Man and the Glacial Period

by G. Frederick Wright

3. Under this crust of stalagmite was a compact deposit of red earth, from two to thirteen feet thick.[DA] Flint implements of various kinds and charcoal were also found at different depths; also an awl, or piercer; a needle with the eye large enough to admit small pack-thread; and three harpoon-heads made out of bone and deer’s horn.

[DA] Dawkins’s Cave-Hunting, p. 326; Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, p. 101.

4. Flint implements were also obtained in a conglomerate (breccia) still below this. The fossil bones in this cave belonged to the same species of animals as those discovered in a cave near Wells.

The Brixham cave occurs near the small village of that name, not far from Torquay. The entrance to it is about ninety-five feet above high water. Its deposits, in descending order, are: 1. Stalagmitic floor from six to twelve or fifteen inches in thickness. 2. A thin breccia of limestone fragments cemented together by carbonate of lime. This had accumulated about the mouth, so as to fill up the entrance. 3. A layer of blackish earth about one foot in thickness 4. A deposit of from two to four feet thick, consisting of clayey loam, mingled with fragments of limestone, from small bits up to rocks weighing a ton. Bounded pebbles of other material were also occasionally met with. 5. Shingle consisting of rounded pebbles largely of foreign material.

All these strata, except the third, contained fossils of some kind, but the fourth was by far the richest repository. Among the bones found are those of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the horse, the ox, the reindeer, the cave-lion, the cave-hyena, and the cave-bear. Associated with these remains a number of worked flints was found. In one place the bones of an entire leg of a cave-bear occurred in such a position as to show that they must have been bound together by the ligaments when they were buried. Immediately below these bones a flint implement was found.[DB]

[DB] See Pengelly’s Reports to the Devonshire Association, 1867.

The hyena’s den, at Wookey Hole, near Wells, in Somerset, was carefully explored by Professor Boyd Dawkins, who stood by and examined every shovelful of material as it was thrown out.

This cave alone yielded 35 specimens of palæolithic art, 467 jaws and teeth of the cave-hyena, 15 of the cave lion, 27 of the cave-bear, 11 of the grizzly bear, 11 of the brown bear, 7 of the wolf, 8 of the fox, 30 of the mammoth, 233 of the woolly rhinoceros, 401 of the horse, 16 of the wild ox, 30 of the bison, 35 of the Irish elk, and 30 of the reindeer (jaws and teeth only).

In Derbyshire numerous caves were explored by Professor Dawkins at Cress well Crags, which, in addition to flint implements and the remains of the animals occurring in the Brixham cave, yielded the bones of the machairodus, an extinct species of tiger or lion which lived during the Tertiary period.

The Victoria cave, near Settle, in west Yorkshire, is the only other one in England which we need to mention. In this there were no remains found which could be positively identified as human, but the animal remains in the lower strata of the cave deposit were so different from those in the upper bed as to indicate the great lapse of time which separated the two. This cave is 1,450 feet above the sea-level, and there were found in the upper strata of the floor, down to a depth of from two to ten feet, many remains of existing animals. Then, for a distance of twelve feet, there occurred a clay deposit, containing no organic remains whatever, but some well-scratched boulders. Below this was a third stratum of earth mingled with limestone fragments, at the base of which were numerous remains of the mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bison, hyena, etc. One bone occurred which was by some supposed to be human, but by others to have belonged to a bear. This lower stratum is, without much doubt, preglacial, and the thickness of the deposit intervening between it and the upper fossiliferous bed is taken by some to indicate the great lapse of time separating the period of the mammoth and rhinoceros in England from the modern age. The scratched boulders in the middle stratum of laminated clay, would indicate certainly that the material found its way into the cave during the Glacial epoch, when ice filled the whole valley of the Ribble, which flows past the foot of the hill, and whose bed is 900 feet below the mouth of the cave.