The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

Essentially hunters, and certainly warriors, the men of this period bestowed their chief attention upon their arms. They probably felt a certain pride in possessing the finest or the best cut weapons; but the relative indifference which they betrayed in the matter of other objects, shows us that their chief aim in the finish of their work was to make their weapons more terrible by increasing their power of penetration. Several fragments of bone, discovered in places remote from each other, and belonging to several periods, prove that these weapons of flint, handled by strong hands, left nothing to be desired in this respect. I shall only mention the vertebra of a reindeer, which had been pierced through by a lance or a javelin, and a human tibia, through the head of which an arrow has passed near to the kneepan. In both cases the broken flint has remained, testifying to the good quality of the weapon and to the strength with which it was used.

At the time of the deposition of the upper river gravels, and when the predominance of the reindeer was most marked, the industry of the men of Cro-Magnon underwent a sudden change. Till then flint, and, in its absence, other hard stones, had furnished both the implement and the instrument formed by the aid of the former. Doubtless from the earliest times, bones and the antlers of the stag or reindeer, had been used from time to time; but they only played an almost insignificant part in the manufacture of tools or weapons. During the epoch of which we are speaking, they acquired a growing importance, and soon furnished almost the only material for weapons. Flint was now only used to make the implements, and these, on the other hand, became more numerous, and fitted for the most varied uses. It was with flints that the troglodytes of Les Eyzies, of Laugerie-Basse, of La Madeleine, and a great number of other settlements, sawed and carved their reindeer antlers to make strong harpoons, which were barbed on one side only. It was with flint that they pointed needles not much longer than our own, and pierced the eye. In some specimens the latter is so small that the piercing of it remained a problem, till Lartet reproduced it with his own hand, using one of the implements which he had discovered. But the most characteristic object of the Magdalénian type is the arrow-head, regularly barbed on both sides, the teeth of which contain little channels, probably intended as the receptacle of some poisonous substance.

The succession of industries which I have just pointed out is, moreover, by no means invariable. As the investigations and discoveries increase in number, we are more and more impressed by the fact that the several colonies of the race under consideration, yielding to local necessities, or carried away by the accidents of their development, do not present an unintelligible uniformity. The last excavations carried out at Solutré by MM. Arcelin and the Abbé Ducrost, show arms and instruments of the Magdalénian type which are anterior to those of the Solutré type. In this epoch, as at the present time, there existed a certain diversity which explains the coincidence, in point of time, of different industrial types among this population of similar origin.

III. The lighter, more trusty, and more varied weapons, announce a change in the life of our troglodytes. They continue, it is true, to hunt large game when it comes in their way; a few rare mammoths, surviving the climatic modifications which were going on, still fell under their hand; the horse also often contributed to their repast. The reindeer, however, largely predominated in the débris of their kitchen. Mixed with them are found the remains of small mammals, such as the hare and the squirrel. Birds also began to be used for food to a considerable extent. From the bones discovered in the single grotto of Gourdan, so admirably explored by M. Piette, M. Alph. Edwards has been able to distinguish twenty distinct species. Lastly, the men of the Magdalénian age fed also upon fish; but fishing again was to them a kind of hunting. They evidently did not use the hook, and only harpooned the larger species, the salmon in Périgord, and the pike in the Pyrenees.

The conveyance of the large animals which fell under their hand to their usual dwelling-place, would have been too much even for such stalwart hunters. They cut them up upon the spot, leaving only the skeleton of the trunk. We rarely find in the caves more than the bones of the head and limbs, which, again, are almost always broken. Like all savages, the troglodytes of the Vézère held the brain and marrow in high estimation. The long bones which enclosed the latter have evidently been split in a methodical manner, with a view to preserving the contents. MM. Lartet and Christy even think that a special implement was employed in eating these delicate morsels. A kind of spatula made from the antler of a reindeer, with a conical, richly carved handle, hollowed and rounded at the extremity, has been regarded by them as a marrow spoon.

The large amount of ashes and burnt wood found in the Vézère deposits, leaves no room for doubt that fire was used in the cooking of food. The manner in which it was used is, however, rather a difficulty. No trace of pottery has been found among these hunters, and there is nothing to show that they were acquainted with the oven of the Polynesians. They must, therefore, have gone to work like the Siberians, who, at the close of the last century, had only vessels of leather or of wood, and nevertheless were able to boil the water which they contained by throwing in highly heated flints.

We have no reason for thinking that the Cro-Magnon man was a cannibal. We find among the débris of his kitchen, none of these long bones, broken so as to extract the marrow, which could not but have been mixed with those of the large mammals, had human flesh formed even accidentally part of their repast. Nevertheless M. Piette has found at Gourdan several remains of human skulls, bearing the mark of flint knives, and the trace of blows which seem to have broken them. Axes and atlases in great quantity, jaw-bones broken or whole, accompany these fragments of the cranial vault. These facts may justify the opinion of M. Piette. The Gourdan warriors after having killed an enemy, doubtless brought his head home, scalped it, and perhaps mixed the brain in some kind of pottage, as some of the tribes of the Philippine islands do at the present day. But they did not eat the flesh of the vanquished, whose decapitated corpses were probably left on the field of battle.

IV. Needles, like those which I have mentioned above, would not have been made had there not been something to sew. This fact alone suggests the idea of clothes. The chase furnished the raw material. The art of preparing skins must have been carried by these tribes as far as it has been by the Red-Skins, to judge from the number of scrapers and smoothers which have been found in their stations. The marks left by flint knives at the points where long tendons taken from the limbs of the reindeer were inserted, show how the thread was procured. The clothes, when sewn, must have been ornamented in various ways, as they are by savages of the present day. Upon the skeleton discovered at Laugerie-Basse by M. Massenat, twenty pierced shells were found placed in pairs upon different parts of the body. This was not an instance of either necklace or bracelet, but of ornaments arranged in an almost symmetrical manner upon a garment. The skeleton of Mentone, discovered by M. Rivière, presented a similar appearance.

Thus the taste for adornment, so striking at the present day in the most savage as also in the civilized nations existed in the troglodytic tribes of the quaternary epoch. There are, moreover, numerous proofs of this fact. The fragments of necklaces, bracelets, etc., have been found in a great number of stations. In most cases marine shells, sometimes fossil and obtained from the tertiary beds, formed these ornaments. But the Cro-Magnon man combined with these the teeth of the large carnivora; he cut also with the same intention plates of ivory, certain soft or hard stones, and even made beads of clay which were merely dried in the sun. Finally, he tatooed himself, or at least painted his body with the oxides of iron or manganese, small stores of which have on several occasions been found in different stations, and which have left their mark upon the bones of some skeletons, for example, upon that of Mentone.