Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

IV. PALAEOLITHIC MAN

1. The people who inhabited this island in the Old Stone Age appear to have been confined to the south; for no palaeolithic implement has yet been found further north than Lincoln, or, as some maintain, the East Riding of Yorkshire.[1535] An attempt has indeed been made to prove that such tools were used in Scotland;[1536] but the best judges are unanimously of opinion that the contention has not been established.[1537]

Little direct evidence exists as to the physical type of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain. Only four human skulls have been found in England which can be referred to that period,—one at Galley Hill, near Swanscombe,[1538] one at Westley, near Bury St. Edmunds,[1539] and two in the Cattedown cave near Plymouth:[1540] but it is not certain that the first was contemporaneous with the beds which contained it:[1541] of the second only fragments remained from which it was impossible to determine the contour;[1542] and the others could not be removed entire. Almost all the older palaeolithic skulls, however, which have been discovered in Western Europe belong apparently to the same race,[1543] which may have been represented among the hunters who entered Britain when it still formed part of the Continent. Indeed the Galley Hill skull, whether it belonged to a palaeolithic man or not, has certain characteristics of the most famous representative of the race,—the Neanderthal skull, which was discovered about the middle of the last century in the valley of the Neander in Rhenish Prussia.[1544] The skulls of this type are extraordinarily dolichocephalic; and the people to whom they belonged had extremely low and retreating foreheads, heavy and projecting lower jaws, and amazingly prominent brow ridges, and were short, big-boned, and muscular.[1545]

But what if the Neanderthal skull was not human? If that poor creature had but known how famous he, or it, was to become! His broken cranium has a bibliography of its own. Virchow, who, however, late in life changed his mind, at one time regarded it as abnormal,—pathological. Huxley and Broca vigorously defended its respectability; and at the end of the nineteenth century the most eminent anthropologists of Europe and America accepted it as the type of the most ancient of the known races of men. But in 1901 a German anthropologist, Dr. G. Schwalbe, wrote an article of appalling length,[1546] which disturbed settled convictions. Huxley had pronounced the Neanderthal to be the most ape-like of all known human skulls: Schwalbe refused to regard it as human, in the accepted sense, at all. For him it represents a distinct species, intermediate between the Pithecanthropus of Java—the famous ‘missing link’, whose remains were discovered a few years ago by Dr. Dubois—and man himself. In the same class Schwalbe places the skulls of Spy, which have always been grouped along with that of Neanderthal; and he insists that all the human palaeolithic skulls of Europe, however closely they may appear to resemble these, are in reality different.[1547] ‘In the Neanderthal skull,’ says Dr. Laloy, in a lucid summary of Schwalbe’s article, which will satisfy all who are not specialists, ‘the greatest length coincides with the “inio-glabellar” diameter,’ that is to say, the diameter measured from the space between the supraciliary, or brow, ridges and the sinus at the back of the neck: this, he adds, is never the case in man. No, not in man as we know him. But what sense are we to attach to the word ‘human’? Was there ever a creature of whom it could be affirmed that he was the first man?[1548]

Ten or twelve skulls, which, in dolichocephaly and prominence of the supraciliary ridges, resemble those of the Neanderthal type, but, unlike them, have high foreheads, and are said to have belonged to tall men, have lately been found associated with tools of Mousterian form,[1549] at Krapina in Northern Croatia.[1550] Fourteen skeletons, which may evidently be assigned to the same group, have been found at Předmost in Moravia,[1551] and another at its capital, Bruenn.[1552]

But the Palaeolithic Age, in Britain as in other parts of Europe, was of such immense duration that it would be absurd to assume that it had no other representatives than men of the Neanderthal type; and the ‘artists’ of the latest period, whose creations have been discovered in the caves of La Madelaine and Les Eyzies,[1553] belonged to a different race, represented by skulls discovered at Laugerie-Basse and Chancelade in the valley of the Lozère. While these skulls are hardly less dolichocephalic than those of the Neanderthal type, they are in other respects strikingly different, being much more capacious, and having high and broad foreheads, and brow ridges which are hardly perceptible.[1554] Although no skulls of this kind have been found in our own country, it is not improbable that men of the stock to which they belonged penetrated into Britain; for in one of the caves of Creswell Crags in Derbyshire there has been found a bone engraved with the figure of a horse’s head,[1555] which reminds one of the spirited designs of the artists of the Dordogne, and was associated with implements of the kind which have been found in the caves of La Madelaine and Les Eyzies and others of the Dordogne basin.[1556]

The recent systematic exploration of the Baoussé-Roussé caves near Mentone is of the highest importance because it has demonstrated an intimate connexion between palaeolithic and neolithic races in Southern France. All the interments have been proved to be palaeolithic.[1557] The newest skeleton in the Grotte des Enfants approximates to the dolichocephalic type of the Neolithic Age.[1558] Beneath it, 5 metres 15 millimetres lower down, lay a gigantic skeleton, closely resembling but far older than that of the famous ‘old man’ of Cro-Magnon, which is commonly assigned to the earliest neolithic times, but may possibly be as old as the period that in France is recognized as transitional.[1559] This skeleton has certain negroid characteristics,[1560] which, however, are more pronounced in the two most ancient skeletons of the Grotte des Enfants, discovered 70 millimetres lower still and associated with the bones of a rhinoceros.[1561] M. Verneau argues that the prognathism which appears in certain skeletons of Western Europe of the early Bronze Age was connected by atavism with these primitive denizens of the Riviera.[1562]

2. Professor Boyd Dawkins draws a sharp distinction between ‘the River-drift men’ and ‘the Cave-men’. I must remark that the term ‘Cave-men’ is not happily chosen; for the professor himself assures us that ‘the Cave-men did not always use caves’, and that ‘the habit of camping in the open air must have been the rule ... because caverns and rock-shelters are only met with in very limited areas’;[1563] while on the other hand he points out that ‘River-drift men’ often lived in caves.[1564] By ‘the Cave-men’ he means those who made implements of what he terms ‘the higher types’, that is, the types which are called after the caves of Le Moustier, Solutré, and La Madelaine. Observing that there were ‘Cave-men’ not only in our own country and in France, but also in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, he argues that ‘from this distribution of the implements it is evident that the Cave-man belongs neither to the southern group of the Pleistocene animals nor to the temperate which found its way over the mountain barriers into Spain, Italy, and Greece. On the other hand,’ he continues, ‘the River-drift man must be considered as a member either of the temperate or southern fauna of Europe, because his remains are met with in the regions of the Mediterranean, north [and also south] of those mountain barriers.’[1565]

Granting that no implements of the higher types have been discovered in caves south of the ‘mountain barriers’, it is hardly safe to conclude that the ‘Cave-men’ did not belong either to the southern or the temperate group of mammals.[1566] The question is whether the implements to which the professor refers were characteristic of one palaeolithic race to the exclusion of others. Assuming that such implements do not exist outside the area in which they have been found—a very rash assumption—it does not follow that the men who made them belonged to a race different from their contemporaries whose tools have been discovered in the drift. Only one interment of the Late Celtic Period has been found in Scotland, and that quite recently;[1567] yet there were numerous Celts then in North as well as in South Britain.

The professor also insists[1568] that ‘the absence of the higher types of implement in the camping-places of the River-drift men cannot be accounted for on the ground that they are smaller or ... more perishable’; for, he says, ‘camping-places of the Cave-men have been met with in France [for instance at Solutré] ... in which the implements are associated in the same manner as in the caves’.

I reply, first, that it is begging the question to say that the men who encamped at Solutré were ‘Cave-men’ as distinct from ‘River-drift men’; secondly, that implements of Le Moustier type, which were characteristic of the earliest French ‘Cave-men’,[1569] are common both in France and Britain in the river-drift;[1570] and thirdly, with due deference to the professor, that the absence ‘of the higher types of implement’ from the river-drift is as easily explicable as the absence of implements of bone or wood:—partly they were more perishable and would be more difficult to find, and partly they were less likely to be used in the field.[1571] Besides, is it not possible that none of the very few palaeolithic ‘camping-places’ that have been found in this country belonged to the Solutrean period? As we have seen, the professor himself affirms that ‘the Cave-men’ encamped as a rule not in caves but in the open air: they, like ‘the River-drift men’ were, as he himself assures us, hunters: why then have hardly any of their ‘higher types of implement’ been found in this country in the field? Simply for the reasons which I have given. And since ‘the Cave-men’, like ‘the River-drift men’, lived commonly in the open air, how could the latter, even if they belonged to a different race, have escaped the influence of the former or have failed to acquire their culture? And how could the two races have escaped amalgamating?

The ‘Cave-men’, as Professor Boyd Dawkins himself admits,[1572] undoubtedly used certain implements of river-drift type as well as ‘the higher types’; nor is there any reason to suppose that the ‘River-drift men’ did not use implements of ‘the higher types’ as well as implements of river-drift type, except the fact, easily accounted for, that the former are not found in the drift. Professor Boyd Dawkins himself strenuously maintains that ‘River-drift men’ as well as ‘Cave-men’ lived in caves.[1573] How then can he prove that the two sets of occupants were ethnologically different? He insists that ‘the river-drift implements in the Caves of Creswell Crags, of Kent’s Hole, and of the Grotte de l’Église, are found in the strata below those with the implements of the Cave-men, and consequently that the River-drift men lived in Britain and France before the Cave-men.’[1574] But on his own showing the owners of both sets of implements did live in caves; and so far nothing is proved except that those who used one set were more ancient than those who used the other. ‘Some caves also,’ he adds, ‘were inhabited by River-drift men, who have left behind their implements without any trace of the higher types of the Cave-men.’[1575] But here again nothing is proved save that these particular ‘River-drift men’ had not yet learned to make ‘the higher types’. The professor might have a good case if he could say, River-drift implements have been found in the lower strata of caves: in the upper strata none have been found, but only ‘the higher types’; consequently the men who used the higher types were quite different from those of the later Palaeolithic Age whose implements have been recovered from river-drift. But this he could not truly say; for implements of river-drift type have been found, although rarely, in the highest strata of caves.[1576] Lastly, I would ask the professor, who insists that ‘the Cave-men’ were ‘northern mammals’, and that they did not enter Europe until long after the appearance of ‘the River-drift men’, to tell us whence they came.

3. Are we to count the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain among our ancestors? ‘I do not consider,’ says Dr. Garson, ‘that there is any evidence of the existence of the direct descendants of Palaeolithic man among the osteological remains of Neolithic or subsequent date in Britain.’[1577] On the other hand, Dr. Beddoe[1578] thinks that the oldest inhabitants of this country may have left descendants, whom he is inclined to identify with ‘some Mongoloid race’, traces of which, he believes, are discernible in the population of the west of England; while two distinguished French anthropologists, MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy, affirm that the Neanderthal race ‘has left a permanent imprint on the population of the three kingdoms’,[1579] and refer to various skulls of the Neolithic and later periods which resemble more or less closely that of Neanderthal.[1580] Moreover, it is generally admitted that even at the present day a few individuals here and there belong to the same type.[1581] But it does not follow that these persons or those to whom Dr. Beddoe and M. Hamy refer were descended from men who lived in Britain in the Palaeolithic Age. That palaeolithic man left no descendants in any part of the world is of course not maintained even by the most ardent supporters of the theory of the ‘Hiatus’: somewhere or other there must have been a link; but Sir John Evans, as I have observed in the first part of this book,[1582] argues from the supposed absence of intermediate forms of implements that it did not exist in this country; and Dr. Keane[1583] thinks that ‘the few scattered palaeolithic hunters could scarcely have lived through the last ice-age in a contracted region at one time reduced by subsidence to a mere cluster of islets’, &c. The answer is, first that there is no reason to believe that in ‘the last ice-age’ or at any time between the dawn of the latest palaeolithic period and the arrival of neolithic man Britain was ‘a mere cluster of islets’;[1584] and secondly that, as Professor Boyd Dawkins assures us, out of forty-eight species of mammalian fauna living in Britain in the Palaeolithic, thirty-one survived in the Neolithic Age.[1585] Professor Boyd Dawkins, however, insists that ‘the mere contrast between the Palaeolithic and wild Neolithic faunas implies a zoological break of the first magnitude’.[1586] I take leave to say that it implies no break at all, seeing that thirty-one of the older species confessedly lived on: it implies no more than is implied by the disappearance of the urus, the wolf, the wild boar, and many other animals which were living in this island at a time since which it has been continuously inhabited by man. The professor triumphantly points out that in those caves which were successively used as dwellings by palaeolithic and neolithic people ‘the remains of the domestic animals are found alone in the upper Prehistoric [or neolithic] strata.’[1587] Undoubtedly. But what then? The fact does not prove that palaeolithic man had become extinct when neolithic man arrived: it merely proves that the latter had domestic animals, and that the former had not. Arab horses, Siamese cats, and many other animals have been introduced into this country since the Christian era: yet the people who were here before their introduction did not become extinct. And if ‘in a great many cases the lower Palaeolithic strata [in caves] are sealed down, and mapped off from the Neolithic, by a layer of stalagmite’,[1588] that only proves ‘a break of continuity between the two periods’ as far as those caves are concerned. The Palaeolithic Age, says the professor, ‘was continental, the Neolithic insular in North-Western Europe.’[1589] He means that in the Palaeolithic Age Great Britain was an outlying part of the Continent, and that the neolithic invaders had to sail across the Channel.[1590] But why should the formation of the Channel have extinguished the palaeolithic race? ‘There is obviously,’ continues the professor, ‘a great gulf fixed between the rude hunter civilisation of the one and the agricultural and pastoral civilisation of the other.’ Obviously. But the gulf is not more obvious than that which separated the civilization of the Red Indians from the civilization of the Pilgrim Fathers. Yet the Red Indians still lived on.

It is true that if the professor has failed to show that the Palaeolithic Age in Britain was abruptly terminated, he has no difficulty in disposing of certain arguments which have been adduced to show that it was not. When, for instance, Mr. Allen Brown points to the implements of palaeolithic type which were found in the refuse heaps of the neolithic settlement at Cissbury in Sussex, he replies that ‘in the vast accumulation of refuse, representing every style in the chipping, from the rough block of flint ... to the highly finished axe, broken ... by an unhappy blow, it is obvious that there must be some which would represent well-known Palaeolithic types.’[1591] Nevertheless it remains true that not one of the facts which he has stated is inconsistent with the hypothesis that men may have lived on in Britain in the palaeolithic stage of culture until the time when the first neolithic immigrants arrived. What his opponents suggest is that certain types of palaeolithic implements survived into the Neolithic Age;[1592] in other words, that implements of those types continued to be manufactured or used then. That this was the case in Ireland is certain;[1593] and, since there is no evidence of a Palaeolithic Age in Ireland, it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that they were made by descendants of palaeolithic refugees from Britain or Gaul. Mr. Allen Brown may be wrong in maintaining that implements which he has found ‘at or near the surface’ at East Dean in Sussex are ‘mesolithic’, that is, belong to a period of transition;[1594] but Sir John Evans himself says[1595] of some of the implements, usually classed as palaeolithic, which have been found in the cave earth of the famous Kent’s Cavern in a position which authorizes us to assume that the people to whom they belonged were not separated by any ‘hiatus’ from the palaeolithic race whose remains were found immediately underneath, that ‘so far as form is concerned, there is little or nothing to distinguish them from the analogous implements of the Neolithic Period’. Is it not possible that these and some of the ruder implements which have hitherto been classed as neolithic may have been fabricated not by neolithic immigrants but, after their immigration, by descendants of the palaeolithic race?[1596] Those who deny that mesolithic implements have been found in Britain deny also that they have been found anywhere else. Granted for the sake of argument. But if their general absence does not weaken the certainty that the supposed hiatus was not universal, how can their absence in Britain prove that there was a hiatus here? In Part I I have shown that it is impossible to frame any theory which shall account satisfactorily for the assumed disappearance of British palaeolithic man. Professor Boyd Dawkins asks us to believe that the ‘Cave-men’ fled in terror before the neolithic invaders and eventually settled in Greenland, where they became the ancestors of the Eskimos; and in support of this theory he assures us that ‘Palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them’; that the gloves of the ‘Cave-men’ were ‘similar to those now used by the Eskimos’; that their implements ‘are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos’; that, like the Eskimos, they did not take the trouble to bury their dead; and that ‘the most astonishing bond of union between the Cave-men and the Eskimos is the art of representing animals’.[1597] Judging from the specimens of Eskimo art which the professor gives, I confess that what I find astonishing is its inferiority to that of the Cave-men;[1598] there is no evidence that the Cave-men of Britain wore gloves; and if they did, may not the reason have been, not that there was any connexion between them and the Eskimos, but that their hands were cold? Is the professor sure that ‘the River-drift men’ did not also wear gloves? We do not know whether palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia: he certainly did not accompany them from the north; and it is an article of faith with French anthropologists that he did not disappear with them, but became the ancestor of neolithic man. There is a general resemblance between the palaeolithic drift implements of all countries; and in the earlier part of this volume many facts have been noted which show how cautious one should be in inferring identity of race from similarity in implements, weapons, or ornaments. There is not the slightest evidence that ‘the Cave-men’ did not bury their dead; and there is irrefragable evidence, as we have seen, that cave-men in the Riviera and in Croatia did.[1599] Again, since the professor differentiates the ‘Cave-men’ from the ‘River-drift men’ of Britain, can he prove that the latter did bury their dead? If not, what becomes of his argument? Finally, the theory that the Eskimos are descendants of ‘the Cave-men’ of Western Europe has been rejected by every recent inquirer.[1600]

How does Professor Boyd Dawkins account for the disappearance, which he assumes, of palaeolithic man? ‘Simply,’ he says, ‘by assuming that at the close of the Pleistocene age, when they came into contact with Neolithic invaders, there were the same feelings between them as existed in Hearne’s times between the Eskimos and the Red Indian, terror and defenceless hatred being, on the one side, met by ruthless extermination on the other. In this way the Cave-men would be gradually driven from Europe.’[1601] That men who were ruthlessly exterminated should have survived to become the ancestors of the Eskimos is certainly remarkable. But seriously I would ask the professor whether he has really succeeded in persuading himself that ‘the Cave-men’ were one and all either exterminated or driven out of Europe. Did none remain? He assures us that ‘the Cave-men’ migrated eastward; and he still insists, in defiance of all French craniologists, that ‘neither of the two races of Palaeolithic man have left behind any marks in the existing population of Europe’.[1602] How they contrived to make their slow progress across the Continent without leaving one descendant is a problem which he does not attempt to solve. And since he himself admits, or rather affirms, that they ‘came into contact with Neolithic invaders’, it is difficult to see how he can maintain the existence of a hiatus.

The professor has asserted that there is ‘no evidence in any part of the world of a continuity between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages’.[1603] Yet he of course admits that it must have existed somewhere. Good reasons have been given for believing that it existed in France.[1604] Why not also in Britain?[1605]

Such are the reasons by which I endeavour to justify myself in refusing to believe that neolithic man, when he entered Britain, found none to welcome or to oppose him save the thirty-one species of mammalian fauna which Professor Boyd Dawkins has spared.