United States or Burkina Faso ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At Aurignac, in the cave of L'HOMME MORT, in the Trou du Frontal, broken bones and fragments of charcoal bear witness to the repast. Similar traces of feasts are met with beneath the dolmens and the tumuli.
In the Sureau Cave in Belgium, in that of Aurignac in France, and Brixham in England, have been found complete skeletons of the URSUS SPELAEUS, which bad evidently been dragged in with the flesh still on them, for all the bones are in their natural position.
As to the flint implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock's words, "one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless." The same is true of other palaeolithic stations. It also appears from Lartet's investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac region in the south of France partook of tribal meals at the burial of their dead.
The caves are often of considerable height; that of Massat is some 560 feet high, that of Lherm is 655, that of Bouicheta nearly 755, that of Loubens 820, and that of Santhenay is, as much as 1,344 feet high. Those of Eyzies, Moustier, and Aurignac are also very lofty.
The works of art of the stone period found there indicate considerable progress in skill beyond that attested by the objects found in the Aurignac grotto. Among the Savigne articles, there is the bone of a stag, on which figures of two animals, apparently meant for deer, are engraved in outline, as if by a sharp-pointed flint.
In Scotland have been found necklaces of nerites and limpets; at Aurignac, eighteen little plaques of cockle shell pierced with holes in the centre. At Laugerie-Basse, a man overtaken by a landslip had been crushed by the stones which had fallen upon him; time has destroyed his clothes, but the shells with which he had decked himself are still preserved.
Unfortunately the skulls were injured in the transfer; and what is worse, after the lapse of eight years, when M. Lartet visited Aurignac, the village sexton was unable to tell him in what exact place the trench was dug, into which the skeletons had been thrown, so that this rich harvest of ethnological knowledge seems for ever lost to the antiquary and geologist.
Those hunters, for example, who feasted on the rhinoceros and buried their dead with funeral rites at Aurignac may have been less barbarous than the savages of St. Acheul, as some of their weapons and utensils have been thought to imply.
The Aurignac cave adds no new species to the list of extinct quadrupeds, which we have elsewhere, and by independent evidence, ascertained to have once flourished contemporaneously with Man.
The last position would be admitted by few scientific geologists at the present day, as the evidence for time, though inferential from the deposits known to us, is held generally to be conclusive. The chain of evidence in regard to this important question seems to be filled out by a recent discovery of M. Edouard Lartet in Aurignac, in the South of France, on the head-waters of the Garonne.
Word Of The Day