THE CAVES OF SOUTHERN FRANCE. These contain the fullest records of
the race, much like the Eskimos in bodily frame, which lived in
western Europe at the time of the mammoth and the reindeer. The
floors of these caves are covered with a layer of bone fragments,
the remains of many meals, and here are found also various
articles of handicraft. In this way we know that the savages who
made these caves their homes fished with harpoons of bone, and
hunted with spears and darts tipped with flint and horn. The
larger bones are split for the extraction of the marrow. Among
such fragments no split human bones are found; this people,
therefore, were not cannibals. Bone needles imply the art of
sewing, and therefore the use of clothing, made no doubt of skins;
while various ornaments, such as necklaces of shells, show how
ancient is the love of personal adornment. Pottery was not yet
invented. There is no sign of agriculture. No animals had yet been
domesticated; not even man's earliest friend, the dog. Certain
implements, perhaps used as the insignia of office, suggest a rude
tribal organization and the beginnings of the state. The remains
of funeral feasts in front of caverns used as tombs point to a
religion and the belief in a life beyond the grave. In the caverns
of southern France are found also the beginnings of the arts of
painting and of sculpture. With surprising skill these Paleolithic
men sketched on bits of ivory the mammoth with his long hair and
huge curved tusks, frescoed their cavern walls with pictures of
the bison and other animals, and carved reindeer on their dagger
heads.
EARLY MAN ON OTHER CONTINENTS. Paleolithic flints curiously like
those of western Europe are found also in many regions of the Old
World,--in India, Egypt, and Asia Minor,--beneath the earliest
vestiges of the civilization of those ancient seats, and sometimes
associated with the fauna of the Glacial epoch.
In Java there were found in 1891, in strata early Quaternary or
late Pliocene in age, parts of a skeleton of lower grade, if not
of greater antiquity, than any human remains now known.
Pithecanthropus erectus, as the creature has been named, walked
erect, as its thigh bone shows, but the skull and teeth indicate a
close affinity with the ape.
In North America there have been reported many finds of human
relics in valley trains, loess, old river gravels buried beneath
lava flows, and other deposits of supposed glacial age; but in the
opinion of some geologists sufficient proof of the existence of
man in America in glacial times has not as yet been found.
These finds in North America have been discredited for various
reasons. Some were not made by scientific men accustomed to the
closest scrutiny of every detail. Some were reported after a
number of years, when the circumstances might not be accurately
remembered; while in a number of instances it seems possible that
the relics might have been worked into glacial deposits by natural
causes from the surface.
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