Fig. 124.—Eskimos Plane or Scraper (1/1). (Lartet and Christy.)
Some of the Eskimos lance-heads of stone in the British Museum are of the same type as that figured from the caves of the Dordogne ([Fig. 108]).
The most remarkable objects brought home from the northern regions are the implements of bone and antler which are ornamented with the figures of animals hunted by the Eskimos on sea or land. On the side of one bow in the Ashmolean Museum, used for drilling holes, you see them harpooning the whale from their skin boats, and catching birds. On a second they are harpooning walrus and catching seals; on a third the seals are being dragged home. The huts in which they live, the tethered dogs, the boat supported on its platform, and their daily occupations are faithfully represented. One bow is ornamented with a large number of porpoises, while on another is a reindeer hunt in which the animals are being attacked while they are crossing a ford. On a bone implement in the British Museum from Fort Clarence, the reindeer are being shot down by archers ([Fig. 125]). The arrow straightener, [Fig. 123], is adorned with a reindeer hunting scene, in which the animals are seen browsing and unsuspicious of the approach of the hunters, who are advancing, clad in reindeer skins and wearing antlers on their heads.
A comparison of these various designs with those from the caves of France and Belgium shows an identity of plan and workmanship, with this difference only, that the hunting scenes familiar to the palæolithic cave-dweller were not the same as those familiar to the Eskimos on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Each sculptured the animals he knew, and the whale, walrus, and seal were unknown to the inland dwellers in Aquitaine, just as the mammoth, bison, and wild horse are unknown to the Eskimos. The reindeer, which they both knew, is represented in the same way by both. The West Georgians made their dirks of walrus tooth, and ornamented them with carvings of the backbones of fishes; the people of Aquitaine used for the same purpose reindeer antlers, and ornamented them with figures of that animal (see [Fig. 116]). And it is worthy of remark that the latter had sufficient artistic feeling to depict the mammoth on mammoth ivory, the reindeer generally on reindeer antler, and the stag on its own antler.
Fig. 125.—Eskimos Hunting-scene (1/1). (Fort Clarence.)
An appeal to the habits of these two peoples, now separated by so wide an interval of space and time, tends also to show that they are descended from the same stock. The method of accumulating large quantities of the bones of animals around their dwelling-places, and the habit of splitting the bones for the sake of the marrow, is the same in both. Their hides were prepared by the same sort of instruments and in the same manner, and the needles with which they were sewn together are of the same pattern. The few remains of man among the relics of feasts in the caves of Belgium and France, show the same disregard of sepulture as that implied by the human skulls lying about along with numerous bones of walrus, seal, dog, bear, and fox, in an Eskimos camp in Igloolik, which were carried away by Captain Lyon, without the slightest objection on the part of the relatives of the dead.
All these facts can hardly be mere coincidences, caused by both peoples leading a savage life under similar circumstances: they afford reasons for the belief that the Eskimos of North America are connected by blood with the palæolithic cave-dwellers of Europe. To the objection that savage tribes living under similar conditions use similar instruments, and that, therefore, the correspondence of those of the Eskimos with those of the reindeer folk does not prove that they belong to the same race, the answer may be made, that there are no two savage tribes now living which use the same set of implements, without being connected by blood. The agreement of one or two of the more common and ruder instruments may be perhaps of no value in classification, but if a whole set agree, fitted for various uses, and some of them rising above the most common wants of savage life, we must admit that the argument as to race is of very great value. The implements found in Belgium, France, or Britain differ scarcely more from those now used in West Georgia, than the latter do from those now in use in Greenland or Melville Peninsula. The conclusion, therefore, seems inevitable, that so far as we have any evidence of the race to which the dwellers in the Dordogne belong, that evidence points only in the direction of the Eskimos.
This conclusion is to a great extent confirmed by a consideration of the animals found in the caves. The reindeer and the musk sheep afford food to the Eskimos now, just as they afforded it to the palæolithic hunters in Europe. No naturalist would deny that the pleistocene musk sheep is of the same species as that of North America, and although the animal is extinct in Europe and Asia, its remains, scattered through Germany, Russia in Europe, and Siberia, show that it formerly ranged in the whole of that area. The enormous distance, therefore, of southern France from the northern shores of America, cannot be considered as an obstacle to this view, for, to say the least, palæolithic man would have had the same chance of retreating to the north-east as the musk sheep. The mammoth and bison have also been tracked by their remains in the frozen river gravels and morasses through Siberia, as far to the north-east as the American side of the Straits of Behring. Palæolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them. And since his implements are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos, it may reasonably be concluded that he is represented at the present time by the Eskimos, for it is most improbable that the convergence of the ethnological, and zoological evidence should be an accident. These views,[236] which I advanced in 1866, have been to a great extent accepted by Sir John Lubbock in his last edition of Prehistoric Man.