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

by William Boyd Dawkins

Fig. 30.—Skull of Woolly Rhinoceros, showing the part which is not eaten by the hyænas.

The last and most important addition to this fauna is that of man, a fragment of fibula in the same mineral condition as the rest of the pleistocene bones, having been identified by Professor Busk with an unusually massive recent human fibula. Although the fragment is very small, its comparison with the abnormal specimen in Professor Busk’s possession removes all doubt from my mind, as to its having belonged to a man, who was contemporary with the cave-hyæna and the other pleistocene animals found in the cave.

The probable Pre-glacial Age of the Pleistocene Stratum.

Is this occupation of the Victoria Cave by the pleistocene mammalia pre-glacial or post-glacial?—before, or after, the great lowering of the temperature in northern Europe? This difficult question can only be answered by an appeal to the physical history of the clay and cave-loam, and to the evidence as to glacial action in the district, and to the distribution of the mammalia in Great Britain during the pleistocene period. Glaciers have left their marks in nearly every part of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and especially in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Cave. The hill-sides around are studded with large ice-borne Silurian rocks; boulder-clay occupies nearly every hollow on the elevated plateaux; and moraines are to be observed in nearly every valley. At the entrance of the cave itself, ice-scratched Silurian grit-stones are imbedded in the clay, which abuts directly on the cave-loam, and passes insensibly into the clay, with angular blocks of limestone within the cave. They may possibly be the constituents of a lateral moraine in situ, as Mr. Tiddeman suggests, or they may merely be derived from the waste of boulder-clay which has dropped from a higher level.

The latter view seems to me to be most likely to be true, because some of the boulders have been deprived of the clay in which they were imbedded, and are piled on each other with empty space between them, the clay being carried down to a lower level and re-deposited. Their position, however, on the edges of the cave-earth implies, in any case, that they had been dropped after its accumulation.

There is another point to be considered in the physical evidence. The deposits above the cave-earth, occupying the interior and entrance of the cave, have been introduced by the rains, either through the entrance, or through the crevices which penetrate the roof, and consist of a finer detritus washed out of the boulder-clay on the surface at a higher level. The cave-earth, however, although it has been introduced in the same way, cannot be accounted for on the supposition that it was derived from the boulder-clay, with which it contrasts in the fact that it is a loam, of a reddish grey colour, containing a large percentage of carbonate and phosphate of lime.

Similar deposits, characterized by their red colour, are to be found in nearly all the caves of the south of England, in France, and southern Europe, not complicated, as here, by the glacial phenomena of the district. Had the layer been formed in the Victoria Cave, from the destruction of the boulder-clay, it would have been identical in composition with the deposits above.

The laminated portions of the grey clay are considered by Mr. Tiddeman to have been formed by the flow of water through the entrance, derived from the daily melting of the glacier which occupied the valley in ancient times, and he compares it with a similar lamination in the boulder-clay at Ingleton, which has been described by Mr. Binney in the neighbourhood of Clifton, near Manchester, under the expressive name of “book-leaves.” Since, however, similar accumulations are being formed at the present time at the bottom of pools in many caves, as, for example, in that of Ingleborough, they cannot be taken to imply a glacial origin. They are not found merely in one spot in the Victoria Cave, but are scattered, more or less, through the general mass of the clay, and occur abundantly even below the cave-earth, having been deposited in the interstices between the large blocks of limestone. In these positions they are of uncertain age, and there is no reason why some of the hollows which we discovered below the cave-earth ([Fig. 29], B) should not be filled with them at the present time by the heavy rains. They dip at all angles, and are conformable to the surfaces on which they have been dropped.

The most important argument in favour of the pre-glacial age of the mammaliferous cave-earth is afforded by the range of the animals in Great Britain during the time that certain areas were occupied by glaciers. In a paper read before the Geological Society in 1869, I showed that those areas in Great Britain in which the marks of glaciers were the freshest and most abundant coincided with those which were barren of the remains of the pleistocene mammalia, and I therefore inferred that this was due to the fact, that the areas in question were covered by ice at the time that pleistocene animals were so numerous in the caves, and river-deposits of southern and eastern England, and on the continent. In a map published in 1871, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and the greater portion of Yorkshire are represented as being one of these barren areas, in which no pleistocene mammalia have been observed. It is obvious that the hyænas, bears, mammoths, and other creatures found in the pleistocene stratum, could not have occupied the district when it was covered by ice; and had they lived soon after the retreat of the ice-sheet, their remains would occur in the river-gravels, from which they are absent throughout a large area to the north of a line drawn between Chester and York, whilst they occur abundantly in the glacial river deposits south of that line. On the other hand, they belong to a fauna, that overran Europe, and must have occupied this very region before the glacial period, since their remains have been found in pre-glacial strata to the north in Scotland, to the south at Selsea, and to the east in Norfolk and Suffolk. It may, therefore, reasonably be concluded that they occupied the cave in pre-glacial times, and that the stratum in which their remains lie buried, was protected from the grinding of the ice-sheet, which destroyed nearly all the surface accumulations in the river-valleys, by the walls and roof of rock, which has since, to a great extent, been weathered away.[76] This view is also held by Mr. Tiddeman.

The exploration of the Victoria Cave, which has hitherto yielded such interesting evidence of three distinct occupations—first by hyænas, then by neolithic men, and lastly by the Brit-Welsh, is by no means complete. The cave itself is of unknown depth and extent, and the mere removal of so much earth and clay as it is at present known to contain will be a labour of years. The results of the exploration, up to the present time, are of almost equal value to the archæologist, to the historian, and the geologist, and prove how close is the bond of union between three branches of human thought which at first sight appear remote from each other. The discussion of the problems connected with the neolithic and pleistocene strata must be referred to the [fifth] and following chapters.