CHAP. IV. ANTIQUITY OF LIÉGE CAVE-BONES. 13 the bones of animals which may be carried away during floods. The manner in which some of the large thigh and shank bones of the rhinoceros and other pachyderms are rounded, while some of the smaller bones of the same creatures, and of the hyæna, bear, and horse, are reduced to pebbles, shows that they were often transported for some distance in the channels of torrents, before they found a resting-place. When we desire to reason or speculate on the probable antiquity of human bones found fossil in such situations as the caverns near Liége, there are two classes of evidence to which we may appeal for our guidance. First, considerations of the time required to allow of many species of carnivorous and herbivorous animals, which flourished in the cave period, becoming first scarce, and then so entirely extinct as we have seen that they had become before the era of the Danish peat and Swiss lake dwellings: secondly, the great number of centuries necessary for the conversion of the physical geography of the Liége district from its ancient to its present configuration; so many old underground channels, through which brooks and rivers flowed in the cave period, being now laid dry and choked up. The great alterations which have taken place in the shape of the valley of the Meuse and some of its tributaries are often demonstrated by the abrupt manner in which the mouths of fossiliferous caverns open in the face of perpendicular precipices 200 feet or more in height above the present streams. There appears also, in many cases, to be such a correspondence in the openings of caverns on opposite sides of some of the valleys, both large and small, as to incline one to suspect that they originally belonged to a series of tunnels and galleries which were continuous before the present system of drainage came into play, or before the existing valleys were scooped out. Other signs of subsequent ANTIQUITY OF LIÉGE CAVE-BONES. CHAP. IV. fluctuations are afforded by gravel containing elephant's bones at slight elevations above the Meuse and several of its tributaries. The loess also, in the suburbs and neighbourhood of Liége, occurring at various heights in patches lying at between 20 and 200 feet above the river, cannot be explained without supposing the filling up and re-excavation of the valleys at a period posterior to the washing in of the animal remains into most of the old caverns. It may be objected that, according to the present rate of change, no lapse of ages would suffice to bring about such revolutions in physical geography as we are here contemplating. This may be true. It is more than probable that the rate of change was once far more active than it is now. Some of the nearest volcanoes, namely, those of the Lower Eifel about sixty miles to the eastward, seem to have been in eruption in post-pliocene times, and may perhaps have been connected and coeval with repeated risings or sinkings of the land in the basin of the Meuse. It might be said, with equal truth, that according to the present course of events, no series of ages would suffice to reproduce such an assemblage of cones and craters as those of the Eifel (near Andernach for example); and yet some of them may be of sufficiently modern date to belong to the era when Man was contemporary with the mammoth and rhinoceros in the basin of the Meuse. But, although we may be unable to estimate the minimum of time required for the changes in physical geography above alluded to, we cannot fail to perceive that the duration of the period must have been very protracted, and that other ages of comparative inaction may have followed, separating the post-pliocene from the historical periods, and constituting an interval no less indefinite in its duration. HUMAN SKELETON FOUND IN CAVE NEAR DÜSSELDORF -ITS GEOLOGICAL Fossil human Skeleton of the Neanderthal Cave near FORE I speak more particularly of the opinions which BEFORE anatomists have expressed respecting the osteological characters of the human skull from Engis, near Liége, mentioned in the last chapter and described by Dr. Schmerling, it will be desirable to say something of the geological position of another skull, or rather skeleton, which, on account of its peculiar conformation, has excited no small sensation in the last few years. I allude to the skull found in 1857, in a cave situated in that part of the valley of the Düssel, near Düsseldorf, which is called the Neanderthal. The spot is a deep and narrow ravine about seventy English miles north-east of the region of the Liége caverns treated of in the last chapter, and close to the village and railway station of Hochdal between Düsseldorf and Elberfeld. The cave occurs in the precipitous southern or left side of the winding ravine, about sixty feet above the stream, and a 76 GEOLOGICAL POSITION OF NEANDERTHAL SKELETON. CHAP. v. hundred feet below the top of the cliff. The accompanying section will give the reader an idea of its position. Section of the Neanderthal Cave near Düsseldorf. a Cavern 60 feet above the Düssel, and 100 feet below the surface b Loam covering the floor of the cave near the bottom of which the b, c Rent connecting the cave with the upper surface of the country. e Devonian limestone. f Terrace, or ledge of rock. When Dr. Fuhlrott of Elberfeld first examined the cave, he found it to be high enough to allow a man to enter. The width was seven or eight feet, and the length or depth fifteen. I visited the spot in 1860, in company with Dr. Fuhlrott, who had the kindness to come expressly from Elberfeld to be my guide, and who brought with him the original fossil skull, and a cast of the same, which he presented to me. In the interval of three years, between 1857 and 1860, the ledge of rock, f, on which the cave opened, and which was originally twenty feet wide, had been almost entirely quarried away, and, at the rate at which the work of dilapidation was proceeding, its complete destruction seemed near at hand. In the limestone are many fissures, one of which, still partially filled with mud and stones, is represented in the section at a c as continuous from the cave to the upper CHAP. V. NEANDERTHAL SKELETON. 77 surface of the country. Through this passage the loam, and possibly the human body to which the bones belonged, may have been washed into the cave below. The loam, which covered the uneven bottom of the cave, was sparingly mixed with rounded fragments of chert, and was very similar in composition to that covering the general surface of that region. There was no crust of stalagmite overlying the mud in which the human skeleton was found, and no bones of other animals in the mud with the skeleton; but just before our visit in 1860 the tusk of a bear had been met with in some mud in a lateral embranchment of the cave, in a situation precisely similar to b, fig. 1, and on a level corresponding with that of the human skeleton. This tusk, shown us by the proprietor of the cave, was two and a half inches long and quite perfect; but whether it was referable to a recent or extinct species of bear, I could not determine. From a printed letter of Dr. Fuhlrott we learn that on removing the loam, which was five feet thick, from the cave, the human skull was first noticed near the entrance, and, further in, the other bones lying in the same horizontal plane. It is supposed that the skeleton was complete, but the workmen, ignorant of its value, scattered and lost most of the bones, preserving only the larger ones.* The cranium, which Dr. Fuhlrott showed me, was covered both on its outer and inner surface, and especially on the latter, with a profusion of dendritical crystallisations, and some other bones of the skeleton were ornamented in the same way. These markings, as Dr. Hermann von Meyer observes, afford no sure criterion of antiquity, for they have been observed on Roman bones. Nevertheless, they are more common in bones that have been long embedded in * Letter to Professor Schaaffhausen, cited Natural History Review, No. 2, p. 156. |