Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/224

214 such importance to the facts, for which we are indebted to M. Lartet, and which entirely refute these conjectures.

M. Lartet studied at Aurignac, in the south of France, a burial-place of these remote times. It is a grotto excavated in the side of a hill, at a height which is not attained by water-courses analogous to those of which we find the trace in the neighborhood of Abbeville. This sepulchral grotto at the time of discovery was closed by a slab taken from a bed of rocks at some distance from this point. In the interior were found the bones of seventeen persons, men, women, and children; and before the entrance were found the well-attested remains of a fireplace. There were traces of funeral repasts that the first inhabitants of our country were in the habit of making, and such as we sometimes find in our own day among certain European peoples. In the ashes of this fireplace were found bones bearing the trace of fire, and excrements of wild animals. These bones, scorched by the fire, bearing traces of the hand of man, were the bones of the bear and of the rhinoceros. The excrements were those of a species of hyena contemporaneous with the preceding animals. Here, consequently, man appears as eating the animals in question; as making his repast of those very animals whose contemporaneousness with him had been disputed.

M. Lartet crowned these beautiful researches by discovering in a cave, in the centre of France, a piece of ivory on which was unmistakably represented the very mammoth (Fig. 6) to which I have just called your attention. It is very evident that this picture could only be made by a man who lived at the same time with this elephant.

In view of M. Lartet's discoveries, we must admit the existence of fossil man, that is to say, the coexistence of our species with the lost species of animals of which I have spoken.

Since this epoch, besides, we have not only found traces of these primitive industries, but débris of jawbones, and entire crania. Hence we can judge of the characters which distinguished our first ancestors. Strange to tell, we find that these men who, even in France, warred with stone weapons such as I have shown you, against the elephant and the rhinoceros, have still at the present day in Europe descendants presenting the same characters.

So man lived in the Quaternary epoch. May we go further, and admit that he also existed during the Tertiary epoch? Was he contemporaneous, not only with the rhinoceros and mammoth, of which I have spoken, but also with earlier mammals?

The question is perhaps still premature. Some facts seem to indicate that it is so; but in such matters it is better to adjourn conviction than to admit opinions that are yet in doubt. Consequently, we shall regard the debate as remaining open.

After demonstrating that man goes back in geologic time to an epoch much anterior to that in which we formerly believed, we are