The testimony of the caves to the early existence of man has never had the importance in America that it has had in Europe.
It was in 1822 that Dr. Buckland, in his Reliquiae diluvianae (2d ed., 1824), first made something like a systematic gathering of the evidence of animal remains, as shown by cave explorations; but he was not prepared to believe that man’s remains were as old as the beasts. He later came to believe in the prehistoric man. In 1833-34, Dr. Schmerling found in the cave of Enghis, near Liége, a highly developed skull, and published his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la province de Liége.[1671]
In 1841, Boucher de Perthes began his discoveries in the valley of the Somme,[1672] and finally discovered among the animal remains some flint implements, and formulated his views of the great antiquity of man in his Antiquités Celtiques (1847), rather for the derision than for the delectation of his brother geologists. In 1848, the Société Ethnographique de Paris ceased its sessions; but Boucher de Perthes had aroused a new feeling, and while his efforts were still in doubt his disciples[1673] gathered, and amid much ridicule founded the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which has had so numerous a following in allied associations in Europe and America.
He tells us of the struggles he endured to secure the recognition of his views in his De l’homme antédiluvien et de ses œuvres (Paris, 1860), and his trials were not over when, in 1863, he found at Moulin Quignon a human jaw-bone,[1674] which, as he felt, added much strength to the belief in the man of the glacial gravels.[1675]
The existence of man in the somewhat later period of the caves[1676] was also claiming constant recognition, and the new society was broad enough to cover all. In 1857, Dr. Fuhlrott had discovered the Neanderthal skull in a cave near Düsseldorf.
In 1858, the discovery of flint tools in the Brixham cave, in Devonshire, was more effective in turning the scientific mind to the proofs than earlier discoveries of much the same character by McEnery had been. In March, 1872, Emile Rivière investigated the Mentone caves, and found a large skeleton, unmistakably human, and the oldest yet found, supposed to be of the palæolithic period. (Cf. Découverte d’un Squelette humain de l’Epoque paléolithique, Paris, 1873.) All this evidence is best set forth in the collection of his periodical studies on the mammals of the Pleistocene, which were collected by William Boyd Dawkins in his Cave Hunting: researches on the evidence of caves, respecting the early inhabitants of Europe (London, 1874),[1677] a book which may be considered a sort of complement to Lyell’s Antiquity of Man and Lubbock’s Prehistoric Man; Dawkins (ch. 9, and Address, Salford, 1877, p. 3) and Lubbock (Scientific Lectures, 150) unite in holding the modern Eskimos to be the representative of this cave folk. No argument is quite sufficient to convince Southall that the archæologists do not place the denizens of the caves too far back (Recent Origin of Man, ch. 13), and he rejects a belief in the steady slowness of the formation of stalagmites (Epoch of the Mammoth, 90), upon which Evans, Geikie, Wallace, Lyell, and others rest much of their belief in the great antiquity of the remains found beneath the cave deposits.[1678]
The largest development of cave testimony in America has been made by Dr. Lund,[1679] a Danish naturalist, who examined several hundred Brazilian caves, finding in them the bones of man in connection with those of extinct animals.[1680] The remains of a race, held to be Indians, found in the caves of Coahuila (Mexico) are described by Cordelia A. Studley in the Peabody Mus. Reports, xv. 233. Edward D. Cope has studied the contents of a bone cave in the island of Anguilla (West Indies), in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, no. 489 (1883). J. D. Whitney describes a cave in Calaveras County, in the Smithsonian Rept. (1887), and Edward Palmer one in Utah (Peab. Mus. Rept., xi. 269). Putnam explored some in Kentucky (Ibid. viii.). Putnam’s first account of his cave work in Kentucky, showing the use of them as habitations and as receptacles for mummies, is in the Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., xvii. 319. J. P. Goodnow made similar explorations in Arizona (Kansas City Rev., viii. 647); E. T. Elliott in Colorado (Pop. Sci. Mo., Oct., 1879), and Leidy in the Hartman cave, in Pennsylvania (Philad. Acad. Nat. Sci. Proc., 1880, p. 348). Cf. also Haldeman in the Am. Philos. Soc. Trans. (1880) xv. 351. Col. Charles Whittlesey has discussed the “Evidences of the antiquity of man in the United States,” in describing some cave remains of doubtful age.[1681] W. H. Dall’s On the remains of later prehistoric man obtained from caves in the Catherine archipelago, Alaska territory, and especially from the caves of the Aleutian islands (Washington, 1878) is included in the Smithsonian contributions to knowledge, xxii.
Throughout the world, naturalists have found on streams and on the seacoast, heaps of the refuse of the daily life of primitive peoples. Beneath the loam which has covered them there are found the shells of edible mollusks and other relics of food, implements, ornaments and vessels, of stone, clay, and bone. Sometimes it happens that natural superposed accumulations will mark them off in layers, and distinguish the usages of successive periods.[1682]
