Caveman

“ Lesson IV. Use this lesson to help the child get the meaning of the contrast between the crude implements that the cave-men used in securing food and in protecting themselves from their enemies, and the devices that we use for a similar purpose. In spite of the great contrasts that will be discovered, the child will find points of likeness between the implements of the cave-men, rude counterparts of which he can fashion for himself, and those that are still in use. ”

“ But the trees bore nuts and fruits, and such creatures as found food in nuts and fruits, and, later, such as loved rich herbage, came to the forest in great numbers, and then followed such as fed upon these again, all the flesh eaters, to whom man was, as any other living thing, to be seized upon and devoured. The promontory, so rich in game and nuts and fruits, was, at the same time, the most dangerous in all the region for human habitation. There were deep, dry caves within its limits, but in none of them had a cave man yet ventured to make his home. ”

“ The silvery water is one of the great curiosities of the cave: a man in a suitable dress plunges into it, and you seem to see a moving silver statue. The silvery flooring is formed of the most beautiful silvery-looking white sand, quite unlike anything I have ever seen, as indeed everything in the cave is. The bright blue light, reflected on your own dress and on everything within the cave, is most accurately described. One feels when in this grotto as if it was but the creation of some fairy’s hand, that would disappear and leave you to sober reality. ”

“ Our eyes were expanding to the twilight. We could make out the arch of the room, its shelves, and hollows, and niches. Lying on them we could discern the seals, hundreds and hundreds of them, all staring at us, all barking and bellowing. As we approached, they scrambled from their elevations, and, diving to the bottom, scurried to the entrance of the cave.
We lay on our oars for ten minutes. Then silence fell. There persisted a tiny drip, drip, drip from some point in the darkness. ”

“ Yet all had to be done by touch, in that abode of darkness and black, un-Christian deeds.
It was silent and eerie beyond telling in the cave. We heard the water lapping further and further from us as it retreated down the long passage. Now and then we seemed to catch a gliff of the noise of human voices. But again, when we listened, it seemed naught but the wind blowing every way through the passages and halls of the cave, or the echoed wing-beatings of the uncanny things that battened in the roofs and crevices of this murtherous cavern, unfathomed, unsounded, and obscure. ”

“ Lesson VIII. If the cave-men wanted to keep such trophies as teeth and claws of animals, it is evident that they would have to bore holes through them. To pierce bright and shining natural forms, fossil shells, etc., for beads, was an easy matter. To bore holes through such hard objects as the teeth and claws of wild animals taxed the cave-man’s ingenuity. The different devices for drilling represented in this lesson doubtless required ages for their development. ”

“ They have been of the greatest service, because in the early days of man, and before he knew enough to build his own habitation, he made the cave his home. You have heard of the 'cave man,' have you not? During the old stone period in England and other European countries, these caverns were the only abodes of man, and in them have been found layers from twenty to thirty feet thick, of successive accretions of bone, stalagmites and various articles of human manufacture. ”

“ CAVE DWELLERS. "We find a hunting and fishing race of cave-dwellers, in the remote pleistocene age, in possession of France, Belgium, Germany, and Britain, probably of the same stock as the Eskimos, living and forming part of a fauna in which northern and southern, living and extinct, species are strangely mingled with those now living in Europe. In the neolithic age caves were inhabited, and used for tombs, by men of the Iberian or Basque race, which is still represented by the small dark-haired peoples of Europe." ”

“ Only those who have lived three days without food can understand how delicious even those cast-off fish bones looked to me. I walked away from the mouth of the cave to be where I could not see the man eat. The daylight enabled me to explore the interior of the cave more thoroughly than I had been able to do before. From a crevice, far within, a tiny thread of water trickled down the rock. ”

“ We accordingly find evidences of devices to accomplish these ends associated with the earliest human remains. While the cave man was disputing food and shelter with the cave bear, the sabre-tooth tiger, and the mammoth in those places which are now the seats of the most advanced civilizations, he scratched or painted outline sketches of the animals he fought, and perhaps worshipped, on the wall of a cave or on the flat surface of a spreading antler or a piece of bone. ”

“ Intermingled with remains of the rhinoceros, cave-hyæna, great cave-tiger, cave-bear, and other extinct mammalia in unusual abundance, lay not only worked flints and the like traces of human art, but also numerous implements wrought from their bones; and subsequent investigations of ossiferous caves in various localities, by competent scientific explorers, guided by the accumulated knowledge and experience of upwards of thirty years, have given precision to the ideas already entertained of the coexistence of man with the extinct fauna of the caves. ”

“ There was one cave, an especial favourite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after day for weeks together. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep ivy-mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height; and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven bottom,—fretted into pot-like cavities, with large rounded pebbles in them,—unequivocal evidence that the excavating agent to which it owed its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. ”

“ Probably the reader has never lived in a cave and does not appreciate cave life—the crawling in at night, the long and gentle sleep on the soft grey sand, the crawling out again at morning, the washing in the river, the stick-collecting and kettle-boiling, the berry-gathering, the lazy hours of noon, the lying outstretched on the springy turf, sun-drinking, the wading in the river and the plashing of the rushing water over one's legs ”

“ Life Enters the Caverns
At the time the limestone beds were beginning to crack, which we noted was some 60,000,000 million years ago, the huge reptiles and other prehistoric animals were playing hide and seek on the surface above the site of the developing Caverns. At that time the cave hadn't yet been formed—the underground seepage of water was just beginning to find the crevices below the gypsum and rock salt and begin its erosion which was to continue slowly for so many centuries. ”

“ We are thus justified in concluding that the Cave-men are associated with the Arctic group of animals.16
We must now turn our attention to the culture of the Cave-men. We must reflect that long ages, with great changes of climate and life, both animal and vegetable, have rolled away since the remains of these early races were sealed by the stalagmite formation in caves. The relics at their best are but scanty memorials of a people long since passed, and we can not expect, can not hope, to recover more than a general outline. ”

“ A cave has lately been discovered in England, which contained prodigious quantities of them, where they were found of every age, and of which the soil presented even their excrements in a sufficient state of preservation to be easily recognised. It would appear that they had long lived there, and that it had been by them that the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, oxen, deer, and various animals of the class of glires, which are found along with them, and which bear evident marks of their teeth, had been dragged into the cave. ”

“ The caves were plainly becoming a necessity, as some persons had been killed on the street by fragments of shells. The room that I had so lately slept in had been struck by a fragment of a shell during the first night, and a large hole made in the ceiling. I shall never forget my extreme fear during the night, and my utter hopelessness of ever seeing the morning light. Terror stricken, we remained crouched in the cave, while shell after shell followed each other in quick succession. ”

“ So men, women, and children of this time were called Cave People.
They spent their days hunting some animals and running and hiding from others. They caught animals by trapping them in a pit covered over with bushes, or they killed them with a club or a rock if they had a chance, or with stone-headed arrows or hatchets. They even drew pictures of these animals on the walls of their caves, scratching the picture with a pointed stone, and some of these pictures we can still see to-day. ”

“ We have fallen too completely in the last century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. ”

“ The cave man, accustomed to run like the deer along the forest ways, or to avoid sudden danger by swift upward clambering and swinging along among treetops, was leaner and more muscular than the Shell man, and had in his countenance a more daring and confident expression. ”

“ There are four distinct strata in the cave. 1st, The surface is composed of dark earth, and contains medieval remains, Roman pottery and articles which prove that it was in use during the Iron, Bronze and Neolithic Ages. 2nd, Below this is a stalagmite floor, varying in thickness from 1 to 3 ft., and covering (3rd) the red earth, which contained bones of the hyena, lion, mammoth, rhinoceros and other animals, in association with flint implements and an engraved antler, which proved man to have been an inhabitant of the cavern during the time of its deposition. ”

“ But such decided differences cannot at present be traced; and inasmuch as the animal remains in the caverns under consideration have, almost without exception, been introduced into the caves by human agency, and been merely the refuse of the spoils of the chase consumed by the old cave-dwellers, we may readily conceive reasons why, without any great natural change in the fauna, the proportionate numbers of the different animals eaten during a certain number of years might vary in different caves. ”

“ The inhabitants of the caves and rock-shelters did not clean house every spring and fall, or, indeed, at any other time; the refuse and debris of the household were allowed to accumulate upon the floors of the caves and rock-shelters, and to this we owe nearly all the knowledge possessed by civilized man of the domestic arts, weapons, food, etc., and the general conditions under which the cave-men lived, as well as of the animals which were their contemporaries. ”

“ Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in which the corpse has lain. ”

“ All that day and the next they travelled, and on the morning of the third day they came to a place where were great black rocks, and hills all treeless and bare, and near the noon hour they saw a great cave in the mountainside, the floor of which was strewn with bones of animals, some of the bones indeed being great things as big as a man, from a creature of which the boys had never seen the like. These bones had been cracked for the marrow in them and the teeth marks told their tale of the size of the giant who had eaten them. ”

“ No one can doubt but that this deposit of cave earth itself requires a prolonged time for its accumulation.8 But this period, however prolonged, at length comes to an end. From some cause, both animals and man again abandoned the cave. Another vast cycle of years rolls away—a time expressed in thousands of years—during which nature again spread over the entombed remains a layer of stalagmite, in some places equal in thickness to the first formation. Above this layer we come to a bed of mold containing remains of the later Stone Age, of the Bronze, and even of the Iron Age. ”

“ Yes, men have lived, fought, and died in the great cave, and left their flint knives, their stone axes, and their bones to tell the tale. Women have lived and worked there; they left their necklaces, their anklets, their bone needles, their household pottery behind them. There have been feasts here, for amphoræ with traces of wine have been found. There were other caves—oh, many! sea caves and land caves; some “professors” say that the old name Calpe means caved mountain. Whether or not that is true, Scorp, of his own knowledge, assured us that the Rock is full of secret caverns. ”

“ We have seen that cave-hunting is not merely an adventurous amusement, but also a quest that brings us into a great laboratory, so to speak, in which we can see the natural agents at work that have carved out the valleys and gorges, and shaped the hills wherever the calcareous rocks are to be found. ”