The famous cave of Aurignac, near the town of that name, in the department of the Haute Garonne, was explored and described by the late M. Ed. Lartet, and his conclusions were adopted by Sir Charles Lyell in the first three editions of the “Antiquity of Man.” In the fourth edition,[167] however, the latter author, after a reconsideration of all the circumstances, qualifies his acceptance of the palæolithic age of the interments, and shares the doubts which have been expressed by Sir John Lubbock and Mr. John Evans. The evidence is as follows:—
M. Lartet’s account falls naturally into two parts: first, the story which he was told by the original discoverer of the cave; and, secondly, that in which the results of his own discoveries are described. We will begin with the first. In the year 1852, a labourer, named Bonnemaison, employed in mending the roads, put his hand into a rabbit-hole ([Fig. 70], f), and drew out a human bone, and having his curiosity excited, he dug down until, as his story goes, he came to a great slab of rock. Having removed this, he discovered on the other side a cavity seven or eight feet in height, ten in width, and seven in depth, almost full of human bones, which Dr. Amiel, the Mayor of Aurignac, who was a surgeon, believed to represent at least seventeen individuals. All these human remains were collected, and finally committed to the parish cemetery, where they rest to the present day, undisturbed by sacrilegious hands. Fortunately, however, Bonnemaison in digging his way into the grotto, had met with the remains of extinct animals, and works of art; and these were preserved until, in 1860, M. Lartet accidentally heard of the discovery, and investigated the circumstances on the spot. He found that Bonnemaison, and the sexton who had buried the human remains, had taken so little note of the place where they were interred, that it could not be identified, and on examining the cave he found that the interior had been ransacked, and the original stratification to a great extent disturbed. M. Lartet’s exploration showed that a stratum containing the remains of the cave-bear, lion, rhinoceros, hyæna, mammoth, bison, horse, and other animals, and palæolithic implements, like those of Périgord, extended from the plateau (d) outside into (b) the cave. On the outside he met with ashes, and burnt and split bones, which proved that it had been used as a feasting-place by the palæolithic hunters; within he detected no traces of charcoal, and no traces of the hyænas, which were abundant outside. Inside he met with a few human bones in the earth which Bonnemaison had disturbed, which were in the same mineral condition as those of the extinct animals, and he, therefore, inferred that they were of the same age. Such is the summary of the facts which M. Lartet discovered. He has, of his own personal knowledge, only proved that Aurignac was occupied by a tribe of hunters during the palæolithic age, and that it had been used as a burial-place.
Fig. 70.—Diagram of the Cave of Aurignac.
Is he further justified in concluding that the period of palæolithic occupation coincides with that in which the burial took place? Bonnemaison’s recollections may be estimated at their proper value by the significant fact, that, in the short space of eight years intervening between the discovery and the exploration, he had forgotten where the skeletons had been buried. And even if his account be true in the minutest detail, it does not afford a shadow of evidence in favour of the cave having been a place of sepulchre in palæolithic times, but merely that it had been so used at some time or another. If we turn to the diagram constructed by M. Lartet to illustrate his views (“Ann. des Sc. Nat. Zool.,” 4e sér., t. xv., pl. 10), and made for the most part from Bonnemaison’s recollections; or to the amended diagram ([Fig. 70]) given by Sir Charles Lyell (“Antiquity of Man,” 1st ed., Fig. 25), we shall see that the skeletons are depicted above the stratum (b) containing the palæolithic implements and pleistocene mammalia; and therefore, according to the laws of geological evidence, they must have been buried after the subjacent deposit was accumulated. The previous disturbance of the cave-earth does away with the conclusion, that the few human bones found by M. Lartet are of the same age as the extinct mammalia in the deposit. The absence of charcoal inside was quite as likely to be due to the fact that a fire kindled inside would fill the grotto with smoke, while outside the palæolithic savage could feast in comfort, as to the view that the ashes are those of funereal feasts in honour of the dead within, held after the slab had been placed at the entrance. The absence of the remains of hyænas from the interior is also negative evidence, disproved by subsequent examination.
The researches of the Rev. S. W. King, in 1865, complete the case against the current view of the palæolithic character of the interments, since they show that M. Lartet did not fully explore the cave, and that he consequently wrote without being in possession of all the facts. The entrance was blocked up, according to Bonnemaison, by a slab of stone, which, if the measurements of the entrance be correct, must have been at least nine feet long and seven feet high, placed, according to M. Lartet, to keep the hyænas from the corpses of the dead. It need hardly be remarked, that the access of these bone-eating animals to the cave would be altogether incompatible with the preservation of the human skeletons, had they been buried at the same time. The enormous slab was never seen by M. Lartet, and it did not keep out the hyænas. In the collection made by the Rev. S. W. King from the interior there are two hyænas’ teeth, and nearly all the antlers and bones bear the traces of the gnawing of these animals. The cave, moreover, has two entrances instead of one, as M. Lartet supposed when his paper in the “Annales” was published. The bones of the sheep, or goat, also obtained from the inside, and preserved in the Christy Museum, afford strong evidence that the interment is not palæolithic; and a fragment of pottery, agreeing exactly with that used in the neolithic age, probably indicates its relative antiquity. This conclusion has also been arrived at by the two most recent explorers, MM. Cartaillac and Gautier.
The skeletons, therefore, in the Aurignac cave cannot be taken to be of the same age as the stratum on which they rested; but, so far as there is any evidence, may probably be referred to the neolithic age, in which the custom of burial in caves prevailed throughout Europe.
Cavern of Bruniquel.
The famous cavern of Bruniquel, explored by the Vicomte de Lastic in 1863–4,[168] and described by Professor Owen, is also one of the class which has furnished human bones, along with the remains of the extinct mammalia. It penetrates a cliff in the Jurassic limestone, opposite the little village of Bruniquel (Tarn and Garonne), about forty feet above the level of the river Aveyron. The bottom was covered with a sheet of stalagmite, resting on earth and blocks of stone, for the most part finely cemented into a breccia, that is black with the particles of carbon constituting the “limon noir” of the workmen, four or five feet thick, beneath which is the “limon rouge,” or red earth without charcoal, from three to four feet thick. Every part of the breccia is charged with the broken remains of the wolf, rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, stag, Irish elk and bison, and palæolithic implements of flint and bone; some of the latter having well-executed designs of the heads of horses and reindeer, which prove that the cave had been used as a place of habitation by the hunters of those animals. Imbedded in the breccia at a depth of from three to five feet human bones were met with, and in two recesses several individuals, including a child, were found, one of which Professor Owen and the Vicomte de Lastic disinterred with sufficient care to prove that the body had been buried in the crouching posture. The only calvarium sufficiently perfect to allow of a comparison belonged to the dolicho-cephalic type, and was very fairly developed.
Professor Owen infers, from the intimate association of the human bones with the palæolithic implements and mammalia, that the cave of Bruniquel was used as a burial-place by the same people who had used it for habitation, and advances, in support of this, that the bones of man and of the animals are exactly in the same state of preservation, having lost the same amount of gelatine. The evidence, however, does not seem to be altogether conclusive. If the interment had been made after the palæolithic inhabitants had forsaken the cave, the association of the human bones with the refuse bones in their old refuse-heap must inevitably have taken place. And if, further, water charged with carbonate of lime percolated the mass, it would be converted into a hard breccia, and ultimately covered with a sheet of stalagmite. This calcification may have taken place in modern times. A modern bone, as Mr. Evans has observed in the case of Aurignac, may lose its gelatine in a comparatively short time, and become chemically identical with those which have been imbedded in the same matrix for long ages. The mineral condition, therefore, is an uncertain test of relative antiquity.