Kent’s Cavern and the Brixham Cave, near Torquay, the Wookey Hole ‘Hyena Den’, near Wells, the Long Hole Cave in Glamorganshire, and the caves of Creswell Crags, on the north-eastern border of Derbyshire, are perhaps the most famous of their class. Heaps of bones have been found in all of them, which proved that the men who, from time to time, inhabited them were contemporary, like those whose tools are recovered from the river-drift, with animals of which some, like the mammoth, the straight-tusked elephant, and the ‘sabre-toothed’ tiger, have disappeared from the face of the earth, and many have long been extinct in Britain. Generally in the lower strata the stone tools are exactly like those found in the river-drift; while in the higher they are as a rule more elaborately finished, and are associated with needles, harpoons, and other implements of bone. The same sequence is discernible in the palaeolithic caves of France and Belgium.[114]
[Sidenote: Cave implements and river-drift implements.]
Let us compare in some museum the sets of tools and weapons which have been taken from caves with those of the river-drift. Are the latter older than the former, and is it possible to establish in either or in both a chronological succession of types? Taken by itself, the form of palaeolithic implements, at least in this country, is not generally a criterion of their age; but neither the forms of those that have come from the caves nor the bones which accompanied them forbid us to believe that the oldest are at least as old as any that belonged to the drift. Generally speaking, the fauna of the caves and of the river gravels are identical.[115] It is therefore certain that, although in general aspect a collection of implements derived from the former source is unlike one from the latter because the two were deposited in different circumstances, some of the deposits in the drift and in the caves were contemporaneous.[116] Since a few implements of river-drift form have been found in caves along with those of higher types, it seems reasonable to conclude that the same men possessed both; and if those which are characteristic of the caves are almost entirely absent from the drift, is not the explanation partly that they were more perishable, partly that many of them would not have been used in the field? In other words, there is no reason to believe that the later occupants of the caves were men of different race or of different habits from the contemporary hunters whose lost tools have been given up by the drift.[117] Long ago Monsieur de Mortillet framed a chronological classification of French and Belgian palaeolithic implements according to their types, which, though of late years it has been modified, has been provisionally accepted; but in this country it has been found impossible to follow his example: the same types exist here, but the relative antiquity of the specimens can seldom be determined; for implements of the oldest French types have been found in deposits which belong to the close of our Palaeolithic Age.[118] Even when implements from the high-level terraces are compared with those of the lower, no marked distinction is observed. In certain cases of course a local classification has been established. Thus the stone implements in the upper strata of two of the caves of Creswell Crags belonged to the advanced type which is called after the settlement of Solutré in the department of Saône-et-Loire;[119] and the implements of North-East London which, from their position at the bottom of the excavations as well as their colour, were evidently the oldest, were also inferior in workmanship to newer specimens found above them some twelve feet beneath the surface, and far inferior to the newest of the same district, which were recovered from an old land-surface, two or three feet below the existing ground, generally called the ‘Palaeolithic Floor.’[120] Again, in the brick-fields of Caddington excavation revealed an ancient land-surface on which a palaeolithic colony had made their tools. At a later time a new surface about two feet higher was formed by brick-earth, which must have been swept down by heavy rains from the hills above; and on this more implements appeared. Above it again is a bed of contorted drift, containing implements whose deep ochreous colour would seem to show that of the three series they are the oldest: evidently they were washed down from the hill-tops on which perhaps lived the earliest inhabitants of the district, and which, as they were gradually worn away, formed a deposit in what were then valleys, but are now in their turn hills.