Fig. 98.—Harpoon from Kent’s Hole (1/1). (Evans.)
Fig. 99.—Harpoon-head from Kent’s Hole (1/1). (Evans.)
(D.) The cave-earth rested on a compact, dark red breccia composed of angular fragments of limestone and pebbles of sandstone embedded in a sandy calcareous paste, identical in constitution with the fragments of the older breccia discovered in the cave-earth. It has furnished bones of bears, and four flint implements. The cave-earth, C, and the breccia, E, seem to stand to one another in an inverse ratio as regards thickness: where the former was thin, the latter was sometimes as much as twelve feet thick. From this relation, as well as from the imbedded fragments of the latter, it may be concluded that the former is the more modern, and that in the interval between their accumulation the latter had been, to a considerable extent, broken up.
Fig. 100.—Hammer-stone (1/2). (Evans.)
There is very good reason for the belief, that before any of the present cave-earth was introduced, Kent’s Hole had been filled nearly to the roof by an older cave accumulation, now represented by the undisturbed breccia and the included fragments. In a portion of the cave termed the “gallery,” there is a sheet of stalagmite, extending overhead from wall to wall, and constituting a ceiling that reaches from wall to wall, without further support than that offered by its own cohesion. Above it, in the limestone rock, there is a considerable alcove. This branch of the cavern, therefore, is divided into three stories or flats, that below the floor occupied with cave-earth, that between the floor and the ceiling entirely unoccupied, and that above the ceiling also without a deposit of any kind. For such a sheet of stalagmite to have been formed it is absolutely necessary for the cave to have been filled up to its level with materials of some kind, just as it is necessary for the formation of a film of ice that it should be crystallized from the surface of water. We may, therefore, infer that Kent’s Hole, like Brixham, was originally filled up to the level of the ceiling (see [Fig. 95], E), then that the contents were swept out, with the exception of the breccia, and lastly, that the present cave-earth was introduced. The occurrence of the remains of bear, and of flint implements, in this breccia also proves that man and bears were living in the district, while it was being accumulated, probably by the action of the floods to which, from time to time, the cave was subjected. All the flint implements in the breccia are of the ruder and larger form which is presented by those from the pleistocene deposits of the Somme, Seine, and the rivers of the south and east of England.
While engaged in the identification of the mammals in 1869, with Mr. W. A. Sanford, I detected splinters of bears’ canines, from the cave-earth, remarkable for their density, crystalline structure, and semi-conchoidal fracture, which were in the same mineral state as those from the older breccia. One of these had been fashioned into a flake after its mineralization, and presented an edge chipped by use. The tooth from which it was struck was, probably, imbedded and mineralized in the older breccia, then washed out of it, and afterwards chosen for the manufacture of an implement. It was already fossil and altered in structure in the palæolithic age.