Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/84

66 caverns these proportions were exactly reversed, while at Goffontaine skulls of the bear and other parts of the skeleton were found in their natural numerical proportions. Speaking generally, it may be said that human bones, where any were met with, occurred at all depths in the cave-mud and gravel, sometimes above and sometimes below those of the bear, elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, &c.

Some rude flint implements of the kind commonly called flint knives or flakes, of a triangular form in the cross section (as in fig. 14, p. 118), were found by Schmerling dispersed generally through the cave-mud, but he was too much engrossed with his osteological inquiries to collect them diligently. He preserved some few of them, however, which I have seen in the museum at Liege. He also discovered in the cave of Chokier, two and a half miles south-west from Liége, a polished and jointed needle-shaped bone, with a hole pierced obliquely through it at the base; such a cavity, he observed, as had never given passage to an artery. This instrument was embedded in the same matrix with the remains of a rhinoceros.

Another cut bone and several artificially shaped flints were found in the Engis cave, near the human skulls before alluded to. Schmerling observed, and we shall have to refer to the fact in the sequel (Chap. VIII.), that although in some forty fossiliferous caves explored by him human bones were the exception, yet these flint implements were universal, and he added that 'none of them could have been subsequently introduced, being precisely in the same position as the remains of the accompanying animals.' 'I therefore,' he continues, 'attach great importance to their presence; for even if I had not found the human bones under conditions entirely favourable to their being considered as belonging to the