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

by William Boyd Dawkins

The pleiocene Ursus arvernensis, Cervus Polignacus, Rhinoceros etruscus, and Elephas meridionalis still living.

The Pleiocene.

Mastodon arvernensis.
M. Borsoni.
Hipparion gracile.
No living species of European Deer.

The three subdivisions of the pleistocene do not apply to the region south of the Alps and Pyrenees, because the northern group of animals did not pass into Spain and Italy. In these two countries we find southern and pleiocene animals living throughout the pleistocene age, which in France and Britain lived only in the two earlier stages.

Antiquity of Man in Europe.

No remains have been discovered up to the present time in any part of Europe which can be referred with certainty to a higher antiquity than the pleistocene age. The palæolithic people or peoples arrived in Europe along with the peculiar fauna of that age, and after dwelling here for a length of time, which is to be measured by the vast physical and climatal changes, described in the last three chapters, finally disappeared, leaving behind as their representatives the Eskimos tribes of arctic America. There is no evidence that they were inferior in intellectual capacity to many of the lower races of the present time, or more closely linked to the lower animals. The traces which they have left behind tell us nothing as to the truth or falsehood of the doctrine of evolution, for if it be maintained on the one hand, that the first appearance of man as a man, and not as a man-like brute, is inconsistent with that doctrine, it may be answered that the lapse of time between his appearance in the pleistocene age and the present day, is too small to have produced appreciable physical or intellectual change. Also, it must not be forgotten, that we have merely investigated the antiquity of the sojourn of man in Europe, and not the general question of his first appearance on the earth, with which it is very generally confounded. Dr. Falconer well remarked that the origines of mankind are to be sought, not in Europe, but in the tropical regions, probably of Asia. To these we have no clue in the present stage of the inquiry. The higher apes are represented in the European meiocene and pleiocene strata, by extinct forms uniting in some cases the characters of different living species, but they do not show any tendency to assume human characters. It must indeed be allowed, that the study of fossil remains throws as little light as the documents of history on the relation of man to the lower animals. The historian commences his labours with the high civilization of Assyria and Egypt, and can merely guess at the steps by which it was achieved; the palæontologist meets with the traces of man in the pleistocene strata, and he too can merely guess at the antecedent steps by which man arrived even at that culture which is implied by the implements. The latter has proved that the antiquity of man is greater than the former had supposed. Neither has contributed anything towards the solution of the problem of his origin.

Man lived in India in Pleistocene Age.

The researches of the Geological Surveyors has shown that in ancient times man, in the same stage of civilization as the palæolithic man of Europe, lived in Southern India and in the valley of the Narbadá. In 1868[271] Mr. Bruce Foote described the flint implements which were discovered over a large area in the districts of Madras, either in the red clayey deposit known as Laterite, or in such positions as implied that they had been washed out of it. They all belong to the same rude types as those of the pleistocene strata of North-western Europe. A small fragment of bone was the only fossil which had up to that time been discovered in the Laterite, and this I was able to identify in 1869 as a portion of a human tibia of the abnormal platycnemic variety, which has been described in the [fifth] chapter of this work, from the European caves and tombs. The Lateritic deposits themselves are strictly analogous to our river-strata and brick-earths in their constitution, and in their resting at various levels above the sea, and were, as Mr. Foote remarks, formed under conditions different to those which are now going on in that district. They prove that the period of the sojourn of palæolithic man in Southern India is divided from the present day by considerable geographical changes, such as the elevation of land, and the erosion and breaking up of accumulations which were once continuous. We have seen that somewhat similar changes have happened in Europe, in the interval which separates the palæolithic period from our own time.

The discovery of a rudely chipped implement of quartzite, of the pointed oval shape common in the gravels of Britain and France, published by Mr. Medlicott in 1873, in the “Records of the Geological Survey of India,” proves further that man was a member of the remarkable fauna which inhabited the valley of the Narbadá in ancient times. It was dug out of reddish unstratified clay by Mr. Hacket at a depth of three feet from the upper surface, which was covered by twenty feet of ossiferous gravel, on the left bank of the Narbadá near the valley of Bhutra. The clay belongs to the same fluviatile series as that from which the mammalia were obtained and named by Dr. Falconer in 1828. Both clay and gravel are shown to be of fluviatile origin, by the presence of fresh-water mussels of the varieties still living in the adjacent river.

The fossil bones belong to extinct and living animals. Among the former are two kinds of elephant (E. namadicus) and (E. stegodon insignis), one of which is closely allied to the European E. antiquus, two species of hippopotamus, one (H. palæindicus) with four incisors in front of the jaws like the African, and a second with six incisors belonging to the extinct division of hexaprotodon, a large ox (Bos namadicus), a deer and a bear. The living forms are represented by the buffalo (Bubalus namadicus), which is identical with the wild arnee from which the Indian domestic buffaloes have descended, and the gavial, or long-snouted Gangetic crocodile. This imperfect list, borrowed from Dr. Falconer,[272] shows that there is the same mixture of extinct with living forms in the valley of the Ganges, while the clays and gravels were being accumulated, as we have observed in the pleistocene deposits of Europe, and the fauna may therefore be referred to the pleistocene age, and probably, as Mr. Medlicott proposes, to the late division of that age. The exact correspondence of the quartzite implements with those which are so abundant in the European river-strata of the same age, adds additional weight to this conclusion.