A very complete survey of the question of the antiquity of man was published in 1883 by M. Gabriel de Mortillet, one of its most eminent investigators, under the title of Le Préhistorique. In that work he subjected to a most rigid examination all the evidence for Tertiary man, coming under either of these three heads, that had been brought forward up to that date.
The instances of the discovery of human bones in Europe were two—at Colle del Vento, in Savona, and Castenedolo, near Brescia, both in Italy. At the former site, in a Pliocene marine deposit abounding in fossil oysters and containing some scattered bones of fossil mammals, a human skeleton was found with the bones lying in their natural connection. Mortillet, however, and many others regard this as an instance of a subsequent interment rather than as proof that the man lived in Pliocene times.[EY] At Castenedolo, in a similar marine Pliocene formation, on three different occasions human skeletons have been discovered, but in different strata. One investigator has accounted for these as the result of a shipwreck in the Pliocene period. This bold hypothesis not only requires that man should have been sufficiently advanced at that very remote period to have navigated the sea, but it calls for two shipwrecks, at different times, at the same point. It has, however, since been abandoned by its author in favor of the presumption of subsequent interments, as in the previous instance.[EZ]
[EY] This is also the opinion of Hamy, Précis de Paléontologie Humaine, p. 67. Professor Le Conte, Elements of Geology (third edition, 1891), p. 609, is wrong in attributing the opposite conclusion to Hamy, on the evidence of “flint implements found in this locality.”
[EZ] Bullettino di Paletnologia Italiana, tome xv, p. 109 (August 18, 1889).
Animal bones showing cuts or breaks supposed to be the work of man have been found in seventeen different localities in Europe. They can all, however, be accounted for as the result of natural movements or pressure of the soil acting in connection with sharp substances, like fractured flints, or else as having been made by the teeth of sharks, whose fossil remains are found in great abundance in the same formation.
All the discoveries of flints supposed to show traces of intentional chipping are pronounced to be unsatisfactory, with the exception of those found in three localities—Thenay (near Tours) and Puy-Courny (near Aurillac), in France, and Otta, in the valley of the Tagus, in Portugal. As European archæologists at the present time are substantially in accord with Mortillet in restricting the discussion to these three places, I will follow their example. But although Mortillet believes that flints found at all these localities exhibit marks of intelligent action, he will not admit that they are the work of man. He attributes them to an intelligent ancestor of man, whom he calls by the name of anthropopithecus, or the precursor of man. Of this creature he distinguishes three different species, named respectively after the discoverers of the flints in the three localities just mentioned. The precursor, however, has found up to this time only a very limited acceptance among men of science, although a few believe in him on purely theoretical grounds. The discussion generally turns upon the question whether these flints were chipped intentionally or are the result of natural causes; and also upon the determination of the geological age of the formations in which they are found.
Fig. 108.—Flint flakes collected by Abbé Bourgeois from Miocene strata at Thenay (after Gaudry). Natural size.