In the winter of 1908-09 a very interesting discovery was announced in the daily newspapers—the discovery of a human skull and some bones buried in a cave called the Grotto of the Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the central department of France, known as the CorrÈze, not very far from Perigueux, in the Dordogne. An account was given of this discovery by Professor Marcelin Boule, of the Paris Museum, to the AcadÉmie des Sciences, and the description of the bones, which had been carefully pieced together, and were exhibited to the meeting of the Academy, was sent by him to me (see Fig. 65). Some exaggerated statements as to the monkey-like character of the race to which these bones belonged (exaggerated, but not altogether devoid of truth) were circulated by imaginative correspondents in the newspapers. It is the fact that these human remains are of enormous antiquity, and belong to a very peculiar and primitive race known as the Neander Men, so called because a skull and some bones of this same race were found fifty years ago in a cave in the Neander valley,[7] near Elberfeld, on the Rhine.

The French archÆologists, or “prehistorians,” as we now call them—are the leading discoverers in all that relates to very early man. The caves in Central and Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) and the gravels in the north have furnished the most wonderful and interesting evidences of the existence of human beings at an immensely remote period in this part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors of French nationality have discovered, preserved, and described the weapons, carvings, and drawings made by the old cave-dwellers of Southern France, buried by the accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where the human artists who made these things used to live. In England only two such caves containing the implements of prehistoric men have been found—whilst a few are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland.

Although we know an immense number of the flint instruments, bone harpoons, and carvings and drawings of the ancient cave-dwellers, yet skulls and bones of the men themselves are extremely rare. Bones, skulls, and teeth of the animals they killed and ate are abundant in the caves—such as those of great bulls, deer, and horses. The bones also of animals which lived in these caves and contended with the ancient men for the possession of the shelter afforded by them, are abundant: bones of hyÆna, of bear, of lion, and wolf. But human bones are exceedingly rare. This arises partly from the fact that human bones are not so thick and strong as those of large animals, and more easily soften, break up, and are lost. It is also due partly to the fact that the men were not nearly so numerous as the wild animals; but it is chiefly due to the fact that these people usually, but not always, buried their dead in the open; and whilst the bones of animals which had been eaten were left about in heaps on the floor of the caves, and became cemented together by the petrifying deposit caused by water dripping from the walls of these limestone caverns or by streams actually flooding the caverns, the bodies of the men themselves were removed when they died by their friends and families, and buried in the open ground, where they have gradually dissolved and broken up. Only a few here and there of the more ancient races were buried in a cave, and are in consequence preserved until the present day. Obviously, it would only be an exceptional honour or superstition which would cause the giving up of a cave to the interment of a dead body, or only rarely that a corpse could be tolerated in the floor of the cave still inhabited by living men.

It is a mistake to suppose that all the bones of all the men and animals which have lived on the earth’s surface are naturally and as a matter of course permanent enduring things. On the contrary, when they are buried in soil or sand permeated by water, they slowly soften and decay, dissolve and disappear. When washed into streams and rivers or into the sea, they break up and dissolve. No bones were dredged up from the floor of the ocean by the explorers of the Challenger expedition. A bone sunk in the sea gradually dissolves. Only those bones (and the same is true of shells) are permanently preserved which happen to get into certain favourable positions, embedded in clay or hard deposit, which is not disturbed, and becomes slowly raised up and free from soaking water before the bone is dissolved; or, again, those which have been protected in the accumulated deposits of the floor of a cavern covered in by layers of hard calcareous slab or stalagmite, which usually is formed by the water dripping from the limestone roof and walls. The limestone is dissolved like sugar, and is deposited when the water evaporates—“petrifying” the floor of the cave. It is owing to this rarity of the natural preservation of bones that we never find more than a few of those of extinct animals of various degrees of antiquity, and never more than a very few of those of the ancient men who lived in caverns and made “flint implements.”

As a preliminary to dealing below with the story of “the Neander Men”—to which race the newly-found skull and bones from the CorrÈze belong—it will help to make the importance of that skeleton obvious if I very briefly and dogmatically state what are the great periods in the prehistoric record of man, and the probable distance in time from us of those periods. It must be remembered that what I have to say applies only to the “prehistoric history” of man in Western Europe and the Mediterranean region, for it is only this part of the world which has been sufficiently carefully examined to yield any definite conclusions. Let us suppose that we can travel back through the ages, and proceed to do so. We find that there are three well-marked successive periods in Europe—which are called the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and the Stone Age. When we go back to Julius CÆsar conquering Gaul and parts of Germany and Britain, we find that the Romans had steel swords, and freely made use of that metal for a variety of tools and constructive purposes. The Gauls and Belgi and Allemanni and Britons were still in the Bronze Age; they had beautifully made bronze swords and daggers and helmets and shields, which were weaker and softer than those of iron used by the Romans. The use of iron was soon spread by the conquerors, and the rest of Europe entered on the Iron Age. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England they had iron weapons. At what date precisely the Romans themselves took to the use of iron is not known, probably they learnt its use from the peoples of Africa; but at no distant date, a few hundred years before Christ, they, too, and the Greeks were in the Bronze Age. In Western Europe we see the Bronze Age, as we travel back in time, disappearing, and we come to the Stone Age, about 2000 B.C. Copper was used at the later stage of the Stone Age, and then the alloy with tin, which is called “bronze.” At the time that the big stones of Stonehenge were set up (the smaller stones of the outer circle are more ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, and the Bronze Age coming in.

Everywhere, but not always within the same thousand years or so, we see as we go still farther back, the use of metal giving place to the use of stone. In Europe we see a highly-developed material civilisation from three to seven thousand years ago. The people till the land, sow crops, keep herds, build houses (of wood), make pottery, combs for the hair, necklaces of amber and of shells, and other ornaments, but they have no metal weapons or implements. They sometimes use native gold to make decorative ornaments; but their knives, daggers, swords, saws, and hammers are all of stone, either flint or dense greenstone. We reach this purely Stone Age in Europe at 2000 B.C.; in Egypt we do not get back to it so soon, but, about 5000 B.C., we there come upon a pre-Pharaonic population which made use of beautifully-finished stone knives in place of metal. The first people we come upon in Europe as we pass from the Bronze to the Stone Age had a great deal of skill and an elaborate social organisation. Their stone weapons were beautifully chipped and often highly polished (Figs. 66 and 67). We find the slabs of grit upon which they rubbed the chipped flint adzes in order to make them smooth. But soon we find, as we go back, that polishing is unknown, and that the chipped flint adzes are used in a rough state. On entering the Stone Age we find that we are only on the fringe of an immense period of “stone-weaponed humanity,” extending back for tens of thousands of generations of men, when stone (and in Europe especially, that stone which we call “flint”) was the one great stand-by of the human race—the one hard cutting material which man learnt to shape and apply to his own purposes—so as to make holes with it, saw with it, scrape with it, cut with it, kill with it. On account of its prodigious range in time it is found necessary to divide the Stone Age into two periods—a later, called the “Neolithic” (the new stone period), and an older, stretching back until the traces of it are lost in geologic changes of the earth, which is called the “PalÆolithic” (the old stone period).

Thus if we start on a time-journey to explore the earliest traces of man in Europe, we pass along the centuries back, through the Iron and the Bronze Ages of humanity, and arrive at the vast Stone Age, which stretches away into the obscurity of more than a hundred thousand, probably of many hundred thousand, years. The later or newer fringe of the Stone Age is called the “Neolithic,” or newer Stone Age, or Age of Polished Stone, because the men of that period polished their stone implements after chipping them into shape. That which we dimly see beyond is the “PalÆolithic,” or older period of “stone-weaponed” humanity, when polishing was unknown.

The Neolithic civilisation comprised the Swiss and Glastonbury lake-dwellers, who built houses on piles in the water: also the makers of the kitchen-middens of Denmark, and the builders of the great stone avenues, circles, and cromlechs, and the elevators of the solitary big stones called “menhirs”—most of them rougher and probably two thousand or three thousand years older than the big stones of Stonehenge. Our journey has now brought us into the full darkness of prehistoric times. We cannot tell how far back this “Neolithic” period reaches, but there are things found which make it certain that it reaches to 7000 B.C., and probably a good deal farther. We are now far in time behind the most ancient Greeks and the more ancient Egyptians. Europe is a rich, moist pasture-land, peat bogs are abundant and luxuriant woodlands; the climate is mild; the wild animals are those which to-day inhabit Central Europe, but more abundant. The domesticated animals kept by the men are those which we have to-day, and many of the crops and cultivated plants are those of our own time, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye. We know also by their remains that the Neolithic men fed on chestnuts, hazel nuts, walnuts, plums, apples, pears, and strawberries, and cultivated the vine, the pale opium-poppy, and the narrow-leaved flax. Hemp was not known to them.

As we push back still farther into the night of antiquity—we cannot say at how many thousand years from to-day, whether ten, twenty, or fifty thousand—the climate becomes very cold, the glaciers extend far down the valleys, and we note that the level of sea and land has changed. Great Britain and Ireland are part of the Continent of Europe. There are strange animals in the south of what was England, and there, as well as in France, reindeer abound, wild horses, the bison, the Siberian saiga antelope, the great ox, bears, gluttons, and wolves; and there are men living in caves—the natural caverns which form in limestone rock. These men are chipping flints (but do not polish them) and carving bones, but now have no herds, nor cultivated fields, nor pottery (some very rough fragments have been found), nor buildings, nor earthworks. They are like some modern savages, Nature’s gentlemen, “who toil not, neither do they spin,” but they hunt and fish. They live entirely on the produce of the chase and on fish, wild fruits, and roots.

They wear undressed skins and furs, and paint or tattoo their faces. They make twisted ropes (probably of skin) which they fix as a halter round the head and jaw of the wild horse, as shown by their own carvings (Figs. 8 and 9). Probably they ride him. They certainly eat him. At SolutrÉ, near MÂcon, the bones of no less than a hundred thousand horses were found piled up as a sort of kitchen-midden round a camp of PalÆolithic men! They have the art of making fire, and have a wonderful artistic skill in carving and drawing on bone and ivory and on stones, and in painting on the walls of their caves, the animals which surround them and are hunted by them (Fig. 71). They make great numbers of carved harpoons or toothed spear-heads (Fig. 68) from bone, and also needles for sewing skins; whilst from flint they chip spear-heads, knives, hand-hatchets, and saws. They decorate their carvings with spirals, lozenges, and circles cut in low relief (Fig. 69). But their truly astonishing skill and mental development is shown in their carvings and engravings of animals and fish (Fig. 70), which are executed either on bones or stones, or on pieces of the ivory of the mammoth. Besides the reindeer, horses, goats, saiga antelope, rhinoceros, mammoth, and seal, their carvings include statuettes and drawings of men and women (Fig. 7).

At the best period some of these carvings show a mastery of the material, a directness and a simplicity and beauty of essential line, together with true observation of characteristic form, which separate these works from those of the ordinary savage of modern times, and have caused living artists of authority to declare that these craftsmen had those definite gifts which entitle them to be recognised as brother artists—an assurance which confirms my own impression based on a long study of large series of the actual specimens. The best works of their later period (for their skill took time to develop, and follows the laws of growth of all art) represent animals, such as deer, in movement and often turning round or foreshortened (Fig. 70); some of their carvings of horses’ heads are worthy of the Parthenon (Fig. 9). On the other hand, as is often observed in primitive art, their representations of the human face and figure are very inferior, and tend to caricature.

We are now in the PalÆolithic period, and, what is more, we have quitted what geologists call the recent or modern epoch, and have entered on “geologic” times; this is the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is a legitimate and useful thing thus to draw a strong line between the Neolithic and the PalÆolithic portions of the Stone Age. The Neolithic men belong, so to speak, to our own days. They were, even seven thousand years ago, only a little rougher in their tools than were the peasants of the remoter parts of Central Europe a few hundred years ago. They had not even as much tendency to or gift for artistic work as the ploughmen of our own days, and have left none behind them. Excepting that they used stone axes and knives instead of steel ones, they really led the life of mediÆval country-folk. But once you pass them in your journey backwards—once you enter the Pleistocene circle—you find that climate, land surface, animals, plants, mode of life are as utterly changed as were you suddenly transferred from the English countryside to Terra del Fuego or to an Eskimo village. The PalÆolithic men and their whole surroundings and arts of life have no touch of familiarity for the modern inhabitants of Europe.

When we explore this PalÆolithic, Pleistocene, or Quaternary epoch—the last of the geologists’ long series of epochs and deposits—we find that it represents by no means a trivial episode in the world’s long change. It is true that compared to geologic periods which follow on below it—namely, the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene of the Tertiary, the Chalk and the vast ages below that white sea-sediment, indicated by the sixty thousand feet of stratified rock (Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, Cambrian!), the Pleistocene exhibits but a small thickness of deposit (amounting to but two or three hundred feet of sand and gravel) as its contribution to the earth’s crust.

Yet, on account of the nearness to our own times of the events which took place in the Pleistocene period, geologists and prehistorians have studied its details with minute care, and have accumulated an immense array of facts and specimens by digging and carefully collecting in Western and Central Europe. They have divided up this Pleistocene period and the deposits in river-valley and cave which have occurred within its limits into three great consecutive ages. These are distinguished from one another by the distinctive wild animals which flourished in each, by the climate which is indicated, and by the progressive development of the art and workmanship of the PalÆolithic men discovered in successive layers of deposit. Let me here refer the reader to the tabular statement on page 384 bis.

These ages of the Pleistocene are:—No. 1. The Upper or Post-Glacial Pleistocene, or Epoch of the Reindeer. The climate was cold and dry, like that of the Russian steppes. The contents of the celebrated cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, and the upper layers of deposit in a whole series of caves (including Kent’s Cavern and the Creswell Cave in England) belong to this age. This was the period in which the caves were inhabited by the artistic race “who came no one knows whence, and went no one knows whither,” accompanied by the reindeer. Before them there was no carving in the caves, or only very rough work, and we are justified in concluding that the men who inhabited the caves before this period belonged to a totally distinct and inferior race. The “Reindeer Men” must have developed their art by gradual steps before they arrived in the caves of Western Europe—where we do not know. At the end of this period the climate became much milder, and the red deer of our own day took the place of the reindeer, during a long transition in which the “Reindeer Men” and their art disappeared, and the pastoral, land-tilling, stone-building, pottery-making communities of the Neolithic Age came into existence, showing no trace of the art of their predecessors. The mammoth and rhinoceros, bison, and aurochs, and, in fact, all the commoner animals of an earlier period were present nearly all through the Reindeer period (they disappear in the late “transition period” of the red deer, called “Azilian”), and were known to the “Reindeer Men,” but great herds of reindeer and of horses occupied the grassy lands in this age, which were not abundant previously. These herds probably were to some extent protected by the men, whilst the lion, bear, hyÆna, mammoths, and rhinoceroses were diminishing in number, and were kept at a distance.

The next lower division of the Pleistocene is No. 2, the Middle Pleistocene or Last Glacial Age, or better, the Epoch of the Mammoth. The climate was cold and humid. For the third and last time great glaciers existed over the whole of Northern Europe, and only bits of the south of England and the central and southern parts of France were free from the ice-covering, and carried a rich vegetation. Deeper deposits in caves are of this age, and also much of the river gravels of the lower terraces of English and French rivers. By the French it is often called the Moustierian period, because it is well seen in the rich deposits of the caves and plateau of Le Moustier, on the river VezÈre (an affluent of the Dordogne), which contain bones of mammoth and rhinoceros, and flint implements of a special form (Fig. 72), but no carvings or artistic work. HyÆnas made some of the caverns into their dens, and the cave-lion and the cave-bear were there too. The men of this period actually contested with these carnivors for the possession of the caves, and made great fires to keep out wild beasts, as well as to grill the meat on which they fed. They were of an inferior race to the Reindeer Men, and had not such command of the situation as their successors. We find their remains, their flint weapons, and in rare cases their own bones as well as the bones of the mammoth and hairy rhinoceros (on which they fed), and the bones of their competitors, the hyÆnas, bears, and lions, in the deeper deposits of some caves, underlying, and separated often by calcareous deposit from, the layers which belong to the subsequent and prosperous days of the Reindeer Men. Most striking is the fact that in the layers of deposit of this older age, there are no works of art nor any implements carved from bone or ivory. These earlier men, devoid of art and living at a low level of savagery, were the Neander Men. It is in this layer and under these conditions that the few broken skulls, agreeing in shape and character with that of the Neander Valley, have been found.

Lastly we come to division No. 3, the Lower Pleistocene, or Epoch of the Hippopotamus. The later climate of this age was mild. It came between two glacial periods, owing to the retreat of the glaciers, which had earlier increased in extent so as to produce the second Great Glacial period. The hippopotamus swam in the Thames and Severn in those days, and left its bones and teeth in the older gravels of those and other European rivers, where we now find them. The big almond-shaped and leaf-shaped flint implements of the English (Fig. 73) and French gravels (Fig. 74) belong to this period. We have no knowledge whatever of the men who made them.[8] The mammoth was not there, but another species of elephant (E. antiquus) and a peculiar rhinoceros (R. merckii). The deepest and oldest deposits in some caves belong to this age, as well as the high-lying gravels of St. Acheuil, of many English river-valleys, and of Chelles on the Seine. This period is not represented by much deposit in caves, though some caves contain very deep-lying layers enclosing bones or teeth of the animals characterising this period.

Older than the Age of the Hippopotamus are deposits which are reckoned by geologists as “Pliocene”—no longer Pleistocene—and are called “Tertiary,” not “Quaternary.” The forest bed of Norfolk (regarded by Professor Marcelin Boule as of transitional character, as shown in the tabular view on p. 384 bis), the Norwich crag, the Suffolk red and coralline crag, and very extensive sandy deposits all over Europe belong to the Pliocene. The earliest or first great extension of glaciers occurred late in this period. The animals are very different from those of the Pleistocene; the great mastodon and the tapir are there, and the sabre-toothed tiger. Implements manufactured by man are found in the oldest Pleistocene, and there is no reason to doubt that we shall find his workmanship in the Pliocene, too, though it is not admitted that this has yet been done. It is a question still eagerly studied and debated as to whether the roughly chipped flints found in gravels on high downs in the south of England, and called “eoliths,” are (as I think many of them are) the work of man, and whether the high-lying gravels in which they are found are to be regarded as of the oldest Pleistocene Age or as late Pliocene. It is an exciting and deeply interesting field of practical exploration and reasoned inference.

It will have been gathered from what I have said that, in seeking for knowledge of the sequence of events in the period of PalÆolithic Man, everything depends upon extreme care in removing the deposits from a cave inch by inch, and keeping all objects found distinct from one another and assigned to their proper layer. The same system is now applied with great success to the exploration of ancient cities in Egypt and Central Asia.

As to the actual bones and skulls of men discovered in these Pleistocene deposits, they show us that the Reindeer Men were a fine, full-brained people, as we should expect, with as large a brain cavity on the average as that of modern Europeans. The skulls of this race, which do not differ in character from those of highly developed modern races, were first found at Cromagnon, and hence we may call them “the Cromagnards” (Fig. 75). The Neander Men are the men of the middle period—the last glacial period—who were displaced by the splendid and accomplished Cromagnards. The Neander Men, of which the new French specimen (Fig. 65) from the cave of the Chapelle-aux-Saints is one, were a very inferior race, and so different from any living race of men as to justify the recognition of them as a distinct species of man, the Homo Neanderthalensis. Only a few other imperfect skulls and skeletons of them are known (Figs. 76 and 77), and show them to have been short people, with very low, flat heads and retreating foreheads. It is in accordance with what one would expect, that they should make no works of art, and should be displaced, as climatic conditions changed for the better, by the arrival of the fine, full-brained Cromagnards or Reindeer Men. But where did they, these delightful artists and happy hunters of the Reindeer Epoch, come from? We cannot say. And what became of them? We do not know. They did not give rise to the Neolithic race, but were replaced, turned out by that race. To them, indeed, are appropriate the words of the Roman poet—Prolem sine matre creatam, mater sine prole defuncta.

Table showing the Geologic History of Man in Western Europe

(AFTER MARCELIN BOULE, WITH SOME ADDITIONS)

FOOTNOTES: