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Updated: June 23, 2025
Acheul and the era of those engulfed rivers which, in the basin of the Meuse near Liege, swept into many a rent and cavern the bones of Man and of the mammoth and cave-bear.
The animals contemporary with these primeval men were the mammoth, species of rhinoceros and hippopotamus, the "sabre-toothed" lion, the cave-bear, the reindeer, besides oxen, horses, and other still surviving forms. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, and in the other the Southern.
Among the bones were those of the mammoth and the hairy rhinoceros, species evidently contemporary with man, though they have long since vanished from the earth. At a somewhat earlier date, implements of men, mingled with bones of the cave-bear, cave-lion, hyena, and other species, had been found in the caves of France and Belgium.
At the beginning of the Quaternary period there were alive the cave-bear, the cave-lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the rhinoceros with chambered nostrils, the mammoth. In fact, the mammoth swarmed. He delighted in a boreal climate. By degrees the reindeer, the horse, the ox, the bison, multiplied, and disputed with him his food.
"And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear the competitor, one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant.
This place had then developed a fauna and flora of its own, including such monsters as the one which I had seen, which may well have been the old cave-bear, enormously enlarged and modified by its new environment. For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other.
The presence there of remains of animals which ages ago perished from the earth is another circumstance indicative of high antiquity. These embrace the mammoth, the great hairy elephant of prehistoric times, an extinct hair-clad rhinoceros, the large and powerful cave-bear and cave-lion, the great Irish elk, and still other animals of whose existence we know only by their bones.
The conclusion, then, in palaeontology, which would be drawn from these facts is, that man must have existed in Europe at the same time with the fossil elephant and rhinoceros, the gigantic hyena, the aurochs, and the elk, and even the cave-bear.
The Pliocene animal world of mammalia of the three old continents, for instance, corresponds exactly, through all its orders, to the present fauna of Europe, Asia and Africa; and that on an average it was built up more stupendously than that of to-day, we can see from the cave-bear and the mammoth.
The earliest men of the European Continent, about whom we know much, the men whose bones and whose weapons are found beneath the gravel-drift, the men who were contemporary with the rhinoceros, mammoth, and cave-bear, were not further advanced in material civilisation than the Australians. They used weapons of bone, of unpolished stone, and probably of hard wood.
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