At Solutré, in Mâconnais, M. de Ferry has discovered human finger-joints among the remains of cooking of the epoch of the great bear and mammoth, and of that of the reindeer.
The appearance of certain bones from the caves of Ariége, dug up by MM. Garrigou and Filhol, has led both these savants to the opinion "that pre-historic man may have been anthropophagous."
The same conclusion would be arrived at from the explorations which have been undertaken in the grottos and caves of Northern Italy by M. Costa de Beauregard. This latter savant found in the caves the small shin-bone of a child which had been carefully emptied and cleansed, leading to the idea that the marrow had been eaten.
At a point near Finale, on the road from Genoa to Nice, in a vast cave which was for a long period employed as a habitation for our race, M. Issel discovered some human bones which had evidently been calcined. Their whitish colour, their lightness, and their friability left no room for doubt on the point. Added to this, the incrustations on their surface still contained small fragments of carbon. Moreover, many of the bones showed notches which could not have been made without the help of some sharp instrument.
It is, therefore, probable that men in the stone age practised anthropophagy; we have, really, no cause to be surprised at this; since, in our own days, various savage tribes are addicted to cannibalism, under a considerable diversity of circumstances.
Not the least trace has been discovered of animals' bones being gnawed by dogs in any of the human settlements during the reindeer epoch. Man, therefore, had not as yet reduced the dog to a state of domesticity.
How did primitive man dress himself during this epoch? He must have made garments out of the skins of the quadrupeds which he killed in hunting, and especially of the reindeer's hide. There can be no doubt on this point. A large number of reindeers' antlers found in Périgord have at their base certain cuts which evidently could only have been produced in flaying the animal.
It is no less certainly proved that these men knew how to prepare animals' skins by clearing them of their hair, and that they were no longer compelled, like their ancestors, to cover themselves with rough bear-skins still covered with their fur. To what purpose could they have applied the flint scrapers which are met with everywhere in such abundance, except for scraping the hair off the skins of wild beasts? Having thus taken off the hair, they rendered them supple by rubbing them in with brains and the marrow extracted from the long bones of the reindeer. Then they cut them out into some very simple patterns, which are, of course, absolutely unknown to us; and, finally, they joined together the different pieces by rough sewing.
The fact that man at this epoch knew how to sew together reindeer skins so as to convert them into garments, is proved by the discovery of numerous specimens of instruments which must have been used for this work; these are—and this is most remarkable—exactly the same as those employed nowadays by the Laplanders, for the same purpose. They consist of bodkins or stilettoes made of flint and bone (fig. 42), by means of which the holes were pierced in the skin; also very carefully fashioned needles, mostly of bone or horn (fig. 43).