Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Accumulated knowledge is the grand characteristic of man. Every age bequeaths some results of its experience; and this constitutes the vantage-ground of succeeding generations. The deterioration which follows in the wake of every impediment to such transmission and accumulation of knowledge no less essentially distinguishes man from the ingenious spinners, weavers, and builders, who require no lesson from the past, and bequeath no experience to the future. Man alone can be conceived of as an intelligent mechanician, starting with the first rudiments of art, devising tools, initiating knowledge, and accumulating experience. Whatever, therefore, tends to disclose glimpses of such a primitive condition, and of his earliest acquisitions in mechanical arts and metallurgic knowledge, helps to a just conception of primeval man. Let us then glance at the evidence we possess of such an initial stage of being. And first in seeming chronological order are those traces of human arts in the drift, or in ossiferous caves among the bones of strange orders of beings hitherto supposed to have long preceded the existence of man. In the ancient alluvial deposits—most modern among the strata of the geologist,—lie abundant traces of extinct animal life, belonging to that recent transitional era of the globe in which man first appears. In nearly all respects they present a contrast to everything we are familiar with in the history of our earth as the theatre of human action. In a zoological point of view they include man and the existing races of animals, as well as extinct races which appear to have been contemporaneous with indigenous species. To the archæologist they are rich in records of that primeval transition in which the beginnings of history lie. How early in that closing geological epoch man appeared, or how late into that archæological era the extinct fossil mammals survived, are the two independent propositions which the sister sciences have to establish and reconcile.

The insular character of Great Britain renders it a peculiarly interesting epitome of archæological study, a microcosm complete in itself, and little less ample in the variety of its records than the great continent, divorced from it by the ocean; yet the question, as we have seen, is reopened: Was it already insular when its earliest nomad trod its unhistoric soil? The Caledonian allophylian, as we now know, pursued the gigantic whale in an estuary which swept along the base of the far-inland Ochils; and guided his tiny canoe, above an ocean-bed, which had to be upheaved into the sunshine of many centuries before it could become the arena of deeds that live associated on the historic page with the names of Agricola, Edward, Wallace and Bruce, of Montrose, Cromwell, and Mar. Its history dawns in an era of geological mutation; yet not more so than is now at work in other and neighbouring historic lands. It is a type of the changes which were gradually transforming that strange post-tertiary microcosm into the familiar historic Britain of this nineteenth century.

From an examination of the detritus and included fossils, and the disclosures of peat-mosses, we learn that, when the British Isles were in possession of their first colonists, the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by animals long since extinct. In the deposits of marl that underlie the accumulated peat-bogs of Scotland and Ireland occur abundant remains of the fossil elk, an animal far exceeding in magnitude any existing species of deer. Its bones have been found associated with skeletons of the mammoth and other proboscidians, and with numerous teeth, jaws, and detached bones of the extinct rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, fossil ox, etc.; yet no doubt is now entertained that the elk was contemporaneous with man in the British Isles. Stone hatchets, flint arrow-heads, and fragments of pottery have been recovered alongside of its skeleton, under circumstances that satisfy geologists, as well as archæologists, of their contemporaneous deposition; its bones have been found with the tool-marks of the flint chisel and saw; and evidence of various kinds seems to exhibit this gigantic deer as an object of the chase, and a source of primitive food, clothing, and tools.

Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell note the discovery, in the county of Cork, of a human body exhumed from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog eleven feet thick. The soft parts were converted into adipocere, and the body, thus preserved, was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimensions, as to lead them to the opinion that it belonged to the extinct elk. In 1863, Professor Beete Jukes exhibited to the geological section of the British Association the left femur, with a portion of one of the tines of an antler, recently dug up in the vicinity of Edgeworthstown, lying in marl, under forty feet of bog. A transverse cut on the lower end of the femur corresponded with another on the antler, by which they appeared to have been adapted for junction. After carefully examining this bone, I entertain no doubt of its having been cut by a sharp tool, and purposely prepared as the haft of the horn blade which lay beside it. When the two were fastened together, they must have made a formidable weapon. Other bones of this fossil deer have been observed to bear marks of artificial cutting; but one of the most interesting evidences of their use was produced at a meeting of the Archæological Institute, June 3, 1864, when the Earl of Dunraven exhibited an imperfect Irish lyre, found in the moat of Desmond Castle, Adare, the material of which was pronounced by Professor Owen to be bone of the Irish elk. The improbability of the recovery of a musical instrument coeval with the Irish elk has been greatly lessened by more recent discoveries. Among the carved bone and graven ivory relics of the Troglodytes of the Dordogne valley was a reindeer bone pierced at one end by an oblique hole, reaching to the medullary canal. By blowing upon this, as on a hollow key, a shrill sound is produced; and to this instrument accordingly M. Paul Broca applies the name of the rallying whistle. But a later discovery furnishes more definite evidence of ancient musical art. In 1871 M. E. Piette explored the cavern of Gourdan (Haute-Garonne), and there in a layer of charcoal and cinders, intermingled with flint implements, he found what he describes as a neolithic flute. It also is formed of bone, but pierced with holes at the side: an undoubted example of the art of one of Jubal’s primitive disciples.

The evidence supplied by the ossiferous caves of England, as of the continents of Europe and America, is full of interest from corresponding revelations. Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire, has acquired a special celebrity from the description and illustration of its contents, given by Dr. Buckland in his Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, in connection with a diluvial theory subsequently abandoned; and Kent’s Hole, Devonshire, one of the richest depositories of British fossil carnivora, yielded no less remarkable traces of primitive mechanical arts. Intermingled with remains of the rhinoceros, cave-hyæna, great cave-tiger, cave-bear, and other extinct mammalia in unusual abundance, lay not only worked flints and the like traces of human art, but also numerous implements wrought from their bones; and subsequent investigations of ossiferous caves in various localities, by competent scientific explorers, guided by the accumulated knowledge and experience of upwards of thirty years, have given precision to the ideas already entertained of the coexistence of man with the extinct fauna of the caves.

In those instances, as well as in similar disclosures in Belgium and Southern France, where the remains of man himself, as well as his handiwork, have been found associated with the fossil mammalia, the facts were for a time discredited, or explained away, as irreconcilable with long-accepted conclusions relative to the age and early condition of man. But in 1858 another ossiferous limestone cave was accidentally discovered at Brixham, in the vicinity of the famous Kent’s Hole, and negotiations were soon after entered into with a view to its thorough exploration for purposes of science. Unlike Kent’s Hole Cavern, after a succession of prolonged alternations of occupation by the carnivora of a late quaternary epoch; of submergence by local floods, with the deposition of their detrital accumulations in beds of varying character and contents; and the formation over all, at favourable points, of a flooring of carbonate of lime upwards of a foot thick: the falling in of a portion of the roof closed up the entrance of Brixham Cave, except to the smaller rodents and burrowing animals. Its history as the resort of the older mammalia, and of man himself, was thus abruptly closed, and it thenceforth remained intact, until its recent exploration. Thus, though in its indications of the presence of man, its evidence is meagre when compared with Kent’s Hole, it is wholly free from any confusing elements such as in that remarkable cavern manifestly pertain to Celtic, Roman, and even Saxon times.

Brixham Cave appears to have long been the resort of hyænas, who dragged their prey into its main passages, and left there the gnawed bones of the rhinoceros, the fossil horse and ox, the reindeer, roebuck, great red-deer, etc. It included unmistakable traces of the mammoth, or other huge proboscidian, was visited by the cave-tiger (Felis spelæa), and finally became a favourite haunt of the great cave-bear (Ursus spelæus), as well as of two other species of bears, one of which seems to correspond to the Ursus arctos, or brown bear, and another has been supposed to be identical with the Ursus ferox, or grizzly bear. From time to time it was also visited, and some of its remote recesses explored by man. Thirty-six flints in all have been recovered in the different strata of the cave beds. A few of those are simply unworked flints; but twenty-three of them betray traces of human workmanship and use; and include knives and oval and lanceolate blades, closely analogous to implements found in the Cavern of Aurignac, in the Pyrenees, and in that of Le Moustier, in the Dordogne. Others, though mere flint-flakes, bear decided marks of use as scraping tools. Another implement is a round pebble of siliceous sandstone, weighing 1 lb. 3 oz., which must have been brought from a distance, and shows on the side opposite to that by which it is most readily grasped by the hand distinct evidence of its use as a hammer stone. One, and only one, object wrought from animal substance, a small cylindrical pin, or rod of ivory, accompanied the more durable flints. Some of those indications of the presence of man were found in the bottom, or shingle-bed, overlaid by undisturbed cave-earth rich in mammalian remains; and the entire succession of beds was overlaid by a layer of stalagmite in which bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other fossil mammals occurred.

It does not appear that Brixham Cave had at any time been inhabited by man. It has no accumulation of split bones or broken tools, nor any traces of the hearth, as in Kent’s Hole, or in the Caves of Dordogne and the Pyrenees. But the men of the mammoth period had resorted thither occasionally,—for hiding, it may be, or in pursuit of their prey; and thus dropped the worked flints which now reveal the evidence of their presence. There is no trace of human bones, or any indication that man fell a prey to the powerful wild animals which chiefly haunted the cave. But he explored its recesses, in one case at least, to a distance of seventy-four feet from the entrance; and unless we suppose him to have groped his way thither, when in search of a more effectual hiding-place from some human foe, it seems no unfair surmise that he carried with him the illuminating torch. The extinguished hearths of the French Caves, as at Aurignac and the Vezère, leave no room to question man’s early acquaintance with fire. Nor does it seem to me probable that, under the rigorous climate to which he was exposed in that remote post-glacial period, he could fail, as man, to employ the art of fire-making to alleviate his necessities, even as is now done under corresponding exigencies by the Arctic Esquimaux. Nevertheless it is to be noted that the flint implements found in Brixham Cave are of the rudest character; and like other specimens of the worked-flints of the men of the Drift or Cave periods, indicate a very slight development of constructive skill: unless, as hereafter shown from analogous American examples, there may be reason to regard many of them as merely in the first stage of manufacture into weapons or tools.

Kent’s Cavern yielded a greatly more varied illustration of primitive arts, such as barbed harpoon heads, bodkins, awls, and needles of bone. Like others found in the French Caves, they suggest comparison with the ingenious arts of the Esquimaux: and may also justify the inference that in milder regions, and under other favouring circumstances, contemporary man, then as now, manifested a higher intellectual vigour when free from the exhausting strain involved in the battle for life, either of the modern hyperborean, or of the post-glacial artificer of the cave period.

At an epoch which, though still prehistoric, is modern when compared with the latest traces of post-glacial or cave periods, the worked flints and implements of bone, found in many European primitive deposits, in caverns, chambered cairns, barrows, and among the chance disclosures of the agriculturist, continue to exhibit the most infantile stage of rudimentary art. Fragments of sun-baked urns, and rounded slabs of slate of a plate-like form, are associated with indications of rude culinary practices, illustrative of the habits and tastes of savage man. Broken pottery, calcined bones, charcoal ashes, and other traces of cooking operations, have been noted under similar circumstances, alike in England and on the continent of Europe; showing where the hearth of the Allophylian had stood. Along with those, in Kent’s cavern especially, the flints lay dispersed in all conditions, from the rounded mass as it came out of the chalk, through various stages of progress, on to finished arrow-heads and hatchets; while small flint-chips, and partially used flint-blocks, thickly scattered through the soil, served to indicate that the British troglodyte had there his workshop, as well as his kitchen, and wrought the raw material of that primitive stone-period into the requisite tools and weapons of the chase. Nor were indications wanting of the specific food of man in the remote era thus recalled for us. Besides accumulated bones, shells of the mussel, limpet, and oyster, lay heaped together near the mouth of the cave, along with a palate of the scarus: indicating that the aborigines found their precarious subsistence from the products of the chase and the spoils of the neighbouring sea.