The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

Without being nearly so abundant, the remains of man himself have been discovered in every part of the quaternary formation. Although several European states have contributed towards this mass of discoveries, by far the greater number occurred in France and Belgium.

I cannot here enter into details, some of which will be more advantageously discussed in another part of the book. I will only mention the cave of Cro-Magnon, which was discovered by the railway engineers in 1860, not far from the station of Les Eyzies, and which has given us the type of one of the best characterized fossil races. Nor can I pass over in silence the successful and laborious researches made by M. Martin from 1867 to 1873 in the quarries near Paris, the results of which enabled M. Hamy to fix the succession of types in our immediate neighbourhood. Lastly, I would allude to the investigations of M. Dupont in the valley of the Lesse. Commenced in 1864, and continued during seven years with an unequalled activity, they have presented to the Museum at Brussels about 80,000 worked flints, 40,000 bones of animals, now all named, the crania of Furfooz, and twenty-one jaws, including the now celebrated jaw of Naulette.

It is not only in Europe that the existence of fossil man has been proved. Even in 1844 Lund had announced that he had found in certain caverns in Brazil human bones associated with remains of extinct animals. He afterwards withdrew his statement, doubtless owing to the distrust with which every announcement of this kind was received. But his observations, which, unfortunately, were never published in detail, were probably correct. In 1867 M. W. Blake announced to the Congress of Paris that in the auriferous deposits of California, and especially near the village of Sonora, weapons, instruments, and even stone ornaments were frequently found associated with the bones of the mammoth and the mastodon. Dr. Snell, who lives in this locality, possesses a large and rich collection of them. Dr. Wilson published some facts of the same nature in 1865.

V. It became necessary, in order to prevent our being lost amidst these riches of every description, to distribute them in a methodical manner, and arrange them in order of time. The universal preponderance of weapons, tools, sculpture, drawings, etc., has led archæologists to propose different classifications essentially founded upon the difference of the types presented by these articles, and upon the material from which they were made. The classification which M. de Mortillet has applied to the Museum of St. Germain is of this kind. But such classifications, though very convenient for the arrangement of a public collection, have the inconvenience of being rather artificial. The naturalist and the anthropologist ought to give the preference to palæontological or geological data.

Lartet preferred the former. He connected the division of quaternary times with the predominance and extinction of the great mammalia. The cave-bear, which was the first to disappear, he employed to mark the most ancient period; the mammoth and the tichorhine rhinoceros, which survived it, characterised the second; the reindeer and the aurochs have served to mark the third and fourth.

This classification has the inconvenience of being purely local, since the disappearance of quaternary species did not take place everywhere at the same time, and was not general. In reality the age of the reindeer still continues in Lapland, and that of the aurochs is prolonged, a little artificially it is true, in the forests of Lithuania. But Lartet’s method connects human groups with animal types; it characterises the epochs by an event palæontologically important; it preserves the relation between the succession of periods and biological events; it offers, therefore, serious advantages if taken for what it is. This was very clearly understood by the eminent author of the theory; he has only applied it to France.

Since M. Lartet made his splendid investigations, fresh facts have come to light, and, as it often happens, distinctions, which at first were apparently most pronounced, have now been partly effaced. Therefore M. Dupont has proposed to reduce to two the four ages of Lartet, which is perhaps excessive even for Belgium. M. Hamy, again, has admitted three ages as corresponding to the mean and new river levels of M. Belgrand. This division of quaternary times has the advantage of being connected with geological phenomena; it at least partly loses the too exclusively local character, and it ought for this reason to be preferred.

Let us, nevertheless, consider the subject for a moment from Lartet’s point of view, which permits of an interesting comparison. We have seen in Denmark the succession of three vegetable species; the beech, the oak, and the pine bring us to the commencement of the present modern epoch. In France the successive disappearance of four animal species, the cave-bear, mammoth, reindeer, and aurochs, which at first were contemporaneous on our soil, characterises so many epochs which embrace the whole quaternary period. Man has been contemporaneous with them all; he made use of their flesh for food, and has left representations of them in sculpture and drawings.

VI. Can we go further and find traces of man even in tertiary times? Falconer, the celebrated English palæontologist, prematurely lost to science, did not hesitate to reply in the affirmative. But he only expected to find tertiary man in India, and M. Desnoyers has discovered him in France.

It was in 1863, in the gravel-pit of Saint-Prest, near Chartres, that M. Desnoyers himself found a tibia of rhinoceros bearing marks of incision and grooves similar to those which had been so often noticed in the bones of bears and reindeer eaten by quaternary man. A careful comparison and numerous facts of the same nature, shown in different collections, authorised him to announce that man might be traced beyond the glacial epoch, and had lived in pliocene times.