. We may, therefore, first consider the nature and amount of this evidence.

That the reader may more distinctly understand the geological history of these more recent periods of the earth's history which are supposed to have witnessed the advent of man, in Western Europe at least, I quote the following summary from Sir Charles Lyell of the more modern changes in that portion of the world. These are:

”First, a continental period, toward the close of which the forest of Cromer flourished; when the land was at least 500 feet above its present level, perhaps much higher. * * * The remains of _Hippopotamus major_ and _Rhinoceros etruscus_, found in beds of this period, seem to indicate a climate somewhat milder than that now prevailing in Great Britain. [This was a _Preglacial_ era, and may be regarded as belonging to the close of the Pliocene tertiary.]

”Secondly, a period of submergence, by which the land north of the Thames and Bristol Channel, and that of Ireland, was generally reduced to * * * an archipelago. * * * This was the period of great submergence and of floating ice, when the Scandinavian flora, which occupied the lower grounds during the first continental period, may have obtained exclusive possession of the only lands not covered with perpetual snow. [This represents the Glacial period; but according to the more extreme glacialists only a portion of that period.]

”Thirdly, a second continental period, when the bed of the glacial sea, with its marine sh.e.l.ls and erratic blocks, was laid dry, and when the quant.i.ty of land equalled that of the first period. * * * During this period there were glaciers in the higher mountains of Scotland and Wales, and the Welsh glaciers * * * pushed before them and cleared out the marine drift with which some valleys had been filled during the period of submergence. * * * During this last period the pa.s.sage of the Germanic flora into the British area took place, and the Scandinavian plants, together with northern insects, birds, and quadrupeds, retreated into the higher grounds. * * *

”Fourthly, the next and last change comprised the breaking up of the land of the British area once more into numerous islands, ending in the present geographical condition of things. There were probably many oscillations of level during this last conversion of continuous land into islands, and such movements in opposite directions would account for the occurrence of marine sh.e.l.ls at moderate heights above the level of the sea, notwithstanding a general lowering of the land. * * *

During this period a gradual amelioration of temperature took place, from the cold of the glacial period to the climate of historical times.”[134]

The second continental period above referred to is that which appears on the best evidence to have been the time of the introduction of man; but such facts as that of the Settle Cave, and the implements of the breccia in Kent's Cave, if rightly interpreted, would make man preglacial or ”interglacial.”

The deposits found in caverns in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and England have afforded a large proportion of the remains from which we derive our notions of the most ancient prehistoric men of Europe. From the Belgian caves, as explored by M. Dupont, we learn that there were two successive prehistoric races, both rude or comparatively uncivilized. The first were men of Turanian type, but of great bodily stature and high cerebral organization, and showing remarkable skill in the manufacture of implements and ornaments of bone and ivory. These men are believed to have been contemporary with the earlier postglacial mammals, as the mammoth and hairy rhinoceros, and to have lived at a time when the European land was more extensive than at present, stretching far to the west of Ireland, and connecting Great Britain with the Continent. The skeletons found at Cro-Magnon, Mentone, and elsewhere in France fully confirm the deductions of Dupont as to this earliest race of Palaeocosmic, Palaeolithic, or antediluvian man. This grand race seems to have perished or been driven from Europe by the great depression of the level of the land which inaugurated the modern era, and which was probably accompanied by many oscillations of level as well as by considerable changes of climate. They were succeeded by a second race, equally Turanian in type, but of small stature, and resembling the modern Lapps. These were the ”allophylian” peoples displaced by the historical Celts, and up to their time the reindeer seems to have existed abundantly in France and Germany. These two successive prehistoric populations have been termed respectively men of the ”mammoth” age and men of the ”reindeer” age. The Bible record would lead us to regard the earlier and gigantic men as antediluvian, and the smaller or Lappish race as postdiluvian. We may therefore, having already at some length considered the postdiluvian age, take up the mode of occurrence of the remains of the earlier of the two races--that of the mammoth age.

The caverns themselves may be divided into those of residence, of sepulture, and of driftage, though one cavern has often successively a.s.sumed two at least of these characters. In the caverns of residence large acc.u.mulations have been formed of ashes, charcoal, bones, and other debris of cookery, among which are found flint and bone implements, the general character of which, as well as that of the needles, stone hammers, mortars for paint, and other domestic appliances, are not more dissimilar from those of the Red Indian and Esquimau races in North America than these are from one another, and in many things, as in the bone harpoons, the resemblance is very striking indeed. In tendency to imitative art, and in the skill of their delineations of animals, the prehistoric men seem to have surpa.s.sed all the American races except the semi-civilized mound-builders and the more cultivated Mexican and Peruvian nations.

With regard to the residence of these men of the mammoth age in caverns, several things are indicated by American a.n.a.logies to which some attention should be paid.

It is not likely that caverns were the usual places of residence of the whole population. They may have been winter houses for small tribes and detached families of fugitives or outlaws, or they may have been places of resort for hunting parties at certain seasons of the year. The large quant.i.ties of broken and uncooked bones of particular species, as of the horse and reindeer, in some of the caverns, would farther indicate a habit of making great battues, like those of the American hunting tribes, at certain seasons, and of preparing quant.i.ties of pemmican or dried meat preserved with marrow and fat for future use. The number of bone needles found in some of the caves would seem to hint that, like the Americans, they sewed up their pemmican in skin bags. The mult.i.tude of flint flakes and of rude stone implements applicable to breaking bones certainly indicates a wholesale cutting of flesh and preparation of marrow. In the ”Story of the Earth,” I have suggested in connection with this that there may have been towns or villages of these people unknown to us, and which would afford higher conceptions of their progress in the arts. This antic.i.p.ation appears recently to have been realized in the discovery of such a town or fortified village of the mammoth age at Soloutre, in France, and which seems to afford evidence that these ancient people had already domesticated the horse, using it as food as well as a beast of burden, in the manner of the Khirgis and certain other Tartar tribes of Central Asia.[135] This, with the undoubtedly high cerebral organization indicated by the skulls of the mammoth age, notably raises our estimate of the position of man at this early date.

With regard to caves of sepulture, the same remark may be made as with regard to the caves of residence. They do not seem to have been the burial-places of large populations, but only occasional places of interment, few bodies being found in them, and these often interred in the midst of culinary debris, evidencing previous or contemporary residence. With regard to the latter, it seems to have been no uncommon practice with some North American tribes to bury the dead either in the floors of their huts or in their immediate proximity. It is probable, however, that the few examples known of caves of sepulture of this period indicate not tribal or national places of burial, but occasional and accidental cases, happening to hunting or war parties, perhaps remote from their ordinary places of residence.

In so far as method of burial is concerned, the men of the Palaeocosmic or Mammoth age seem to have buried the dead extended at full length, and not in the crouching posture usual with some later races. Like the Americans, they painted the dead man, and buried him with his robes and ornaments, and probably with his weapons, thus intimating their belief in happy hunting-grounds beyond the grave.[136] I may remark here that all the known interments of the mammoth age indicate a race of men of great cerebral capacity, with long heads and coa.r.s.ely marked features, of large stature and muscular vigor, surpa.s.sing indeed much in all these respects the average man of modern Europe. These characteristics befit men who had to contend with the mammoth and his contemporaries, and to subdue the then vast wildernesses of the eastern continent, and they correspond with the Biblical characteristics of antediluvian man.

Among caves of driftage may be cla.s.sed some of those near Liege, in Belgium, and, partially at least, those of Kent's Hole and Brixham, in England. In these only disarticulated remnants of human skeletons, or more frequently only flint implements, some of them of doubtful character, have been found. In my ”Story of the Earth,” I have taken the carefully explored Kent's Cavern of Torquay as a typical example, and have condensed its phenomena as described by Mr. Pengelly. I now repeat this description, with some important emendations suggested by that gentleman in more recent reports and in private correspondence.

The somewhat extensive and ramifying cavern of Kent's Hole is an irregular excavation, evidently due partly to fissures or joints in limestone rock, and partly to the erosive action of water enlarging such fissures into chambers and galleries. At what time it was originally cut we do not know, but it must have existed as a cavern at the close of the Pliocene or beginning of the Post-pliocene period, since which time it has been receiving a series of deposits which have quite filled up some of its smaller branches.

First and lowest, according to Mr. Pengelly, of the deposits as yet known, is a ”breccia,” or ma.s.s of broken and rounded stones, with hardened red clay filling the interstices. Some of the stones are of the rock which forms the roof and walls of the cave, but the greater number, especially the rounded ones, are from more distant parts of the surrounding country. Many are fragments of grit from the Devonian beds of adjacent hills. There are also fragments of stalagmite from an old crust broken up when the breccia was deposited, and possibly belonging to Pliocene times. In this ma.s.s, the depth of which is unknown, are numerous bones, nearly all of one kind of animal, the cave bear or bears, for there may be more than one species--creatures which seem to have lived in Western Europe from the close of the Pliocene down to the modern period. They must have been among the earliest and most permanent tenants of Kent's Hole at a time when its lower chambers were still filled with water. Teeth of a lion and of the common fox also occur in this deposit, but rarely. Next above the breccia is a floor of ”stalagmite,” or stony carbonate of lime, deposited from the drippings of the roof, and in some places more than twelve feet thick. This also contains bones of the cave bear, deposited when there was less access of water to the cavern. Mr.

Pengelly infers the existence of man at this time from the occurrence of chipped flints supposed to be artificial; but which, in so far as I can judge from the specimens described and figured, must still be regarded as of doubtful origin.

After the old stalagmite floor above mentioned was formed, the cave again received deposits of muddy water and stones; but now a change occurs in the remains embedded. This stony clay, or ”cave earth,” has yielded an immense quant.i.ty of teeth and bones, including those of the elephant, rhinoceros, horse, hyena, cave bear, reindeer, and Irish elk. With these were found weapons of chipped flint, and harpoons, needles, and bodkins of bone, precisely similar to those of the North American Indians and other rude races. The ”cave earth” is four feet or more in thickness. It is not stratified, and contains many fallen fragments of rock, rounded stones, and broken pieces of stalagmite. It also has patches of the excrement of hyenas, which the explorers suppose to indicate the temporary residence of these animals; and besides fragments of charcoal scattered in the ma.s.s, there is in one spot, near the top, a limited layer of burned wood, with remains which indicate the cooking and eating of repasts of animal food by man. It is clear that when this bed was formed the cavern was liable to be inundated with muddy water, carrying stones and perhaps some of the bones and implements, and breaking up in places the old stalagmite floor.[137] One of the most puzzling features, especially to those who take an exclusively uniformitarian view, is that the entrance of water-borne mud and stones implies a level of the bottom of the water in the neighboring valleys of nearly one hundred feet above its present height. The cave earth is covered by a second crust of stalagmite, less dense and thick than that below, and containing only a few bones, which are of the same general character with those beneath, but include a fragment of a human jaw with teeth. Evidently when this stalagmite was formed the influx of water-borne materials had ceased, or nearly so; and Mr. Pengelly appears to affirm, though without a.s.signing any reason, that none of these bones could, like the ma.s.ses of stalagmite, have been lifted from lower beds, or washed into the cave from without.

The next bed marks a new change. It is a layer of black mould from three to ten inches thick. Its microscopic structure does not seem to have been examined; but it is probably a forest soil, introduced by growth, by water, by wind, and by ingress of animals, all of them modern, and contains works of art from the old British times before the Roman invasion up to the porter bottles and dropped half-pence of modern visitors. Lastly, in and upon the black mould are many fallen blocks from the roof of the cave.

There can be no doubt that this cave and the neighboring one of Brixham have done very much to impress the minds of British geologists with ideas of the great antiquity of man; and they have, more than any other postglacial monuments, shown the existence of some animals now extinct up to the human age. Of precise data for determining time, they have, however, given nothing. The only measures which seem to have been applied, namely, the rate of growth of stalagmite and the rate of erosion of neighboring valleys, are, from the very sequence of the deposits, obviously worthless; and the only apparently constant measure, namely, the fall of blocks from the roof, seems not to have been applied, and Mr. Pengelly declares that it can not be practically used. We are therefore quite uncertain as to the number of centuries involved in the filling of this cave, and must remain so until some surer system of calculation can be devised. We may, however, attempt to sketch the series of events which it indicates.

The animals found in Kent's Hole are all ”postglacial,” some of them of course survivors from ”preglacial” times, and some of them still surviving. They therefore inhabited the country after it rose from the great glacial submergence. Perhaps the first colonists of the coast of Devons.h.i.+re in this period were the cave bears, migrating on floating ice, and subsisting like the arctic bear and the black bear of Anti-costi, on fish, and on the garbage cast up by the sea. They may have found Kent's Hole a sea-side cavern, with perhaps some of its galleries still full of water and filling with breccia, with which the bones of dead bears became mixed. In the case of such a deposit as this breccia, however, the precise time when its materials were finally laid down in their present form, or the length of time necessary for its acc.u.mulation, can not be definitely settled. It may be a result of continued torrential action or of some sudden cataclysm. As the land rose, these creatures for the most part betook themselves to lower levels, and in process of time the cavern stood upon a hill-side, perhaps several hundreds of feet above the sea; and the mountain streams, their beds not yet emptied of glacial detritus, washed into it stones and mud, and probably bones also, while it appears that hyenas occupied the cave at intervals, and dragged in remains of mammals of many species which had now swarmed across the plains elevated out of the sea, and multiplied in the land. This was the time of the cave earth; and before its deposit was completed, though how long before an unstratified and therefore probably often-disturbed bed of this kind can not tell, man himself seems to have been added to the inhabitants of the British land. In pursuit of game he sometimes ascended the valleys beyond the cavern, or even penetrated into its outer chambers; or perhaps there were even in those days rude and savage hill-men, inhabiting the forests and warring with the more cultivated denizens of plains below, which are now deep under the waters. Their weapons, and other implements dropped in the cavern or lost in hunting, or buried in the flesh of wounded animals which crept to the streams to a.s.suage their thirst, are those found in the cave earth. The absence of the human bones may merely show that the mighty hunters of those days were too hardy, athletic, and intelligent often to perish from accidental causes, and that they did not use this cavern for a place of burial. The fragments of charcoal show that they were acquainted with fire, and possibly that they sometimes took shelter in the cave. But the land again subsided.

The valley of that now nameless river, of which the Rhine and the Thames may have alike been tributaries, disappeared under the sea; and perhaps some tribe, driven from the lower lands, took up its abode in this cave, now again near the encroaching waves, and left there the remains of their last repasts ere they were driven farther inland or engulfed in the waters. For a time the cavern may have been wholly submerged, and the charcoal of the extinguished fires became covered with its thin coating of clay. But ere long it re-emerged to form part of an island, long barren and desolate; and the valleys having been cut deeper by the receding waters, it no longer received muddy deposits, and the crust formed by drippings from its roof contained only bones and pebbles washed by rains and occasional land floods from its own clay deposits. Finally, the modern forests overspread the land, and were tenanted by the modern animals. Man returned to use the cavern again as a place of refuge or habitation, and to leave there the relics contained in the black earth. This seems at present the only intelligible history of this curious cave and others resembling it; though, when we consider the imperfection of the results obtained even by a large amount of labor, and the difficult and confused character of the deposits in this and similar caves, too much value should not be attached to such histories, which may at any time be contradicted or modified by new facts or different explanations of those already known. The time involved depends very much on the answer to the question whether we should regard the postglacial subsidence and re-elevation as somewhat sudden, or as occupying long ages at the slow rate at which some parts of our continents are now rising or sinking.

Mr. Pengelly thinks it possible, but not proved, that the lower breccia of Kent's Cavern may be interglacial or preglacial in age. One case only is known where a human bone has been found in a cavern under deposits supposed to be of the nature of the glacial drift. It is that of the Victoria Cave, at Settle, in Yorks.h.i.+re. At this place a human fibula was found under a layer of boulder clay. But there are too many chances of this bone having come into this position by some purely local accident to allow us to attach much importance to it until future discoveries shall have supplied other instances of the kind.[138]

I may close this survey of the cave deposits with a summary of the results of M. Dupont, as obtained from two of the caves explored by him, that of Margite and that of Frontal. In the first of these caverns, resting on rolled pebbles which covered the floor, were four distinct layers of river mud deposited by inundations, and amounting to two yards and a half in thickness. In all of these layers were bones. The lowest contained rude flint implements, and bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, bear, horse, chamois, reindeer, stag, and hyena.

In the overlying deposits are some flint implements of more artistic form and a greater prevalence of the bones of the reindeer. In the second cave, that of Frontal, over a similar deposit of alluvial mud of the mammoth age, was found a sepulchre containing the remains of sixteen individuals, of the second or diminutive Lappish race before referred to. The door of the cave had been closed by these people with a slab of stone, and in front was a hearth for funeral feasts, built on the deposits of the mammoth age, and containing bones of animals all recent or now living in Belgium, and without any traces of the bones of the extinct quadrupeds. This burial-place belonged to the Neocosmic yet prehistoric race which replaced the Palaeocosmic men of the mammoth age.

What is the absolute antiquity of the Palaeocosmic age in Europe? We have no monumental or historical chronology to answer this question, but only the measures of time furnished by the acc.u.mulation of deposits, by the deposition of stalagmite, by the gradual extinction of animals, and by the erosion of valleys and other physical changes.

These somewhat loose measures have been applied in various ways, but the tendency of geologists, from the prevalence of uniformitarian views, and the prejudice created by familiarity with the long times of previous geologic periods, has been to a.s.sign to them too great rather than too little value, both as measures of time and as indicating a remote antiquity.