Cave Hunting / Researches on the evidence of caves respecting the early inhabitants of Europe

by William Boyd Dawkins

Classification of Palæolithic Caves.

The palæolithic caves are divided by M. Lartet[232] into four groups, according to the species of animals which they contain; into those of the age of the cave-bear, of the age of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, of the age of the reindeer, and of the age of bison. Dr. Hamy follows Sir John Lubbock,[233] in considering the age of the cave-bear to be co-extensive with that of the mammoth, and in the classification of caves he adopts a series of transitions. M. Dupont divides the caves of Belgium into those belonging to the age of the mammoth, and to that of the reindeer.

It is easy to refer a given cave to the age of the reindeer or of the mammoth because it contains the remains of those animals, but the division has been rendered worthless for chronological purposes, by the fact that both these animals inhabited the region north of the Alps and Pyrenees at the same time, and are to be found together in nearly every bone-cave explored in that area. The difference between the contents of one palæolithic cave and another, is probably largely due to the fact that man could more easily catch some animals than others, as well as to the preference for one kind of food before another. And the abundance of the reindeer, which is supposed to characterise the reindeer period, may reasonably be accounted for by the fact, that it would be more easily captured by a savage hunter, than the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave-bear, lion, or hyæna. The classification will apply, as I have shown in my essay on the pleistocene mammalia,[234] neither to the caves of this country, of Belgium, nor of France, and my views are shared by M. de Mortillet,[235] after a careful and independent examination of the whole evidence.

The division of the caves also into ages, according to the various types of implements found in them, proposed by M. de Mortillet, seems to be equally unsatisfactory; for there is no greater difference in the implements of any two of the palæolithic caves, than is to be observed between those of two different tribes of Eskimos, while the general resemblance is most striking. The principle of classification by the relative rudeness, assumes that the progress of man has been gradual, and that the ruder implements are therefore the older. The difference, however, may have been due to different tribes, or families, having co-existed without intercourse with each other, as is now generally the case with savage communities; or to the supply of flint, chert, and other materials for cutting instruments, being greater in one region than in another.

Relation of Cave-dwellers to Eskimos.

Fig. 122.—Eskimos Spear-head, bone (1/2).

Fig. 123.—Eskimos Arrow-straightener of Walrus Tooth (1/1). (Brit. Mus.)

Can these cave-dwellers be identified with any people now living on the face of the earth? or are they as completely without representatives as their extinct contemporaries, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros? Absolute certainty we cannot hope to obtain on the point, but the cumulative evidence enables an answer to be given which is probably true. Along the American shore of the great Arctic Ocean, in the region of everlasting snow, dwell the Eskimos, living by hunting and fishing, speaking the same language, and using the same implements from the Straits of Behring on the west, to Greenland on the east. Their implements and weapons, brought home by the arctic explorers, enable us to institute a comparison with those found in the palæolithic caves. The harpoons in the Ashmolean collection at Oxford, brought over by Captain Beechey and Lieut. Harding from West Georgia, as well as those in the British Museum, are almost identical in shape and design with those from the caves of Aquitaine and Kent’s Hole; the only difference being that some of the latter have grooved barbs. The heads of the fowling and fishing spears, darts, and arrows, as well as the form of their bases for insertion into the shafts, are also identical ([Fig. 122]), as may be seen from a comparison of [Fig. 122] with [Figs. 99] and [114]. The curiously carved instrument, [Fig. 123], which the Eskimos use for straightening their arrows is variously ornamented with designs of animals, analogous to those cut on the reindeer antlers in Aquitaine; and if it be compared with the so-called “bâton de commandement,” [Fig. 121], it will be seen, that the latter also was probably intended for the same purpose; the difference in the shape of the hole in the two figured specimens being also observable in the series of Eskimos arrow-straighteners in the British Museum, and being largely due to friction by use. Many of the implements are the same in form. An Eskimos stone scraper for preparing skins, or plane for smoothing wood, is represented in [Fig. 124], which is inserted in a handle of fossil mammoth ivory, obtained from the frozen ice-cliffs on the shores of the Arctic sea. If it be compared with [Fig. 107] from the caves, it will be seen to be of the same pattern. It is indeed not a little singular, that the handle in which it is imbedded should have been formed out of the tusks of the same species of elephant as that which was depicted by the palæolithic hunter (see [Fig. 120]), in the south of France.