The appearance of certain bones from the caves of Ariége, dug up by MM.
Garrigou and Filhol, has led both these _savants_ to the opinion "that
pre-historic man may have been anthropophagous."
The same conclusion would be arrived at from the explorations which have
been undertaken in the grottos and caves of Northern Italy by M. Costa
de Beauregard. This latter _savant_ found in the caves the small
shin-bone of a child which had been carefully emptied and cleansed,
leading to the idea that the marrow had been eaten.
At a point near Finale, on the road from Genoa to Nice, in a vast cave
which was for a long period employed as a habitation for our race, M.
Issel discovered some human bones which had evidently been calcined.
Their whitish colour, their lightness, and their friability left no room
for doubt on the point. Added to this, the incrustations on their
surface still contained small fragments of carbon. Moreover, many of the
bones showed notches which could not have been made without the help of
some sharp instrument.
It is, therefore, probable that men in the stone age practised
anthropophagy; we have, really, no cause to be surprised at this; since,
in our own days, various savage tribes are addicted to cannibalism,
under a considerable diversity of circumstances.
Not the least trace has been discovered of animals' bones being gnawed
by dogs in any of the human settlements during the reindeer epoch. Man,
therefore, had not as yet reduced the dog to a state of domesticity.
How did primitive man dress himself during this epoch? He must have made
garments out of the skins of the quadrupeds which he killed in hunting,
and especially of the reindeer's hide. There can be no doubt on this
point. A large number of reindeers' antlers found in Périgord have at
their base certain cuts which evidently could only have been produced in
flaying the animal.
It is no less certainly proved that these men knew how to prepare
animals' skins by clearing them of their hair, and that they were no
longer compelled, like their ancestors, to cover themselves with rough
bear-skins still covered with their fur. To what purpose could they have
applied the flint scrapers which are met with everywhere in such
abundance, except for scraping the hair off the skins of wild beasts?
Having thus taken off the hair, they rendered them supple by rubbing
them in with brains and the marrow extracted from the long bones of the
reindeer. Then they cut them out into some very simple patterns, which
are, of course, absolutely unknown to us; and, finally, they joined
together the different pieces by rough sewing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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