[16] Reference may be made to Christy and Lartet, Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ; Quatrefages, Homme Fossile; Dupont, L'Homme pendant les Ages de Pierre; Carthaillac, La France Préhistorique; Dawkins, Cave Hunting and Early Man in Britain; Fossil Men and Modern Science in Bible Lands, by the author.
My first instance shall be one originally described by Canon Tristram, and which I had an opportunity to examine in 1884—the caverns or rock shelters in the face of the limestone cliff of the pass of Nahr-el-Kelb, north of Beyrout. At this place, in old caverns partly cut away in the forming of the Roman road round the cliff, there is a hard stalagmite, or modern limestone, produced by the calcareous drippings from the rock. This is filled with broken bones intermixed with flint flakes suitable for use as knives or spears or darts, and occasional fragments of charcoal. The bones are those of large animals, and have been broken for the extraction of the marrow; and the whole is evidently the remnants of the cuisine of some primitive tribe of hunters, now cemented into a somewhat hard stone by stalagmitic matter. The bones are not those of the present animals of Syria, but principally of an extinct species of rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), a species of bison, and other large mammals which inhabited the region in the pleistocene and post-glacial periods. It is farther known that these animals had been extinct long before the early Phœnicians penetrated into this country, perhaps 3000 B.C., and that the deposits existed in their present state when the early Egyptian conquerors passed this way, at least 1500 B.C., on their march to encounter the Hittites. It is also known that the earliest historic aborigines of the Lebanon, certain rude tribes which seem to have existed there before the migration of the Phœnicians, subsisted on the modern animals of the district, and used flint implements and weapons somewhat differing from those of the earlier cave men of the region. [17] What, then, were these earlier cave men? Certainly no people known to history, unless those whom we know as antediluvians. [18]
[17] See the illustration on p. [97].
[18] For more detailed description see Modern Science in Bible Lands; also Egypt and Syria, in the Bypaths of Bible Knowledge, by the author.
From the Lebanon we may pass to the west of Europe, where in France and Belgium a vast number of interesting relics of palæocosmic man have been discovered, and have been scientifically examined.
We may take as an illustration the cave of Goyet, on the cliffs bounding the ravine of the Samson, a tributary of the Meuse. This cavern is about forty-five feet above the present ordinary level of the river, but in post-glacial times seems to have been invaded by inundations, as it shows on its floor five distinct ossiferous surfaces, separated by layers of river-mud. These successive surfaces have been carefully examined by M. Dupont, and their contents noted.
On the lowest of these, or the first in order of age, were found numerous skeletons and detached bones of the cave lion and the cave bear; the former a possible ancestor of the lion of Western Asia, the latter closely allied to the grizzly bear of North America, but both entirely extinct in Europe. One of the skeletons of the lion was of unusually large size, and so complete that when set up it forms the principal ornament of the cave collection in the Brussels Museum.
CAVE OF GOYET, BELGIUM (section after Dupont)
1 to 5, layers of clay deposited in the mammoth ages