Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/207

Rh With the Unground Stone Age of the Drift, that of the Bone Caves is intimately connected. In the Drift, geological evidence shows that a long period of time must have been required for the accumulation of the beds which overlie the flint implements, and the cutting out of the valleys to their present state, since the time when the makers of these rude tools and weapons inhabited France and England in company with the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the mammoth, and other great animals now extinct. In the Bone Caves this natural calendar of strata accumulated and removed is absent, but their animal remains border on the fauna of the Drift, and the Drift series of stone implements passes into the Cave series, so that the men of the Drift may very well be the makers of some Cave implements contemporaneous with the great quaternary mammals.

The explorations made with such eminent skill and success in the caverns of Périgord by M. Lartet and Mr. Christy, bring into view a wonderfully distinct picture of rude tribes inhabiting the south of France, at a remote period characterized by a fauna strangely different from that at present belonging to the district, the reindeer, the aurochs, the chamois, and so forth. They seem to have been hunters and fishers, having no domesticated animals, perhaps not even the dog; but they made themselves rude ornaments, they sewed with needles with eyes, and they decorated their works in bone, not only with hatched and waved patterns, but with carvings of animals done with considerable skill and taste. Yet their stone implements were very rude, to a great extent belonging to absolute Drift types, and destitute of grinding, with one curious set of exceptions, certain granite pebbles with a smooth hollowed cavity, some of which resemble stones used by the Australians for grinding something in, perhaps paint to adorn themselves with. It is very curious to find these French tribes going so far in the art of shaping tools by grinding, and yet, so far as we know, never catching the idea of grinding a celt.