Page:Antiquity of Man as Deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton.djvu/21

Rh with the oldest forms of stone tools; but such bones have hitherto been of the extinct kinds of Carnivores, Ruminants, Proboscidians, and Pachyderms, which also roamed over the land subsequently insulated as "Britain," and which were the chief source of food to the savages who made and wielded those palæolithic implements.

But the evidence of the great share taken by the teeth of my present subject in comminuting his food and fitting it for deglutition begets speculation as to the kinds of nutriment necessitating this exercise of the natural preparatory instruments of digestion. The best of these, the true molars, with their multiplied roots, massive crowns, and ridged square triturating surfaces, have been worn out, ground down to the stumps, and finally, with their sockets, removed by absorption. The smooth unbroken surface of the molar tract tells plainly that the aged palæolithic individual went on labouring for his subsistence long after the loss of his grinders, and putting such few teeth as remained to their utmost powers of trituration.

The tools he manufactured enabled him most probably to slay, under favourable circumstances, the big beast known as "Mammoth," which came to the margin of the river to quench its thirst. He may have obtained his share of the Elephas primigenius taken in an artificial pitfall, such as the lowest tribe of negroes with whom Livingstone tarried awhile on the banks of the Zambesi river prepared to entrap the African Elephant, which they then attacked and slew with weapons not greatly, if at all, superior to the palæolithic ones in reference to such lethal work.