CHAPTER XIII.
AGE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES.—PAST GEOLOGICAL EPOCHS.
I. The skovmoses and the remains at Schussenried have shown that man existed in Europe at the close of the Glacial Epoch. But did he live through this epoch? Did he precede it? Has he, therefore, been contemporary with vegetable and animal species, which have long been considered as fossils? We know that we can with certainty reply in the affirmative to these questions. We know also that the proof of this great fact, one of the grandest scientific conquests of modern times, dates, so to speak, from yesterday.
This demonstration rests on proofs which are now so well known that the enumeration of them will be sufficient. It is evident that human bones, buried beneath an undisturbed layer of soil, prove the existence of man at the time when the layer was formed. It is no less clear that flints worked by human hands and made into hatchets, knives, etc., bones of animals made into harpoons and arrow-heads, are so many irrefutable testimonies of the existence of the workers. Lastly, when human bones are found associated with bones of animals in the same undisturbed layers, it is again evident that man and these animal species have been contemporaneous.
Many facts included in these three categories were proved in the earlier years, and during the course of the last century. Since 1700, excavations made by the order of Duke Eberhard Louis de Wurtemberg, at Canstadt, near Stuttgard, brought to light a great number of bones of animals, among which was found a human cranium. The nature of this precious relic was, however, only recognised by Jaeger in 1835. About the same time an Englishman, Kemp, found in London itself, side by side with the teeth of elephants, a stone hatchet similar to those of Saint Acheul. Some time after Esper in Germany, and John Frere in England, discovered more or less analogous facts. But none of them were able to recognise their significance, for geology was quite in its infancy, and palæontology not yet in existence.
II. It was not till 1823 that Amy Boué gave Cuvier some human bones which he had found in the loess of the Rhine, near Lahr, in the Duchy of Baden. Boué regarded these bones as fossils. Cuvier refused to admit this conclusion. He has often been reproached with this, but the reproach is unjust. Cuvier had too often seen pretended fossil men change either into mastodons or salamanders, or even into simple contorted blocks of sandstone, not to be on his guard, and, in presence of a fact hitherto unique, he thought it wiser to admit a disturbance which would have carried into the loess bones of much later date than that of the formation of this layer.
But Cuvier, whatever may have been said of him, never denied the possibility of the discovery of fossil men. He has, on the contrary, formally admitted the existence of our species as anterior to the latest revolutions of the globe. “Man,” he says, “may have inhabited some country of small extent from which he repeopled the earth after these terrible events.” We see that the praises and reproaches which have been addressed to our great naturalist on account of an opinion which he never held, are equally undeserved.
The reserve, perhaps exaggerated, which Cuvier imposed upon himself, and the confidence which was placed in him, weighed heavily upon science by impeding the comprehension of the value of observations made by Tournal (1828-1829) in L’Aude, by Christol (1829) in Le Gard; by Schmerling (1833) in Belgium; by Joly (1835) in Lozère; by Marcel de Serres (1839), in L’Aude, and by Lund (1844) in Brazil. In 1845 almost all the savants, properly so called, shared the opinion so well stated by Desnoyers. Without regarding the existence of fossil man as impossible, they did not think that the discovery had as yet been made.
It is to the persevering efforts of a distinguished archæologist, Boucher de Perthes, that we owe the proof of a fact so long denied, and now universally admitted. Under the influence of certain philosophical ideas, little calculated to procure him followers, he had admitted à priori the existence of human beings anterior to the present man, from whom they must have differed considerably. He hoped to find either their remains themselves, or the products of their industry, in the upper alluvial deposits. Watching either himself or through his agents the excavation of the gravel-pits near Abbeville, he collected there a number of flints, more or less rudely worked, but bearing the unmistakable impress of the hand of man. Some of his publications (1847) brought him visitors, who in their turn carried on the search. Soon after, M. Regollot (1855) and M. Gaudry (1856) obtained from the gravel of Saint Acheul hatchets similar to those of Abbeville, and declared themselves convinced. The English savants, Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, after having visited the collection of Boucher de Perthes, did the same, and had many imitators.
III. In spite of the discoveries which were multiplied in caverns and gravel-pits, even in the neighbourhood of Paris, the same objections were brought against the believers in fossil man which Cuvier had opposed to Amy Boué. The juxtaposition of the remains of extinct animals and human bones, or articles of human workmanship, were attributed to a reformation effected by water. The high authority of M. de Bramont lent new force to this argument. He compared the alluvium of the neighbourhood of Abbeville to his terrains des pentes, formed, he said, by storms of an exceptional violence, which only happened once in a thousand years, and which heap up together materials derived from different beds. As for the objects discovered in caverns they inspired still less confidence than the others, on account of the ease with which the bed might be undermined by eddies, which would tend to deposit in the heart of a subjacent layer objects derived from the upper layers, without destroying either the one or the other.
Many men of high intellect still hesitated, until M. Lartet published his remarkable work upon the grotto of Aurignac (1861). Here doubt was impossible. This grotto, or rather rock-shelter, was closed at the time of its discovery by a slab of stone brought from a distance; M. Lartet discovered, either in the interior or at the entrance, the bones of eight or nine species of animals which are essentially characteristic of quaternary deposits. In his memoir he gives details of all the remains. Some of these animals had evidently been eaten upon the spot, their bones, partly carbonized, still bore the trace of fire, the charcoal and ashes of which were discovered; those of a young tichorhine rhinoceros showed marks made by flint implements, and their spongy extremities had been gnawed by carnivora; the species of the latter was shown by his excrement, which was recognized as that of the hyena spelæa.
The grotto or rock-shelter of Aurignac is excavated in a small mountainous group, a spur of the plateau of Lanémézan, which the Pyrenean drift has never reached. It is, therefore, free from the objections drawn from the intervention of aqueous currents. Thus the facts made known by M. Lartet were generally accepted at once in their fullest signification. These facts show that man lived in the midst of a quaternary fauna, which he used as food, including the rhinoceros, and was followed by the hyena of this epoch, who finished the remains of his meals. The coexistence of man with these fossil species was proved.
A few ill-judged attacks were still made by savants, who did not accept the testimony of these facts, among others that of the discovery of a human jaw made by Boucher de Perthes. But the discoveries became so numerous that the last among them was soon reduced to silence, and had to submit to the mention of fossil man without raising the slightest protest.
IV. It would be too tedious and, indeed, useless to enumerate here all these discoveries. I will only mention some of the most striking ones associated with the names of Lartet and Christy, his enthusiastic colleague. At Les Eyzies, these indefatigable investigators discovered a stalagmitic layer formed of a veritable breccia, which contained worked flints, ashes, charcoal, and bones of different quaternary animals. Large slabs of this breccia now figure in many collections. In this same grotto they found a vertebra of a young reindeer pierced by a flint which had broken in the bone, thus causing the death of the animal. Finally, in 1864, M. Lartet had the pleasure of being present at the discovery of a plate of mammoth ivory, upon which a representation of the animal itself had been carved with a sharp flint by an artist of La Madeleine. In this drawing are found the characteristic traits of the mammoth, as they are known to us from the remains of the animal which are at times found preserved, with its thick fur and long hair, in the ice of Siberia.
For man to be able to draw the portrait of any animal species, he must have been contemporaneous with it. Now proofs of this nature have rapidly become more numerous and striking. In l’Ariége M. Garrigou found a representation of the cave bear traced on a pebble. M. de Vibraye extracted from the grotto of Laugerie-Basse a sketch of a fight between reindeer remarkably well drawn upon a piece of schist. The same animal has been discovered represented in sculpture in the same rock-shelter, and again in the rock-shelter of Montastruc, where M. Peccadeau de l’Isle found his wonderful dagger-handles.
I need not speak here of the weapons, tools, and instruments of every kind, from the simple knife to barbed arrow-heads, and harpoons, to laurel-leaf shaped lance-heads, and daggers toothed and grooved, which equal the finest specimens found in Denmark. I will only remark that all these objects prove the existence of man, and that we now count by the thousand articles made by him during the geological period preceding our own.
Without being nearly so abundant, the remains of man himself have been discovered in every part of the quaternary formation. Although several European states have contributed towards this mass of discoveries, by far the greater number occurred in France and Belgium.
I cannot here enter into details, some of which will be more advantageously discussed in another part of the book. I will only mention the cave of Cro-Magnon, which was discovered by the railway engineers in 1860, not far from the station of Les Eyzies, and which has given us the type of one of the best characterized fossil races. Nor can I pass over in silence the successful and laborious researches made by M. Martin from 1867 to 1873 in the quarries near Paris, the results of which enabled M. Hamy to fix the succession of types in our immediate neighbourhood. Lastly, I would allude to the investigations of M. Dupont in the valley of the Lesse. Commenced in 1864, and continued during seven years with an unequalled activity, they have presented to the Museum at Brussels about 80,000 worked flints, 40,000 bones of animals, now all named, the crania of Furfooz, and twenty-one jaws, including the now celebrated jaw of Naulette.
It is not only in Europe that the existence of fossil man has been proved. Even in 1844 Lund had announced that he had found in certain caverns in Brazil human bones associated with remains of extinct animals. He afterwards withdrew his statement, doubtless owing to the distrust with which every announcement of this kind was received. But his observations, which, unfortunately, were never published in detail, were probably correct. In 1867 M. W. Blake announced to the Congress of Paris that in the auriferous deposits of California, and especially near the village of Sonora, weapons, instruments, and even stone ornaments were frequently found associated with the bones of the mammoth and the mastodon. Dr. Snell, who lives in this locality, possesses a large and rich collection of them. Dr. Wilson published some facts of the same nature in 1865.
V. It became necessary, in order to prevent our being lost amidst these riches of every description, to distribute them in a methodical manner, and arrange them in order of time. The universal preponderance of weapons, tools, sculpture, drawings, etc., has led archæologists to propose different classifications essentially founded upon the difference of the types presented by these articles, and upon the material from which they were made. The classification which M. de Mortillet has applied to the Museum of St. Germain is of this kind. But such classifications, though very convenient for the arrangement of a public collection, have the inconvenience of being rather artificial. The naturalist and the anthropologist ought to give the preference to palæontological or geological data.
Lartet preferred the former. He connected the division of quaternary times with the predominance and extinction of the great mammalia. The cave-bear, which was the first to disappear, he employed to mark the most ancient period; the mammoth and the tichorhine rhinoceros, which survived it, characterised the second; the reindeer and the aurochs have served to mark the third and fourth.
This classification has the inconvenience of being purely local, since the disappearance of quaternary species did not take place everywhere at the same time, and was not general. In reality the age of the reindeer still continues in Lapland, and that of the aurochs is prolonged, a little artificially it is true, in the forests of Lithuania. But Lartet’s method connects human groups with animal types; it characterises the epochs by an event palæontologically important; it preserves the relation between the succession of periods and biological events; it offers, therefore, serious advantages if taken for what it is. This was very clearly understood by the eminent author of the theory; he has only applied it to France.
Since M. Lartet made his splendid investigations, fresh facts have come to light, and, as it often happens, distinctions, which at first were apparently most pronounced, have now been partly effaced. Therefore M. Dupont has proposed to reduce to two the four ages of Lartet, which is perhaps excessive even for Belgium. M. Hamy, again, has admitted three ages as corresponding to the mean and new river levels of M. Belgrand. This division of quaternary times has the advantage of being connected with geological phenomena; it at least partly loses the too exclusively local character, and it ought for this reason to be preferred.
Let us, nevertheless, consider the subject for a moment from Lartet’s point of view, which permits of an interesting comparison. We have seen in Denmark the succession of three vegetable species; the beech, the oak, and the pine bring us to the commencement of the present modern epoch. In France the successive disappearance of four animal species, the cave-bear, mammoth, reindeer, and aurochs, which at first were contemporaneous on our soil, characterises so many epochs which embrace the whole quaternary period. Man has been contemporaneous with them all; he made use of their flesh for food, and has left representations of them in sculpture and drawings.
VI. Can we go further and find traces of man even in tertiary times? Falconer, the celebrated English palæontologist, prematurely lost to science, did not hesitate to reply in the affirmative. But he only expected to find tertiary man in India, and M. Desnoyers has discovered him in France.
It was in 1863, in the gravel-pit of Saint-Prest, near Chartres, that M. Desnoyers himself found a tibia of rhinoceros bearing marks of incision and grooves similar to those which had been so often noticed in the bones of bears and reindeer eaten by quaternary man. A careful comparison and numerous facts of the same nature, shown in different collections, authorised him to announce that man might be traced beyond the glacial epoch, and had lived in pliocene times.
But M. Desnoyers only brought forward proofs of a single kind, and such as are not appreciated at their full value until we are used to them. Thus his work was at first received with a certain amount of distrust. He was asked to produce, if not pliocene man himself, at least some objects of his industry, and, in particular, the weapons which would enable him to attack, and the knives with which he could cut up the elephant and rhinoceros, or the great deer, whose bones all bear the marks of more or less deep incision which he attributes to man. M. l’Abbé Bourgeois soon replied to these demands, and in the presence of the worked flints which he placed before competent judges, all doubt disappeared.
Unfortunately, the gravel of Saint-Prest is considered by a sufficient number of geologists to belong rather to quaternary deposits, which are more recent than undoubted tertiary formations. It ought probably to be placed in the period of transition which separates two distinct epochs. Perhaps it is contemporaneous with the deposit of the Victoria cave in Yorkshire, from which Tiddeman extracted a human fibula, and which this naturalist regarded as having been formed a little before the great glacial cold. In short, the discoveries of MM. Desnoyers and Tiddeman take back the existence of man to the confines of the tertiary period.
The discoveries in Italy take us still further. On different occasions, and since 1863, some Italian savants thought that they had discovered in undoubted pliocene deposits traces of human industry, and even human bones. These results were, however, for different reasons successively doubted and rejected by the most competent judges.
But M. Capellini has just discovered, in 1876, clearer proofs of man’s existence in pliocene times in the clay deposits of Monte Aperto, near Sienne, and in two other places. The eminent professor of Bologna has found in these localities, the age of which is not contested, bones of the balœnotus bearing numerous deep incisions, which it seems to me could only have been produced by the action of a cutting instrument. In some cases the bone has been broken off upon one of the faces of incision, whilst the other is smooth and sharply defined. Judging from woodcuts and casts, it is impossible to avoid admitting that the cuts have been made upon fresh bones. These incisions differ entirely from those found upon the bones of halitherium found in the miocene falunian strata of Pouancé. I have always thought it impossible to attribute the latter to man, as decidedly as I think those which we are now discussing ought to be attributed to his agency. The existence of pliocene man in Tuscany is, then, in my opinion, an acquired scientific fact. Nevertheless, I should admit that this conclusion is not yet unanimously accepted, and that it is disputed by M. Magitot, among others, who relies upon his own experience.
VII. The researches of M. l’Abbé Bourgeois take us still further back. This practised and persevering observer has discovered in the department of Loir-et-Cher, in the Commune of Thénay, flints, the shape of which he thinks can only be attributed to man. Now geologists are unanimous in considering these deposits as miocene, belonging to the mean tertiary age.
But the flints of Thénay, generally of small size, are almost all very roughly shaped, and many palæontologists and archæologists have considered the fractures to be due to nothing more than accidental blows. In 1872, at the Congress of Brussels, the question was submitted to a commission of the most competent men of Germany, England, France, Belgium, and Italy, and the judges disagreed. Some accepted and some rejected all the flints exhibited by M. l’Abbé Bourgeois. Some considered that a small number only could be attributed to human industry. Others, again, thought it right to reserve their judgment and to wait for fresh facts.
I joined the ranks of the latter. But since then fresh specimens discovered by M. l’Abbé Bourgeois have removed my last doubts. A small knife or scraper, among others, which shows a fine regular finish, can, in my opinion, only have been shaped by man. Nevertheless, I do not blame those of my colleagues who deny or still doubt. In such a matter there is no very great urgency, and doubtless the existence of miocene man will be proved, as that of glacial and pliocene man has been—by facts.
VIII. Thus, man was most certainly in existence during the quaternary epoch and during the transition age to which the gravels of Saint-Prest and the deposits of the Victoria cave belong. He has, in all probability, seen miocene times, and consequently the entire pliocene epoch. Are there any reasons for believing that his traces will be found further back still? Is the date of his appearance necessarily connected with any epoch? For an answer to these questions I only see a single order of facts to which we can apply.
We know that, as far as his body is concerned, man is a mammal, and nothing more. The conditions of existence which are sufficient for these animals ought to have been sufficient for him also; where they lived, he could live. He may then have been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and go back as far as the secondary period.
Palæontologists of high merit shrink from this proposition. They do not admit even the possibility of the existence of man in miocene times. All the mammalian fauna of this period have, they say, disappeared; how should man alone have resisted against causes which were sufficiently powerful to cause a complete renewal of all the beings with which he was most nearly connected?
I recognise the force of the objection; but I also take into account human intelligence, which they seem to forget. It is evidently owing to this intelligence that the man of Saint-Prest, of the Victoria cave, and of Monte Aperto has been able to survive two great geological epochs. He protected himself against cold by fire, and so survived till the return of a more genial temperature. Is it not possible, therefore, to imagine that man of an earlier period should have found in his industry the necessary resources for struggling against the conditions which the transition from the later secondary times to the earlier tertiary must have imposed upon him.
In fact, the most careful judges acknowledge that man has seen the accomplishments of one of the great changes on the surface of the globe. He has lived in one of the geological epochs to which he was but lately thought to be a complete stranger; he has been contemporary with species of mammalia which have not even seen the commencement of the present epoch. There is then nothing impossible in the idea that he should have survived other species of the same class, or have witnessed other geological revolutions, or have appeared upon the globe with the first representatives of the type to which he belongs by his organisation.
But this is a question to be proved by facts. Before we can even suppose it to be so, we must wait for information from observation.