William Boyd Dawkins

“ Caves have excited the awe and wonder of mankind in all ages, and have been the centres round which have clustered many legends and superstitions. They were the abode of the sibyls and the nymphs in Roman mythology, and in Greece they were the temples of Zeus, Pan, Dionysus, Pluto and the Moon, as well as the places where the oracles were delivered at Delphi, Corinth and Mount Cithaeron. ”

“ It is a magnificent trophy of the chase, buried along with the hunter in the floor of his dwelling, which proves that human art was more than a master for the claws and teeth of the most formidable beasts of prey—the lion and the cave-bear—then living in the southwest of France. The broken and burned bones on the floor point to the fact that reindeer, horses, bisons, and stags were then abundant in the neighborhood. ”

“ But we have no proof that cannibalism was universally practised at any stage in the history of man. All the caves of Europe, explored up to the present time, merely afford some three or four examples in the neolithic and bronze ages. In the pleistocene there is no instance which is devoid of doubt. This atrocious practice is therefore to be viewed as abnormal, and it probably became ingrafted into the religious ideas of the nations of antiquity from the horror by which it was surrounded, ultimately surviving in the form of human sacrifices to the offended gods. ”

“ If, however, we accept the evidence advanced in favour of Meiocene man, it is incredible that he alone of all the mammalia living in those times in Europe should not have perished, or have changed into some other form in the long lapse of ages during which many Meiocene genera and all the Meiocene species have become extinct. Those who believe in the doctrine of evolution will see the full force of this argument against the presence of man in the Meiocene fauna, not merely of Europe but of the whole world. ”

“ At the close of the Pleistocene age the great extension of Europe to the west sank beneath the Atlantic, and the North Sea and the English Channel flowed over the hunting-grounds of the lion, and formed "the silver streak" of which we have so much reason to be proud. A change in the wild animals accompanied, as it always does, the change in geography; some animals became extinct, such as the mammoth, while others retreated to more congenial districts, and among them the lion. ”

“ To suppose that a savage would take the trouble to excavate a trench twenty-four feet long—for twelve feet of the former mouth of the cave had been cut away—with miserable implements, and consequently with great labour, and having excavated it again to fill it up to the very roof, is little less than absurd. Nor could such an operation take place in such a deposit, without the stratification of the layers being destroyed. The absence of pottery and human bones precludes the idea of the cave ever having been a place of sepulture, such as Aurignac or Bruniquel. ”

“ For purposes of geological classification over wide areas an appeal to the purely local phenomena of glacier or iceberg is useless, because they tell us nothing as to the contemporary fauna and flora, by which alone all geological periods have hitherto been determined. I am unable, therefore, to agree with Dr. James Geikie in treating the Pleistocene period as the equivalent of "the Ice age." It is foreign to the plan of this work to discuss the much debated cause of the Glacial period, as the lowering of the temperature in the Pleistocene age is frequently termed. ”

“ It will be necessary before we examine the group of caves used by man in prehistoric times, to point out the important difference in the measurement of time within and beyond the borders of history. When we speak, for example, of the date of the Norman Conquest, we imply that we can ascertain by historical records, not merely that it succeeded the invasion of Britain by the English or Danes, and happened before our own time, but that the interval which separates it from those events can be accurately measured by the unit of years. ”

“ Under favourable conditions of life there is every reason to believe that it would in like manner have become wild in Europe. The enormous abundance of its remains in the Neolithic pile-dwellings, coupled with the pig-sties, and stores of acorns and beech-nuts found at Robenhausen, where no other breed of swine has been discovered, seem to me good evidence that it was introduced into Europe as a domestic animal. ”

“ The events with which we are dealing—the conditions of life when the lion first appeared in Britain—are so far removed from the earliest records that we can not form an idea of the interval separating them from our own time. It must, however, have been very great to allow of the changes in climate and geography, and in the wild animals of Europe, as well as of the succession of the various races and the development of civilization, which, so far as our experience goes, could not have been swift. ”

“ It is a singular fact that no fissures or caves should, with the above exception, contain the remains of animals of a date before the Pleistocene age. There can be but little doubt that they were used as places of shelter in all ages, and they must have entombed the remains of the animals that fell into them, or were swept into them by the streams. Caves there must have been long before, and the Eocene Palæotheres, and Anoplotheres met their death in the open pit-falls, just as the sheep and cattle do at the present time. ”

“ The tomb was, to the Neolithic mind, as truly the habitation of the spirits of the dead as the hut was that of the living. It was the home of the dead chieftain, and the centre into which the members of the family or clan were gradually gathered, and where they led a joyous and happy life similar to that which they enjoyed on the earth. ”

“ It is not more strange that the lion of the Old World should be found in the New, than that the musk-sheep, now only alive in the Arctic regions of North America and Greenland, should have ranged through Siberia into Europe as far to the southwest as the Pyrenees. ”

“ At the frontier of history, in each country, we find that the dwellers were acquainted with the use of iron, and had found it to be the most convenient material for the manufacture of cutting weapons and implements. Before this the voice of tradition points out that bronze was the only material used for these purposes, and stone before bronze. These three stages of human culture, or the ages of iron, bronze, and stone, have been fully verified by investigations which have been made in various parts of Europe, into the prehistoric habitations and burial-places of man. ”

“ The River-drift man first comes before us, endowed with all human attributes, and without any signs of a closer alliance with the lower animals than is presented by the savages of to-day; as a hunter, armed with rude stone implements, living not merely in Britain but throughout western and southern Europe, northern Africa, Asia Minor, and India. ”

“ New conditions of life were produced by these changes, so unfavourable for the Secondary animals, that all the higher forms perished that were unable to compete in the struggle for life with the new invaders, whose presence marks the Eocene period. The invasion of Europe by the placental mammals is the great event which is the natural starting-point for our enquiry into the ancient history of man, since the conditions by which he was surrounded on his arrival in Europe, form part of a continuous sequence of changes, from that remote period down to the present day. ”

“ And since those which are extinct, or which have migrated, could not have lived where their remains are found under the present conditions of life, an inquiry into their history leads us into the general question of the ancient European climate and geography. It is obvious, for example, that the spotted hyæna, which formerly inhabited the caves of Sicily, could not have crossed over to that island after it was separated from Africa and Italy; and it would be impossible for the musk-sheep, the most arctic of the herbivora, to live as far south as Auvergne under the present climatal conditions. ”

“ They prove that the earth as a whole has passed through a series of biological changes, analogous to those which are to be seen in the animal world in the passage from birth to old age. They may be accounted for on the theory of evolution of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, that while the conditions of life were ever changing, those animals and plants which were not sufficiently plastic to conform to a new state of things died out, while those which were more capable of modification, so as to be in harmony with their surroundings, became what we know as new species, genera, families, orders. ”

“ The caves have contributed but very little to our knowledge of the bronze-folk in any part of Europe. Examples, such as those given above, are scattered through France and Spain, but they are not sufficiently important to require notice. We could not expect that men, in the high state of civilization implied by the beautiful jewellery and ornaments which are distinctive of the bronze-folk, would have chosen the wild, half-savage life which is involved in cave-habitation. ”

“ Instead of the wanderer dependent on the chase, we have to deal with the dweller in fixed habitations, and with those social conditions which follow from men being massed together in various centres for the common good. We have to chronicle in the Prehistoric period the changes wrought in Europe by the invasion of new peoples, and the appearance of new civilisations—changes similar to those which are now rapidly causing the hunters of the bison in the far west to disappear before the advance of the English colonist. ”

“ The caves in the mountain limestone of Yorkshire rival in size those of Carniola, or those of Greece, and they are to be seen in all stages of formation. In their gloomy recesses all the higher qualities of a mountaineer may be exercised, and there is sufficient danger to give a keen zest to their exploration. The mountain streams sometimes plunge into a yawning chasm, locally known as a pot, and at others emerge from the dark portals of a cave in full current. There is, perhaps, no place in the world where the subterranean circulation of water may be studied with better advantage. ”

“ The great mineral riches and natural fertility of the country caused a trade to spring up, and, as in the case of most of our colonies, the trade was rapidly followed by supremacy, which, if the Romans had been conquered, would have turned the Iberian peninsula into a Carthaginian province, and might have resulted in Carthage becoming the mistress of the world. The silver enabled them to make that metal a standard of value, and thus gave enormous facilities for traffic, while the tin and the copper gave them the materials for making bronze, used so largely in the Mediterranean trade. ”

“ Thus, in this district, close to the centre of the dominion of ancient Etruria, we have the two metals side by side, which enabled the Etruskans to become the famous bronze merchants and metal-workers which they were at the dawn of history in Italy. There is no longer any reason for supposing that the civilised Mediterranean peoples were dependent on the mines of Spain and Britain for a supply of bronze. ”

“ It is not likely that so large an animal could have survived in Britain into the Historic period in a wild state, because its creamy- white colour would make it conspicuous to its enemies, and render concealment impossible in so densely-populated an island as Britain. These large cattle are distributed throughout every part of Britain conquered by the English, while the Celtic short-horn only survives in those parts in which the British had taken refuge. ”

“ If we could in imagination take our stand on the summit of a hill commanding an extensive view, in almost any part of Great Britain or Ireland in the Neolithic period, we should look upon a landscape somewhat of this kind. Thin lines of smoke rising from among the trees of the dense virgin forest at our feet would mark the position of the Neolithic homesteads, and of the neighbouring stockaded camp which afforded refuge in time of need ”

“ The tall, round- or broad-headed Celts described in the last chapter, composing the van of the great Aryan army, ultimately destined to rule the west, brought with them the knowledge of bronze into Britain, and are proved to have conquered nearly every part of the British Isles, by their tombs scattered over the face of the country, alike in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The conquered peoples survived probably in a state of slavery, and were only preserved from absorption in the west,—where farther retreat was forbidden by the waters of the ocean. ”

“ It is remarkable that the seeds of the wild plants found in the lake-dwellings are absolutely identical with those of the present time; while the seeds of the plants under cultivation have been improved by the care of man in the many centuries which separate the Neolithic age from our own times.
It is therefore evident that in the fields, gardens, and orchards the pile-dwellers possessed vegetables not traceable to wild stocks now growing in Switzerland; and it is certain, from the researches of Professor Heer, that the foreign stocks have been derived from Southern Europe or from Asia Minor. ”