English Villages | Page 8

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