The ‘Cave-men’, as Professor Boyd Dawkins himself admits,[1572] undoubtedly used certain implements of river-drift type as well as ‘the higher types’; nor is there any reason to suppose that the ‘River-drift men’ did not use implements of ‘the higher types’ as well as implements of river-drift type, except the fact, easily accounted for, that the former are not found in the drift. Professor Boyd Dawkins himself strenuously maintains that ‘River-drift men’ as well as ‘Cave-men’ lived in caves.[1573] How then can he prove that the two sets of occupants were ethnologically different? He insists that ‘the river-drift implements in the Caves of Creswell Crags, of Kent’s Hole, and of the Grotte de l’Église, are found in the strata below those with the implements of the Cave-men, and consequently that the River-drift men lived in Britain and France before the Cave-men.’[1574] But on his own showing the owners of both sets of implements did live in caves; and so far nothing is proved except that those who used one set were more ancient than those who used the other. ‘Some caves also,’ he adds, ‘were inhabited by River-drift men, who have left behind their implements without any trace of the higher types of the Cave-men.’[1575] But here again nothing is proved save that these particular ‘River-drift men’ had not yet learned to make ‘the higher types’. The professor might have a good case if he could say, River-drift implements have been found in the lower strata of caves: in the upper strata none have been found, but only ‘the higher types’; consequently the men who used the higher types were quite different from those of the later Palaeolithic Age whose implements have been recovered from river-drift. But this he could not truly say; for implements of river-drift type have been found, although rarely, in the highest strata of caves.[1576] Lastly, I would ask the professor, who insists that ‘the Cave-men’ were ‘northern mammals’, and that they did not enter Europe until long after the appearance of ‘the River-drift men’, to tell us whence they came.
3. Are we to count the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain among our ancestors? ‘I do not consider,’ says Dr. Garson, ‘that there is any evidence of the existence of the direct descendants of Palaeolithic man among the osteological remains of Neolithic or subsequent date in Britain.’[1577] On the other hand, Dr. Beddoe[1578] thinks that the oldest inhabitants of this country may have left descendants, whom he is inclined to identify with ‘some Mongoloid race’, traces of which, he believes, are discernible in the population of the west of England; while two distinguished French anthropologists, MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy, affirm that the Neanderthal race ‘has left a permanent imprint on the population of the three kingdoms’,[1579] and refer to various skulls of the Neolithic and later periods which resemble more or less closely that of Neanderthal.[1580] Moreover, it is generally admitted that even at the present day a few individuals here and there belong to the same type.[1581] But it does not follow that these persons or those to whom Dr. Beddoe and M. Hamy refer were descended from men who lived in Britain in the Palaeolithic Age. That palaeolithic man left no descendants in any part of the world is of course not maintained even by the most ardent supporters of the theory of the ‘Hiatus’: somewhere or other there must have been a link; but Sir John Evans, as I have observed in the first part of this book,[1582] argues from the supposed absence of intermediate forms of implements that it did not exist in this country; and Dr. Keane[1583] thinks that ‘the few scattered palaeolithic hunters could scarcely have lived through the last ice-age in a contracted region at one time reduced by subsidence to a mere cluster of islets’, &c. The answer is, first that there is no reason to believe that in ‘the last ice-age’ or at any time between the dawn of the latest palaeolithic period and the arrival of neolithic man Britain was ‘a mere cluster of islets’;[1584] and secondly that, as Professor Boyd Dawkins assures us, out of forty-eight species of mammalian fauna living in Britain in the Palaeolithic, thirty-one survived in the Neolithic Age.[1585] Professor Boyd Dawkins, however, insists that ‘the mere contrast between the Palaeolithic and wild Neolithic faunas implies a zoological break of the first magnitude’.[1586] I take leave to say that it implies no break at all, seeing that thirty-one of the older species confessedly lived on: it implies no more than is implied by the disappearance of the urus, the wolf, the wild boar, and many other animals which were living in this island at a time since which it has been continuously inhabited by man. The professor triumphantly points out that in those caves which were successively used as dwellings by palaeolithic and neolithic people ‘the remains of the domestic animals are found alone in the upper Prehistoric [or neolithic] strata.’[1587] Undoubtedly. But what then? The fact does not prove that palaeolithic man had become extinct when neolithic man arrived: it merely proves that the latter had domestic animals, and that the former had not. Arab horses, Siamese cats, and many other animals have been introduced into this country since the Christian era: yet the people who were here before their introduction did not become extinct. And if ‘in a great many cases the lower Palaeolithic strata [in caves] are sealed down, and mapped off from the Neolithic, by a layer of stalagmite’,[1588] that only proves ‘a break of continuity between the two periods’ as far as those caves are concerned. The Palaeolithic Age, says the professor, ‘was continental, the Neolithic insular in North-Western Europe.’[1589] He means that in the Palaeolithic Age Great Britain was an outlying part of the Continent, and that the neolithic invaders had to sail across the Channel.[1590] But why should the formation of the Channel have extinguished the palaeolithic race? ‘There is obviously,’ continues the professor, ‘a great gulf fixed between the rude hunter civilisation of the one and the agricultural and pastoral civilisation of the other.’ Obviously. But the gulf is not more obvious than that which separated the civilization of the Red Indians from the civilization of the Pilgrim Fathers. Yet the Red Indians still lived on.
It is true that if the professor has failed to show that the Palaeolithic Age in Britain was abruptly terminated, he has no difficulty in disposing of certain arguments which have been adduced to show that it was not. When, for instance, Mr. Allen Brown points to the implements of palaeolithic type which were found in the refuse heaps of the neolithic settlement at Cissbury in Sussex, he replies that ‘in the vast accumulation of refuse, representing every style in the chipping, from the rough block of flint ... to the highly finished axe, broken ... by an unhappy blow, it is obvious that there must be some which would represent well-known Palaeolithic types.’[1591] Nevertheless it remains true that not one of the facts which he has stated is inconsistent with the hypothesis that men may have lived on in Britain in the palaeolithic stage of culture until the time when the first neolithic immigrants arrived. What his opponents suggest is that certain types of palaeolithic implements survived into the Neolithic Age;[1592] in other words, that implements of those types continued to be manufactured or used then. That this was the case in Ireland is certain;[1593] and, since there is no evidence of a Palaeolithic Age in Ireland, it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that they were made by descendants of palaeolithic refugees from Britain or Gaul. Mr. Allen Brown may be wrong in maintaining that implements which he has found ‘at or near the surface’ at East Dean in Sussex are ‘mesolithic’, that is, belong to a period of transition;[1594] but Sir John Evans himself says[1595] of some of the implements, usually classed as palaeolithic, which have been found in the cave earth of the famous Kent’s Cavern in a position which authorizes us to assume that the people to whom they belonged were not separated by any ‘hiatus’ from the palaeolithic race whose remains were found immediately underneath, that ‘so far as form is concerned, there is little or nothing to distinguish them from the analogous implements of the Neolithic Period’. Is it not possible that these and some of the ruder implements which have hitherto been classed as neolithic may have been fabricated not by neolithic immigrants but, after their immigration, by descendants of the palaeolithic race?[1596] Those who deny that mesolithic implements have been found in Britain deny also that they have been found anywhere else. Granted for the sake of argument. But if their general absence does not weaken the certainty that the supposed hiatus was not universal, how can their absence in Britain prove that there was a hiatus here? In Part I I have shown that it is impossible to frame any theory which shall account satisfactorily for the assumed disappearance of British palaeolithic man. Professor Boyd Dawkins asks us to believe that the ‘Cave-men’ fled in terror before the neolithic invaders and eventually settled in Greenland, where they became the ancestors of the Eskimos; and in support of this theory he assures us that ‘Palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them’; that the gloves of the ‘Cave-men’ were ‘similar to those now used by the Eskimos’; that their implements ‘are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos’; that, like the Eskimos, they did not take the trouble to bury their dead; and that ‘the most astonishing bond of union between the Cave-men and the Eskimos is the art of representing animals’.[1597] Judging from the specimens of Eskimo art which the professor gives, I confess that what I find astonishing is its inferiority to that of the Cave-men;[1598] there is no evidence that the Cave-men of Britain wore gloves; and if they did, may not the reason have been, not that there was any connexion between them and the Eskimos, but that their hands were cold? Is the professor sure that ‘the River-drift men’ did not also wear gloves? We do not know whether palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia: he certainly did not accompany them from the north; and it is an article of faith with French anthropologists that he did not disappear with them, but became the ancestor of neolithic man. There is a general resemblance between the palaeolithic drift implements of all countries; and in the earlier part of this volume many facts have been noted which show how cautious one should be in inferring identity of race from similarity in implements, weapons, or ornaments. There is not the slightest evidence that ‘the Cave-men’ did not bury their dead; and there is irrefragable evidence, as we have seen, that cave-men in the Riviera and in Croatia did.[1599] Again, since the professor differentiates the ‘Cave-men’ from the ‘River-drift men’ of Britain, can he prove that the latter did bury their dead? If not, what becomes of his argument? Finally, the theory that the Eskimos are descendants of ‘the Cave-men’ of Western Europe has been rejected by every recent inquirer.[1600]
How does Professor Boyd Dawkins account for the disappearance, which he assumes, of palaeolithic man? ‘Simply,’ he says, ‘by assuming that at the close of the Pleistocene age, when they came into contact with Neolithic invaders, there were the same feelings between them as existed in Hearne’s times between the Eskimos and the Red Indian, terror and defenceless hatred being, on the one side, met by ruthless extermination on the other. In this way the Cave-men would be gradually driven from Europe.’[1601] That men who were ruthlessly exterminated should have survived to become the ancestors of the Eskimos is certainly remarkable. But seriously I would ask the professor whether he has really succeeded in persuading himself that ‘the Cave-men’ were one and all either exterminated or driven out of Europe. Did none remain? He assures us that ‘the Cave-men’ migrated eastward; and he still insists, in defiance of all French craniologists, that ‘neither of the two races of Palaeolithic man have left behind any marks in the existing population of Europe’.[1602] How they contrived to make their slow progress across the Continent without leaving one descendant is a problem which he does not attempt to solve. And since he himself admits, or rather affirms, that they ‘came into contact with Neolithic invaders’, it is difficult to see how he can maintain the existence of a hiatus.
The professor has asserted that there is ‘no evidence in any part of the world of a continuity between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages’.[1603] Yet he of course admits that it must have existed somewhere. Good reasons have been given for believing that it existed in France.[1604] Why not also in Britain?[1605]
Such are the reasons by which I endeavour to justify myself in refusing to believe that neolithic man, when he entered Britain, found none to welcome or to oppose him save the thirty-one species of mammalian fauna which Professor Boyd Dawkins has spared.
V. THE PYGMIES (?)
British pygmies are the creation of Celtic imagination. The evidence on which we are required to believe that they existed is this. Professor Rhys[1606] suggests that the name of the Coritani, a tribe mentioned by Ptolemy,[1607] who inhabited the country between the Trent and the Nen, is related to the word cor, a dwarf. ‘Then,’ the professor concludes, ‘we should have accordingly to suppose the old race to have survived so long and in such numbers that the Celtic lords of Southern Britain called the people of that area by a name meaning dwarfs.’ Afterwards, referring to various articles by Mr. David MacRitchie, he observes that in certain parts of Wales and Scotland there are mounds enclosing cells, which are ‘frequently so small as to prove beyond doubt that those who inhabited them were of remarkably small stature’;[1608] and he finds in Welsh, Irish, and Scotch folk-lore traditions which confirm him in the belief that these cells were inhabited by dwarfs, whom he calls ‘the Mound Folk’. ‘This strange people,’ he tells us, ‘seems to have exercised on the Celts ... a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness and awe stretching to the verge of adoration ... the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration, combined with his incapacity to comprehend the weird and uncanny population of the mounds and caves ... has enabled him ... to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs,’[1609] &c. The professor’s conclusion[1610] is that the earliest people who inhabited these islands [apparently after the Palaeolithic Age] were ‘the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured by our fairy tales’; and that they were conquered by neolithic invaders, who, he tells us, ‘made slaves and drudges of the mound-haunting race.’
‘These,’ the professor warns us, perhaps superfluously, ‘are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may.’
I venture to hint a doubt. Not only is the derivation of Coritani utterly uncertain,[1611] but it is safe to assume that the Celtic tribe who undoubtedly conquered the country which belonged in Ptolemy’s time to the Coritani would not have called its population, themselves included, by a name which described not even the people whom they found in possession, but the ‘slaves and drudges’ of that people, or rather of their neolithic predecessors! The professor indeed argued in Celtic Folk-Lore[1612] that the Coritanian dwarfs ‘may be conjectured to have had quiet from invaders from the Continent because of the inaccessible nature of their fens’. How then did they themselves and the non-dwarfish invaders of the Bronze Age get there? It is almost superfluous to remark that in the year before and in the year after the publication of Celtic Folk-Lore the professor counted the Coritani among the Brythonic ‘invaders from the Continent’.[1613] The ‘mound-dwellings’ which Mr. MacRitchie describes[1614] belong to the class of structures which are popularly known as ‘Picts’ houses’, ‘Earth-houses’, or ‘Weems’, and are immeasurably later than the period to which Professor Rhys’s theory would compel him to assign them. The mere fact, indeed, that many of them have been shown by excavation to have been occupied in Roman times does not prove that they were not constructed earlier; but I can find no evidence that any of them belong even to the Neolithic Age. Mr. MacRitchie himself assures us that one which was opened at Crichton in Mid-Lothian ‘was proved to have been built not earlier than 80 A.D.’;[1615] and he assigns the ‘mound-dwellings’ in general not to a pre-neolithic race but to the Picts of historic times.[1616] He also says that one which was explored in 1855 contained four chambers, of which the largest was ‘6 feet 2 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches in height, and 2 feet 6 inches wide’, and, with a fascinating lack of humour, he adds that ‘while the size of the stones used in its construction is evidence of great personal strength on the part of the builders, the small and narrow rooms seem to indicate a diminutive race.’[1617] When the reader is invited to believe that ‘those who inhabited’ these ‘rooms’, which were only built by the exertion of ‘great personal strength’, ‘were of remarkably short stature’, he falls to calculating whether even a race of Tom Thumbs, each of whom possessed the muscular power of a Sandow, would not have used their strength to make their rooms a little more comfortable.[1618] Mr. MacRitchie shows more acumen when, after remarking that ‘two alleged Fairy Knowes in Shetland’ proved on investigation to be natural hillocks, and that another in Stirlingshire ‘was only a sepulchral mound’, he concludes that these instances are ‘sufficient to show the unreliable nature of popular tradition’.[1619] If it was ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’ that ‘enabled him to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs’, why should he not have exercised his faculty upon the comparatively short neolithic population rather than upon the imaginary pygmies whom Professor Rhys has appointed as their ‘slaves and drudges’?[1620] And if the imagination which created ‘a motley train of dwarfs’ had pygmies for its basis of fact, will the professor tell us who were the originals of the ‘motley train’ of giants whom the imaginations of various European peoples associated with the dwarfs?[1621] I am aware that Professor Kollmann[1622] claims to have proved that pygmies existed in prehistoric times in France, Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries; but the fact remains that no evidence has been produced that a race of pre-neolithic or even prehistoric pygmies existed in this country save only that which is furnished by ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’.