The rudeness of many of the worked flints has suggested the idea of their accidental origin; but the most diligent search in the heaps of chalk-flints broken for the roads, in France or England, or crushed in situ by subterranean movements, as in the Isle of Wight, has failed to recover a single specimen resembling even the rudest implements of the drift; whereas, in the ancient flint pits of the Shawnees, and probably of the Mound-Builders of Ohio,—to which I shall again refer,—I have collected fractured flints of precisely the same types as those familiar to us among the rudest drift implements. They differ for the most part in size, and also in type, from those found in early British or Danish grave-mounds; but artificial origin and inventive design are as obvious in the one as in the other.
That forgery of drift implements has been practised latterly, especially by the French workmen, is indisputable, but this need not affect the question. The facts connected with their discovery had been on record for nearly a century and a half before their significance was perceived; and specimens lay unheeded in the British Museum and in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London, with their human workmanship undisputed, so long as their origin was ascribed to Celtic art.[[13]] In reality the explorers of the drift have been perplexed by the very abundance of the traces of art which it discloses. Dr. Rigollot states that in the pits of St. Acheul alone, between August and December 1854, upwards of four hundred specimens were obtained. The lowest estimate of the number recovered in the valley of the Somme is 3000; but this is exclusive of the more dubious flint-flakes, styled knives, estimated by Sir Charles Lyell at many thousands more.[[14]] In England flint implements of the same peculiar type have already rewarded research in many localities; so that Mr. Evans justly remarks: “The number found is almost beyond belief.”[[15]] Some reasons tending to account for their accumulation in such localities are discussed in the following chapter, in the light of analogous discoveries in the New World. But while it is no longer possible to question their artificial origin, and the consequent evidence of the presence of man in those localities where they abound, the haunts of those primeval hunters and fishers were the river-valleys of an elder world; and any attempt at estimating the time required for changes of climate, extinction of fauna, the succession of races implied in the phases of palæolithic and neolithic arts, and the gradual introduction and development of metallurgy, involves so many unknown quantities, that at present it must suffice to recognise as no longer disputable that the whole historic period of Northern Europe is insignificant when compared with the time requisite to account for all the phenomena in question. The relative chronology of the French drift is: 1st, superficially, tombs and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of the Christian era; 2d, in the alluvium, seemingly imbedded by natural accumulation, at an average depth of 15 feet, remains of a European stone-period, corresponding to those of the recently discovered pfahlbauten, or lacustrine villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, 3d, the tool-bearing gravel, imbedding works of the Flint-Folk, wrought seemingly when the rivers were but beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England.
With such indications of the remoteness of the era of the Drift-Folk it scarcely calls for special notice, that their tools correspond to some of those found in cave-deposits, as in Kent’s Hole, Devonshire; but that they are readily distinguishable from the smaller implements and weapons of the same material wrought by the primitive Barrow-Builders of Europe, or by modern savage tribes still ignorant of metallurgy. From whatever point we attempt to view the facts thus presented to our consideration, it becomes equally obvious that we are dealing with the traces of a period irreconcilable with any received system of historic chronology; but within which, nevertheless, we are compelled to recognise many indications of the presence of man.
By evidence of a like character, the intermediate but still remote periods of prehistoric centuries are peopled with successive races of men. Proofs of oscillation, upheaval, and derangement of the course of ancient rivers, had furnished indications of the enormous lapse of time embraced within the British stone-period before the discoveries of Abbeville and Amiens were heard of.[[16]] In the year 1819 there was disclosed in the alluvium of the carse-land, where the river Forth winds its circuitous course through ancient historic scenes, the skeleton of a gigantic whale, with a perforated lance or harpoon of deer’s-horn beside it. They lay together near the base of Dunmyat, one of the Ochil Hills, twenty feet above the highest tide of the neighbouring estuary. Over this an accumulation of five feet of alluvial soil was covered with a thin bed of moss. The locality was examined by scientific observers peculiarly competent to the task; and at the same time sufficient traces of the old Roman causeway were observed, leading to one of the fords of the Forth, to prove that no important change had taken place on the bed of the river, or the general features of the strath, during the era of authentic history.[[17]] Nor was this example a solitary one. Remains of gigantic Balænæ have been repeatedly found; and one skeleton discovered in 1824, seven miles further inland, was deposited in the Museum of Edinburgh University, along with the primitive harpoon of deer’s-horn found beside it, which in this instance retained some portion of the wooden shaft by which it had been wielded. Among antique spoils recovered at various depths in the same carse-land, the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries includes a primitive quern, or hand-mill, fashioned from the section of an oak,—such as is still in use by the Indians of America for pounding their grain,—and a wooden wheel of ingenious construction, found with several flint arrow-heads alongside of it.
With such well-authenticated and altogether indisputable evidence already in our possession, the additions made to our grounds for belief in the antiquity of the prehistoric dawn of Britain or Europe do not materially affect the conclusions thereby involved, though they add to the apparent duration of the human era. Whatever difficulties may seem to arise from the discoveries at Abbeville and Amiens, or the older ones at Gray’s Inn Lane, Hoxne, and elsewhere, in relation to the age of man, the chronology which suffices to embrace the ancient Caledonian whaler within the period of human history will equally adapt itself to more recent disclosures. And lying, as the Scottish relics did, almost beneath the paving of the Roman causeway, they suffice to show that discoveries relative to the British Celt of Julius Cæsar’s time, or to the Romanised Briton of Claudius or Nero, which have hitherto seemed to the antiquary to illuminate the primeval dawn, bear somewhat less relation to the period to which the Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss harpoons belong, than the American aborigines of the fifteenth century do to primeval generations of the New World. The very question raised anew by such disclosures as the British drift, ossiferous caves, grave-mounds, and chance deposits reveal, is whether the ancient Celt, on whom Roman and Saxon intruded, was not himself a very recent intruder on older allophylian occupants?[[18]] If he was not, we are left to imagine for his race an antiquity and a history, compared with which the dreams of Merlin and the fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth are credible things.
With the advent of man antedated in geological eras, the Roman period becomes, in truth, a part of very modern history; and the vast ages computed to have intervened between the two periods baffle the fancy in its efforts to comprehend the links by which they are connected. But crude as are the arts of that primeval age, it will be seen that they compare favourably with those of uncultured man at any later period. Recent explorations, and especially those of the Dordogne caves of Central France, disclose carvings in bone, and engravings on ivory and slate, hereafter referred to, revealing an imitative skill, and powers of observation in the delineation of characteristic details of form and action, such as have rarely, if ever, been equalled in the art of modern uncultured races. If by the aid of those singularly interesting disclosures, we do indeed recover traces of the Flint-Folk belonging to an era estimated by some scientific chronologists as antedating our own by hundreds of thousands of years, it is of no slight importance to perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions on the earth as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, show man the same reasoning, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the Elephantine or cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of the brute creation. In truth, so far from arriving by such disclosures any nearer an anthropoid link between man and the brute, the oldest art-traces of the palæotechnic men of Central France not only surpass those of many savage races, but they indicate an intellectual aptitude in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the nineteenth century.
Much of the reasoning relative to the characteristics which archæological discoveries assign to man in his primeval stage originates in an illogical association of the concomitants of modern intellectual and social progress with the indispensable requisites implied in man’s primary condition as a rational being. It is not necessary for the confirmation of a primeval Stone or Flint Period, that we degrade man from that majestic genesis of our race, when he heard the voice of the Lord God amongst the trees of Paradise and was not afraid. Still less is it requisite that we make of him that “extinct species of anthropoid animal” hastily invented by over-sensitive Mosaic geologists to meet the problematic case of pleistocene products of art. In that primeval transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close, and archæology has its beginning, amid all the rudeness of palæolithic art, we may still recognise the rational lord of creation, the being endowed, not with physical but moral supremacy; in whom intelligence and accumulated experience were to prove more than a match for all the brute force of those gigantic mammalia so familiar to us now in fossil disclosures of the drift-gravels and cave-earth. Even if no more is claimed for primeval man than a condition akin to that of many modern uncivilised races, we can still discern the new and higher order of beings for which all others were to make way.
But if our modern technological standards are to be the only received tests of intellectual nobility, “his fair large front and eye sublime,” with all the suggestive picturings of Milton’s primeval man, are vain. His arts, though ample enough for all his wants, if tested by such standards, declare him no better than “the ignoble creature that arrow-heads and flint-knives would indicate.” He needed no weapons for war or the chase; implements of husbandry were scarcely less superfluous, amid a profusion ampler than the luxuriant plenty of the islands of the Southern Ocean. The needle and the loom were as foreign to his requirements as the printing-press or the electric telegraph. What use had he for the potter’s wheel, or the sculptor’s chisel, or the mason’s tools? And if his simple wants did suggest the need of some cutting implement, the flint-knife, or
“Such other gardening tools as art, yet rude,
Guiltless of fire, had formed,”