There is no evidence of Spain having been peopled from northern Africa, the identity of the Berber and Kabyle with the Basque being due to their being descended from the same non-Aryan stock in possession of southern and western Europe, and northern Africa. They are to be looked upon as cousins rather than as connected by descent in a right line.
The Basque race was probably in possession of Europe for a long series of ages, before hordes either identical or cognate with the Celts gradually crept westward over Germany into Gaul, Spain, and Britain, driving away, or absorbing, the inhabitants of the regions which they conquered.
CHAPTER VII.
CAVES CONTAINING HUMAN REMAINS OF DOUBTFUL AGE.
The Caves of Paviland.—Engis.—Trou du Frontal.—Gendron.—Neanderthal.—Gailenreuth.—Aurignac.—Bruniquel.—Cro-Magnon.— Lombrive.—Cavillon, near Mentone.—Grotta dei Colombi in Island of Palmaria, inhabited by Cannibals.—General Conclusions.
There are many prehistoric caves in Britain and on the Continent which do not contain remains sufficiently characteristic to fix the date of their use, either for occupation or burial, unless the term neolithic be understood to cover the wide interval between the palæolithic stage of the pleistocene on the one hand, and the bronze age on the other.
The Paviland Cave.
The Cave of Goat’s Hole[155] at Paviland, in Glamorganshire, explored by Dr. Buckland in 1823, offers an instance of an interment having been made in a pre-existent deposit of the pleistocene age. It consists of a chamber facing to the sea, in a cliff of limestone 100 feet high, at a level of from 30 to 40 feet above the high-water mark. Its floor was composed of red loam, containing the remains of the woolly-rhinoceros, hyæna, cave-bear, and mammoth. Close to a skull with tusks of the last animal a human skeleton (equalling in size the largest male skeleton in the Oxford Museum) was discovered; and in the soil, “which had apparently been disturbed by ancient diggings,” were fragments of charcoal, a small chipped flint, and the sea-shells of the neighbouring shore. Certain small ivory ornaments, found close to the skeleton, are considered by Dr. Buckland to have been carved out of the tusks of the mammoth near which they rested; and he justly remarks that, “as they must have been cut to their present shape at a time when the ivory was hard, and not crumbling to pieces, as it is at present at the slightest touch, we may from this circumstance assume for them a high antiquity.”
May we not also infer, from the fact of the manufactured ivory and the tusks from which it was cut being in precisely the same state of decomposition, that the tusks were preserved from decay, during the pleistocene times, by precisely the same agency as those now found perfect in the polar regions—namely, the intense cold; that after the skull of the mammoth had been buried in the cave, the tusks, thus preserved, were used for the manufacture of ornaments; and that, at some time subsequent to the interment of the ornaments with the corpse, a climatal change has taken place, by which the temperature in England, France, and Germany has been raised, and the ivory became decomposed that up to that time had preserved its gelatine? On this point it is worthy of remark that fossil tusks have been discovered in Scotland sufficiently perfect to be used as ivory. The ornaments may, however, not have been made from the fossil tusks.