This apparently trivial circumstance is, however, of the highest importance. In fact, it leads to the following conclusion: "That man, having eaten large mammals of species now extinct, must have been contemporary with these species."
We shall now proceed to examine the caverns which were used as burial-places for man.
To M. Édouard Lartet, the celebrated palæontologist, the honour must be ascribed of having been the first to collect any important data bearing on the fact that caverns were used for burial-places by the primitive man of the great bear and mammoth epoch. We have thus been led to discover the traces of a funeral custom belonging to the man of these remote ages; we allude to the funeral banquet. The source of this information was the discovery of a pre-historic burial-place at Aurignac (Haute-Garonne), of which we have given an account in the Introduction to this work, which, however, we must again here refer to.
Near the town of Aurignac rises the hill of Fajoles, which the inhabitants of the country, in their patois, call "mountagno de las Hajoles" (beech-tree mountain), a circumstance showing that it was formerly covered with beech-trees. As we have already stated, in the Introduction to this work, it was on one of the slopes of this hill that, in the year 1842, an excavator, named Bonnemaison, discovered a great slab of limestone placed in a vertical position and closing up an arched opening. In the cave closed up by this slab the excavator discovered the remains of seventeen human skeletons!
We have already told how these skeletons were removed to the village cemetery, and thus, unfortunately, for ever lost to the researches of science.
Eighteen years after, in 1860, M. Lartet, having heard of the event, repaired to the spot, accompanied by Bonnemaison; he quite understood how it had happened that, during a long course of centuries, the cave had escaped the notice of the inhabitants of the country. The entrance to it was concealed by masses of earth which, having been brought down from the top of the hill by the action of the water, had accumulated in front of the entrance, hiding a flat terrace, on which many vestiges of pre-historic times were found. As no disturbance of the ground had taken place in this spot subsequent to the date of the burial, this talus had been sufficient to protect the traces of the men who were contemporary with the mammoth, and to shield their relics from all exterior injury.
Fig. 22.—Section of the Sepulchral Cave at Aurignac.