The Antiquity of Man

by Sir Charles Lyell

Many of the caverns had never before been entered by scientific observers, and their floors were encrusted with unbroken stalagmite. At a very early stage of his investigations, Dr. Schmerling found the bones of Man so rolled and scattered as to preclude all idea of their having been intentionally buried on the spot. He also remarked that they were of the same colour, and in the same condition as to the amount of animal matter contained in them, as those of the accompanying animals, some of which, like the cave-bear, hyaena, elephant, and rhinoceros, were extinct; others, like the wild cat, beaver, wild boar, roe-deer, wolf, and hedgehog, still extant. The fossils were lighter than fresh bones, except such as had their pores filled with carbonate of lime, in which case they were often much heavier. The human remains of most frequent occurrence were teeth detached from the jaw, and the carpal, metacarpal, tarsal, metatarsal, and phalangeal bones separated from the rest of the skeleton. The corresponding bones of the cave-bear, the most abundant of the accompanying mammalia, were also found in the Liege caverns more commonly than any others, and in the same scattered condition. Occasionally, some of the long bones of mammalia were observed to have been first broken across, and then reunited or cemented again by stalagmite, as they lay on the floor of the cave.

No gnawed bones nor any coprolites were found by Schmerling. He therefore inferred that the caverns of the province of Liege had not been the dens of wild beasts, but that their organic and inorganic contents had been swept into them by streams communicating with the surface of the country. The bones, he suggested, may often have been rolled in the beds of such streams before they reached their underground destination. To the same agency the introduction of many land-shells dispersed through the cave-mud was ascribed, such as Helix nemoralis, H. lapicida, H. pomatia, and others of living species. Mingled with such shells, in some rare instances, the bones of freshwater fish, and of a snake (Coluber), as well as of several birds, were detected.

The occurrence here and there of bones in a very perfect state, or of several bones belonging to the same skeleton in natural juxtaposition, and having all their most delicate apophyses uninjured, while many accompanying bones in the same breccia were rolled, broken, or decayed, was accounted for by supposing that portions of carcasses were sometimes floated in during floods while still clothed with their flesh. No example was discovered of an entire skeleton, not even of one of the smaller mammalia, the bones of which are usually the least injured.

The incompleteness of each skeleton was especially ascertained in regard to the human subjects, Dr. Schmerling being careful, whenever a fragment of such presented itself, to explore the cavern himself, and see whether any other bones of the same skeleton could be found. In the Engis cavern, distant about eight miles to the south-west of Liege, on the left bank of the Meuse, the remains of at least three human individuals were disinterred. The skull of one of these, that of a young person, was embedded by the side of a mammoth's tooth. It was entire but so fragile, that nearly all of it fell to pieces during its extraction. Another skull, that of an adult individual, and the only one preserved by Dr. Schmerling in a sufficient state of integrity to enable the anatomist to speculate on the race to which it belonged, was buried 5 feet deep in a breccia, in which the tooth of a rhinoceros, several bones of a horse, and some of the reindeer, together with some ruminants, occurred. This skull, now in the museum of the University of Liege, is figured in Chapter 5 (Figure 2), where further observations will be offered on its anatomical character, after a fuller account of the contents of the Liege caverns has been laid before the reader.

On the right bank of the Meuse, on the opposite side of the river to Engis, is the cavern of Engihoul. Bones of extinct animals mingled with those of Man were observed to abound in both caverns; but with this difference, that whereas in the Engis cave there were several human crania and very few other bones, in Engihoul there occurred numerous bones of the extremities belonging to at least three human individuals, and only two small fragments of a cranium. The like capricious distribution held good in other caverns, especially with reference to the cave-bear, the most frequent of the extinct mammalia. Thus, for example in the cave of Chokier, skulls of the bear were few, and other parts of the skeleton abundant, whereas in several other caverns these proportions were exactly reversed, while at Goffontaine skulls of the bear and other parts of the skeleton were found in their natural numerical proportions. Speaking generally, it may be said that human bones, where any were met with, occurred at all depths in the cave-mud and gravel, sometimes above and sometimes below those of the bear, elephant, rhinoceros, hyaena, etc.

Some rude flint implements of the kind commonly called flint knives or flakes, of a triangular form in the cross section (as in Figure 14), were found by Schmerling dispersed generally through the cave-mud, but he was too much engrossed with his osteological inquiries to collect them diligently. He preserved some few of them, however, which I have seen in the museum at Liege. He also discovered in the cave of Chokier, 2 1/2 miles south-west from Liege, a polished and jointed needle-shaped bone, with a hole pierced obliquely through it at the base; such a cavity, he observed, as had never given passage to an artery. This instrument was embedded in the same matrix with the remains of a rhinoceros.*

(* Schmerling part 2 page 177.)

Another cut bone and several artificially-shaped flints were found in the Engis cave, near the human skulls before alluded to. Schmerling observed, and we shall have to refer to the fact in the sequel (Chapter 8), that although in some forty fossiliferous caves explored by him human bones were the exception, yet these flint implements were universal, and he added that "none of them could have been subsequently introduced, being precisely in the same position as the remains of the accompanying animals." "I therefore," he continues, "attach great importance to their presence; for even if I had not found the human bones under conditions entirely favourable to their being considered as belonging to the antediluvian epoch, proofs of Man's existence would still have been supplied by the cut bones and worked flints."*

(* Schmerling, part 2 page 179.)

Dr. Schmerling, therefore, had no hesitation in concluding from the various facts ascertained by him, that Man once lived in the Liege district contemporaneously with the cave-bear and several other extinct species of quadrupeds. But he was much at a loss when he attempted to invent a theory to explain the former state of the fauna of the region now drained by the Meuse; for he shared the notion, then very prevalent among naturalists, that the mammoth and the hyaena* were beasts of a warmer climate than that now proper to Western Europe.