Bone-caves of Provence and Mentone.
The arctic animals are also absent from the numerous bone-caves and bone breccias of Provence and Mentone. The pleistocene fauna of Provence consists, according to M. Marion,[245] of the spotted hyæna, and lion, Elephas antiquus or straight-tusked elephant, Rhinoceros hemitœchus, wild-boar, urus, stag, horse, and rabbit. The breccias in the island of Ratonneau have also furnished the porcupine, brown bear, and tailless hare. Man is proved to have been living in the district at the time by the discovery of perforated and cut bones, in the cave of Rians.
The fissures and caves of Mentone, explored by Mr. Moggridge[246] in 1871, and subsequently by M. Rivière, contained a fauna composed, according to Prof. Busk, of the following species:—
Marmot.
Field-vole.
Lion.
Panther.
Lynx.
Wild-cat.
Spotted hyæna.
Wolf.
Fox.
Brown bear.
Cave-bear.
Roe.
Stag.
Ibex.
Urus.
Horse.
Wild-boar.
Rhinoceros hemitœchus.
Along with these were large quantities of charcoal and flint flakes, which proved that man had inhabited the district while the deposits were being formed.
Mr. Moggridge gives the following account of the results of his exploration:—[247]
“The caves of the red rocks, half a mile out of Mentone, are in lofty rocks of jurassic limestone on the shore of the Mediterranean, and at an average height of 100 feet above that sea, the rocks themselves attaining an elevation of 260 feet. They have now been repeatedly rifled by the learned or the curious; but when the principal cave (Cavillon) was nearly intact, the author made a section of it from the modern or highest floor, down to the solid rock. There were five floors formed in the earth by long-continued trampling; on each, and near the centre, were marks of fire, around which broken bones and flints were abundant, except upon the lowest, where but few bones occurred, and no flints. The bones were those of animals still existing. Few implements were found, but many chips of flint, some cores and stones used as hammers. Perhaps this cave was used as a place for manufacturing flints, which must have been carried from their native bed, distant about one mile.
“There is nothing to evince the action of water; on the contrary, the numerous stones that occur are all angular.... Below these caves a slope of about 180 feet descends to the edge of the sea. Through the upper part of this slope, at distances from the cave of from 0 to ten feet, is a railway cutting 600 feet long, fifty-four feet deep, and sixty feet above the sea. The mass removed in making this cutting was composed of angular stones not waterworn. Loose at the surface, it soon became a more or less mature breccia, for the most part so hard that it was blasted with gunpowder.” In this breccia, and at various depths, some of more than thirty feet, the author has taken out teeth of the bear (Ursus spelæus) and of the hyæna (Hyæna spelæa) while with and below those teeth he found flints worked by man.
The subsequent exploration by M. Rivière[248] has resulted in no important addition to the fauna: the famous human skeleton having been, as I have already remarked in the [seventh] chapter, interred in the pleistocene strata, and probably not palæolithic. It may possibly be of the era of the upper floors described by Mr. Moggridge, in which all the remains belong to living species.[249]