But Cuvier, whatever may have been said of him, never denied the possibility of the discovery of fossil men. He has, on the contrary, formally admitted the existence of our species as anterior to the latest revolutions of the globe. “Man,” he says, “may have inhabited some country of small extent from which he repeopled the earth after these terrible events.” We see that the praises and reproaches which have been addressed to our great naturalist on account of an opinion which he never held, are equally undeserved.
The reserve, perhaps exaggerated, which Cuvier imposed upon himself, and the confidence which was placed in him, weighed heavily upon science by impeding the comprehension of the value of observations made by Tournal (1828-1829) in L’Aude, by Christol (1829) in Le Gard; by Schmerling (1833) in Belgium; by Joly (1835) in Lozère; by Marcel de Serres (1839), in L’Aude, and by Lund (1844) in Brazil. In 1845 almost all the savants, properly so called, shared the opinion so well stated by Desnoyers. Without regarding the existence of fossil man as impossible, they did not think that the discovery had as yet been made.
It is to the persevering efforts of a distinguished archæologist, Boucher de Perthes, that we owe the proof of a fact so long denied, and now universally admitted. Under the influence of certain philosophical ideas, little calculated to procure him followers, he had admitted à priori the existence of human beings anterior to the present man, from whom they must have differed considerably. He hoped to find either their remains themselves, or the products of their industry, in the upper alluvial deposits. Watching either himself or through his agents the excavation of the gravel-pits near Abbeville, he collected there a number of flints, more or less rudely worked, but bearing the unmistakable impress of the hand of man. Some of his publications (1847) brought him visitors, who in their turn carried on the search. Soon after, M. Regollot (1855) and M. Gaudry (1856) obtained from the gravel of Saint Acheul hatchets similar to those of Abbeville, and declared themselves convinced. The English savants, Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, after having visited the collection of Boucher de Perthes, did the same, and had many imitators.
III. In spite of the discoveries which were multiplied in caverns and gravel-pits, even in the neighbourhood of Paris, the same objections were brought against the believers in fossil man which Cuvier had opposed to Amy Boué. The juxtaposition of the remains of extinct animals and human bones, or articles of human workmanship, were attributed to a reformation effected by water. The high authority of M. de Bramont lent new force to this argument. He compared the alluvium of the neighbourhood of Abbeville to his terrains des pentes, formed, he said, by storms of an exceptional violence, which only happened once in a thousand years, and which heap up together materials derived from different beds. As for the objects discovered in caverns they inspired still less confidence than the others, on account of the ease with which the bed might be undermined by eddies, which would tend to deposit in the heart of a subjacent layer objects derived from the upper layers, without destroying either the one or the other.
Many men of high intellect still hesitated, until M. Lartet published his remarkable work upon the grotto of Aurignac (1861). Here doubt was impossible. This grotto, or rather rock-shelter, was closed at the time of its discovery by a slab of stone brought from a distance; M. Lartet discovered, either in the interior or at the entrance, the bones of eight or nine species of animals which are essentially characteristic of quaternary deposits. In his memoir he gives details of all the remains. Some of these animals had evidently been eaten upon the spot, their bones, partly carbonized, still bore the trace of fire, the charcoal and ashes of which were discovered; those of a young tichorhine rhinoceros showed marks made by flint implements, and their spongy extremities had been gnawed by carnivora; the species of the latter was shown by his excrement, which was recognized as that of the hyena spelæa.
The grotto or rock-shelter of Aurignac is excavated in a small mountainous group, a spur of the plateau of Lanémézan, which the Pyrenean drift has never reached. It is, therefore, free from the objections drawn from the intervention of aqueous currents. Thus the facts made known by M. Lartet were generally accepted at once in their fullest signification. These facts show that man lived in the midst of a quaternary fauna, which he used as food, including the rhinoceros, and was followed by the hyena of this epoch, who finished the remains of his meals. The coexistence of man with these fossil species was proved.
A few ill-judged attacks were still made by savants, who did not accept the testimony of these facts, among others that of the discovery of a human jaw made by Boucher de Perthes. But the discoveries became so numerous that the last among them was soon reduced to silence, and had to submit to the mention of fossil man without raising the slightest protest.
IV. It would be too tedious and, indeed, useless to enumerate here all these discoveries. I will only mention some of the most striking ones associated with the names of Lartet and Christy, his enthusiastic colleague. At Les Eyzies, these indefatigable investigators discovered a stalagmitic layer formed of a veritable breccia, which contained worked flints, ashes, charcoal, and bones of different quaternary animals. Large slabs of this breccia now figure in many collections. In this same grotto they found a vertebra of a young reindeer pierced by a flint which had broken in the bone, thus causing the death of the animal. Finally, in 1864, M. Lartet had the pleasure of being present at the discovery of a plate of mammoth ivory, upon which a representation of the animal itself had been carved with a sharp flint by an artist of La Madeleine. In this drawing are found the characteristic traits of the mammoth, as they are known to us from the remains of the animal which are at times found preserved, with its thick fur and long hair, in the ice of Siberia.
For man to be able to draw the portrait of any animal species, he must have been contemporaneous with it. Now proofs of this nature have rapidly become more numerous and striking. In l’Ariége M. Garrigou found a representation of the cave bear traced on a pebble. M. de Vibraye extracted from the grotto of Laugerie-Basse a sketch of a fight between reindeer remarkably well drawn upon a piece of schist. The same animal has been discovered represented in sculpture in the same rock-shelter, and again in the rock-shelter of Montastruc, where M. Peccadeau de l’Isle found his wonderful dagger-handles.
I need not speak here of the weapons, tools, and instruments of every kind, from the simple knife to barbed arrow-heads, and harpoons, to laurel-leaf shaped lance-heads, and daggers toothed and grooved, which equal the finest specimens found in Denmark. I will only remark that all these objects prove the existence of man, and that we now count by the thousand articles made by him during the geological period preceding our own.