58

UPRAISED STRATA IN SWEDEN AND NORWAY.

CHAP. III.

century to century, and the insensible rate of variation in the geographical distribution of organic beings in our own times, we may presume that an extremely lengthened period was required, even for so slight a modification in the range of the molluscous fauna, as that of which the evidence is here brought to light. There are also other independent reasons for suspecting that the antiquity of these deposits may be indefinitely great as compared to the historical period. I allude to their present elevation above the sea, some of them rising, in Norway, to the height of 600 feet or more. The upward movement now in progress in parts of Norway and Sweden, extends, as I have elsewhere shown*, throughout an area about 1000 miles north and south, and for an unknown distance east and west, the amount of elevation always increasing as we proceed towards the North Cape, where it is said to equal five feet in a century. If we could assume that there had been an average rise of two and a half feet in each hundred years for the last fifty centuries, this would give an elevation of 125 feet in that period. In other words, it would follow that the shores, and a considerable area of the former bed of the North Sea, had been uplifted vertically to that amount, and converted into land in the course of the last 5000 years. A mean rate of continuous vertical elevation of two and a half feet in a century would, I conceive, be a high average; yet, even if this be assumed, it would require 24,000 years for parts of the sea-coast of Norway, where the post-tertiary marine strata occur, to attain the height of 600 feet.

*Principles, 9th ed. ch. xxx.

CHAP. IV. DISCOVERIES OF MM. TOURNAL AND CHRISTOL. 59

CHAPTER IV.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD

-

BONES OF MAN AND EXTINCT

MAMMALIA IN BELGIAN CAVERNS.

EARLIEST DISCOVERIES IN CAVES OF LANGUEDOC OF HUMAN REMAINS
WITH BONES OF EXTINCT MAMMALIA
1833 OF
RESEARCHES IN
DR. SCHMERLING IN THE LIEGE CAVERNS SCATTERED PORTIONS OF
HUMAN SKELETONS ASSOCIATED WITH BONES OF ELEPHANT AND
RHINOCEROS DISTRIBUTION AND PROBABLE MODE OF INTRODUCTION
OF THE BONES IMPLEMENTS OF FLINT AND BONE SCHMERLING'S
CONCLUSIONS AS
TO THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IGNORED PRESENT
STATE OF THE BELGIAN CAVES - HUMAN BONES RECENTLY FOUND IN
CAVE OF ENGIHOUL-ENGULFED RIVERS STALAGMITIC CRUST-
ANTIQUITY OF THE HUMAN REMAINS IN BELGIUM HOW PROVED.

AVING hitherto considered those formations in which

HAVING

both the fossil shells and the mammalia are of living species, we may now turn our attention to those of older date, in which the shells being all recent, some of the accompanying mammalia are extinct, or belong to species not known to have lived within the times of history or tradition.

Discoveries of MM. Tournal and Christol in 1828, in the South of France.

In the Principles of Geology, when treating of the fossil remains found in alluvium, and the mud of caverns, I gave an account in 1832 of the investigations made by MM. Tournal and Christol in the South of France.*

M. Tournal stated in his memoir, that in the cavern of Bize, in the department of the Aude, he had found human bones and teeth, together with fragments of rude pottery, in

* 1st ed. vol. ii. ch. xiv., 1832; and 9th ed. p. 738, 1853.

60

DISCOVERIES OF MM. TOURNAL AND CHRISTOL. CHAP. IV.

the same mud and breccia cemented by stalagmite in which land-shells of living species were embedded, and the bones of mammalia, some of extinct, others of recent species. The human bones were declared by his fellow-labourer, M. Marcel de Serres, to be in the same chemical condition as those of the accompanying quadrupeds.*

Speaking of these fossils of the Bize cavern five years later, M. Tournal observed, that they could not be referred, as some suggested, to a diluvial catastrophe,' for they evidently had not been washed in suddenly by a transient flood, but must have been introduced gradually, together with the enveloping mud and pebbles, at successive periods.†

M. Christol, who was engaged at the same time in similar researches in another part of Languedoc, published an account of them a year later, in which he described some human bones, as occurring in the cavern of Pondres, near Nismes, in the same mud with the bones of an extinct hyæna and rhinoceros.‡ The cavern was in this instance filled up to the roof with mud and gravel, in which fragments of two kinds of pottery were detected, the lowest and rudest near the bottom of the cave, below the level of the extinct mammalia.

It has never been questioned that the hyæna and rhinoceros found by M. Christol were of extinct species; but whether the animals enumerated by M. Tournal might not all of them be referred to quadrupeds which are known to have been living in Europe in the historical period seems doubtful. They were said to consist of a stag, an antelope, and a goat, all named by M. Marcel de Serres as new; but the majority of paleontologists do not agree with this opinion. Still it is true, as M. Lartet remarks, that the fauna of the cavern of

* Annales des Sciences Naturelles,

tom. xv. p. 348: 1828.

† Annales de Chimie et de Physique, p. 161: 1833.

Christol, Notice sur les Ossements humains des Cavernes du Gard. Montpellier, 1829.

CHAP. IV. DESNOYERS ON HUMAN AND OTHER CAVE BONES. 61

Bize must be of very high antiquity, as shown by the presence, not only of the Lithuanian aurochs (Bison europaus), but also of the reindeer, which has not been an inhabitant of the South of France in historical times, and which, in that country, is almost everywhere associated, whether in ancient alluvium or in the mud of caverns, with the mammoth.

6

In my work before cited*, I stated that M. Desnoyers, an observer equally well versed in geology and archæology, had disputed the conclusion arrived at by MM. Tournal and Christol, that the fossil rhinoceros, hyæna, bear, and other lost species, had once been inhabitants of France contemporaneously with Man. The flint hatchets and arrow-heads' he said, and the pointed bones and coarse pottery of many French and English caves, agree precisely in character with those found in the tumuli, and under the dolmens (rude altars of unhewn stone) of the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, Britain, and Germany. The human bones, therefore, in the caves which are associated with such fabricated objects, must belong not to antediluvian periods, but to a people in the same stage of civilization as those who constructed the tumuli and altars.'

'In the Gaulish monuments,' he added,' we find, together with the objects of industry above mentioned, the bones of wild and domestic animals of species now inhabiting Europe, particularly of deer, sheep, wild boars, dogs, horses, and oxen. This fact has been ascertained in Quercy, and other provinces; and it is supposed by antiquaries that the animals in question were placed beneath the Celtic altars in memory of sacrifices offered to the Gaulish divinity Hesus, and in the tombs to commemorate funeral repasts, and also from a superstition prevalent among savage nations, which induces them to lay up provisions for the manes of the dead in a

* Principles, 9th ed. p. 739.

62 DESNOYERS ON HUMAN AND OTHER CAVE BONES. CHAP. IV.

future life. But in none of these ancient monuments have any bones been found of the elephant, rhinoceros, hyæna, tiger, and other quadrupeds, such as are found in caves, which might certainly have been expected, had these species continued to flourish at the time that this part of Gaul was inhabited by Man.'*

After giving no small weight to the arguments of M. Desnoyers, and the writings of Dr. Buckland on the same subject, and visiting myself several caves in Germany, I came to the opinion that the human bones mixed with those of extinct animals, in osseous breccias and cavern mud, in different parts of Europe, were probably not coeval. The caverns having been at one period the dens of wild beasts, and having served at other times as places of human habitation, worship, sepulture, concealment, or defence, one might easily conceive that the bones of Man and those of animals, which were strewed over the floors of subterranean cavities, or which had fallen into tortuous rents connecting them with the surface, might, when swept away by floods, be mingled in one promiscuous heap in the same, ossiferous mud or breccia.†

2

That such intermixtures have really taken place in some caverns, and that geologists have occasionally been deceived, and have assigned to one and the same period fossils which had really been introduced at successive times, will readily be conceded. But of late years we have obtained convincing proofs, as we shall see in the sequel, that the mammoth, and many other extinct mammalian species very common in caves, occur also in undisturbed alluvium, embedded in such a manner with works of art, as to leave no room for doubt that Man and the mammoth coexisted. Such discoveries have

* Desnoyers, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, tom. ii. p. 252; and article on Caverns, Dictionnaire

Universelle d'Histoire Naturelle. Paris, 1845.

+ Principles, 9th ed. p. 740.