these immense changes; and it is impossible to speculate with any degree of certainty how long that period was, which transformed the icebound surface of our island to a land of verdure and wild forests. We must leave such conjectures and the more detailed accounts of the glacial and post-glacial periods to the geologists, as our present concern is limited to the study of the habits and condition of the men who roamed our fields and forests in prehistoric times. Although no page of history gives us any information concerning them, we can find out from the relics of arms and implements which the earth has preserved for us, what manner of men lived in the old cave dwellings, or constructed their rude huts, and lie buried beneath the vast barrows.
The earliest race of men who inhabited our island was called the Palaeolithic race, from the fact that they used the most ancient form of stone implements. Traces of a still earlier race are said to have been discovered a few years ago on the chalk plateau of the North Down, near Sevenoaks. The flints have some slight hollows in them, as if caused by scraping, and denote that the users must have been of a very low condition of intelligence—able to use a tool but scarcely able to make one. This race has been called the Eolithic; but some antiquaries have thrown doubts upon their existence, and the discovery of these flints is too recent to allow us to speak of them with any degree of certainty.
ENLARGE
PALAEOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS
The traces of Palaeolithic man are very numerous, and he evidently exercised great skill in bringing his implements to a symmetrical shape by chipping. The use of metals for cutting purposes was entirely unknown; and stone, wood, and bone were the only materials of which these primitive beings availed themselves for the making of weapons or domestic implements. Palaeolithic man lived here during that distant period when this country was united with the Continent, and when the huge mammoth roamed in the wild forests, and powerful and fierce animals struggled for existence in the hills and vales of a cold and inclement country. His weapons and tools were of the rudest description, and made of chipped flint. Many of these have been found in the valley gravels, which had probably been dropped from canoes into the lakes or rivers, or washed down by floods from stations on the shore. Eighty or ninety feet above the present level of the Thames in the higher gravels are these relics found; and they are so abundant that the early inhabitants who used them must have been fairly numerous. Their shape is usually oval, and often pointed into a rude resemblance of the shape of a spear-head. Some flint-flakes are of the knifelike character; others resemble awls, or borers, with sharp points evidently for making holes in skins for the purpose of constructing a garment. Hammer-stones for crushing bones, tools with well-wrought flat edges, scrapers, and other implements, were the stock-in-trade of the earliest inhabitant of our country, and are distinguishable from those used by Neolithic man by their larger and rougher work. The maker of the old stone tools never polished his implements; nor did he fashion any of those finely wrought arrowheads and javelin points, upon which his successor prided himself. The latter discovered that the flints which were dug up were more easily fashioned into various shapes; whereas Palaeolithic man picked up the flints that lay about on the surface of the ground, and chipped them into the form of his rude tools. However, the elder man was acquainted with the use of fire, which he probably obtained by striking flints on blocks of iron pyrites. Wandering about the country in families and tribes, he contrived to exist by hunting the numerous animals that inhabited the primeval forests, and has left us his weapons and tools to tell us what kind of man he was. His implements are found in the drift gravels by the riversides; and from this cause his race are known as drift men, in order to distinguish them from the cave men, who seem to have belonged to a little later period.
The first dwellings of man were the caves on the hillsides, before he found out the art of building pile huts. In Palaeolithic times these caves were inhabited by a rude race of feral nomads who lived by the chase, and fashioned the rude tools which we have already described. They were, however, superior to the drift men, and had some notion of art. The principal caves in the British islands containing the relics of the cave folk are the following: Perthichoaren, Denbighshire, wherein were found the remains of Platycnemic man—so named from his having sharp shin-bones; Cefn, St. Asaph; Uphill, Somerset; King’s Scar and the Victoria Cave, Settle; Robin Hood’s Cave and Pinhole Cave, Derbyshire; Black Rock, Caldy Island, Coygan Caves, Pembrokeshire; King Arthur’s Cave, Monmouth; Durdham Downs, Bristol; and sundry others, near Oban, in the valleys of the Trent, Dove, and Nore, and of the Irish Blackwater, and in Caithness.
In these abodes the bones of both men and animals have been found; but these do not all belong to the same period, as the Neolithic people, and those of the Bronze and Iron Ages, followed the occupation of the earlier race. The remains of the different races, however, lie at various depths, those of the earlier race naturally lying the lowest. An examination of the Victoria Cave, Settle, clearly shows this. Outside the entrance there was found a layer of charcoal and burnt bones, and the burnt stones of fireplaces, pottery, coins of the Emperors Trajan and Constantine, and ornaments in bone, ivory, bronze and enamel. The animal remains were those of the bos longifrons (Celtic ox), pig, horse, roe, stag, fowl (wild), and grouse. This layer was evidently composed of the relics of a Romano-British people. Below this were found chipped flints, an adze of melaphyre, and a layer of boulders, sand, and clay, brought down by the ice from the higher valley.
Inside the cave in the upper cave earth were found the bones of fox, badger, brown bear, grizzly bear, reindeer, red deer, horse, pig, and goat, and some bones evidently hacked by man. In the lower cave earth there were the remains of the hyena, fox, brown and grizzly bears, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, urus, bison, and red deer, the hacked bones of a goat, and a small leg-bone of a man.
Some idea of the time which has elapsed since primitive man inhabited this rude dwelling may be formed from these excavations. Two feet below the surface lay the Romano-British layer, and we know therefore that about 1,600 years was required for the earth to accumulate to that depth. The Neolithic layer was six feet below this; hence 4,800 years would be necessary to form this depth of earth. So we may conclude that at least 6,400 years ago Neolithic man used the cave. A long time previous to this lived the creatures of the lower cave earth, the bison, elephant, and the hyena with the solitary human bone, which belonged to the sharp-shinned race (Platycnemic) of beings, the earliest dwellers in our country.
It is doubtful whether Palaeolithic man has left any descendants. The Esquimaux appear to somewhat resemble them. Professor Boyd Dawkins, in his remarkable book, Cave Hunting, traces this relationship in the character of implements, methods of obtaining food and cooking it, modes of preparing skins for clothing, and particularly in the remarkable skill of depicting figures on bone which both races display. In carving figures on bone and teeth early man in Britain was certainly more skilful than his successor; but he was a very inferior type of the human race, yet his intelligence and mode of life have been deemed not lower than those of the Australian aborigines.
The animals which roamed through the country in this Pleistocene period were the elk and reindeer, which link us on to the older and colder period when Arctic conditions prevailed; the Irish deer, a creature of great size whose head weighed about eighty pounds; bison, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, wolf, otter, bear, horse, red deer, roe, urus or gigantic ox, the short-horned ox (bos longifrons), boar, badger and many others which survive to the present day, and have therefore a very long line of ancestors.
The successor of the old stone implement maker was Neolithic man, to whom we have already had occasion to refer. Some lengthy period of geological change separates him from his predecessor of the Old Stone Age. Specimens of his handiwork show that he was a much more civilised person than his predecessor, and presented a much higher type of humanity. He had a peculiarly shaped head, the back part of the skull being strangely prolonged; and from this feature he is called dolichocephalic. He was small in stature, about 5 feet 6 inches in height, having a dark complexion, and his descendants
