Are the Palæolithic Aborigines of India related to those of Europe?
It is not a little remarkable that Dr. Falconer, writing in 1865 of the peculiar fauna of the Narbadá, should have held the view that man was living in India at that time, and that the memory of the hippopotamus was handed down in Aryan traditions, under the striking name of the water elephant. “After reflecting,” he writes, “on the question during many years in its palæontological and ethnological bearings, my leaning is to the view that Hippopotamus namadicus was extinct in India long before the Aryan invasion, but that it was familiar to the earlier indigenous races.” (ii. p. 644.) This inference is proved to be literally true by the discovery of the palæolithic implements in the ossiferous strata of the Narbadá, which must have required long ages for their accumulation and subsequent erosion.
We may, therefore, conclude that palæolithic man inhabited both Europe and India in the pleistocene age. And possibly the identity of the implements, in these two remote regions, may be accounted for in the same manner as the identity of Aryan root-words, by the view that their fabricators may have come from the same centre of dispersal, by the same routes as those which were subsequently used by the pre-Aryan, and Aryan, invaders of Europe and India. But whether this be accepted or not, it cannot be denied that the man who inhabited both these regions was in the same rude stage of human progress, and played his part in the same life-era.
Palæolithic Man lived in Palestine.
The discovery, by the Abbé Richard,[273] of a palæolithic flint implement, of the ordinary river-bed type, on the surface of a stratum of gravel between Mount Tabor and the lake of Tiberias, lends great weight to the view that the Aborigines of India and Europe, whose implements are found in the deposits of rivers, migrated from the same centre, since it bridges over the great interval of space by which they were isolated. It is very probable, that future discoveries may reveal the presence of a tolerably uniform priscan population, in the pleistocene age, throughout this vast area: which as yet has only been explored by archæologists in a few isolated points, with the important results recorded in the preceding pages.
Conclusion.
It now remains for us to sum up the results of the exploration of European caves, of which an imperfect outline has been given in this work. Their formation, and filling up, have an important bearing on the physical geography of the districts in which they occur, and reveal the great changes which are going on, in the calcareous rocks, at the present time. The study of the remains which they contain has led to the recognition of the fact, that the climate and geography of Europe, in ancient times, were altogether different from those of the present day.
It has also made large additions to the history of the sojourn of man in Europe. We find a hunting and fishing race of cave-dwellers, in the remote pleistocene age, in possession of France, Belgium, Germany, and Britain, probably of the same stock as the Eskimos, living and forming part of a fauna, in which northern and southern, living and extinct, species are strangely mingled with those now living in Europe. In the neolithic age caves were inhabited, and used for tombs, by men of the Iberian or Basque race, which is still represented by the small, dark-haired, peoples of western Europe. They were rarely used in the bronze age. When we arrive within the borders of history in Britain, we find them offering shelter to the Brit-Welsh flying from their enemies after the ruin of the Roman empire, and throwing great light on the fragmentary records of those obscure times. In treating of these questions, it has been necessary to discuss problems of deep and varied interest to the ethnologist, physicist, and historian, some of which have been partially solved, while others await the light of the higher knowledge which will be the fruit of a wider experience.