Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 June 1884 — The Cave-Men. [ARTICLE]

The Cave-Men.

The bones and implements of the Cave-men are found in association with remains of the reindeer and bison, the arctic fox, the mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros. They are found in great abundance in Southern and Central England, in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, and in every part of France; but nowhere as yet have their remains been discovered south of the Alps and Pyrenees. A diligent exploration of the Pleistocene caves of England and France, during the past twenty years, has thrown some light upon their mode of life. Not a trace of pottery has been found anywhere associated with their remains, so that it is quite clear that the Cave-men did not make earthenware vessels. Burned clay is a peculiarly indestructible material, and where it has once been in existence it is sure to leave plentiful traces of itself, Meat was baked in the caves by contact with hot stones, or roasted before the blazing fire. Fire may have been obtained by friction between two pieces of wood, or between bits oT flint and iron pyrites. Clothes were made of the furs of bisons, reindeer, bears, and other animals, rudely sewn together with threads of reindeer sinew. Even long fur gloves were used, and necklaces of shells and of bears’ and lions' teeth. The stone tools and weapons were far finer in appearance than those of the Riverdrift men, though they were still chipped and not ground. They made borers’ and saws as well as spears and arrow-heads; and besides these stone implements they used spears and arrows headed with bone, and daggers of reindeer antler. The reindeer, which thus supplied them with clothes and weapons, was also slain for food; and, besides, they slew whales and seals on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, and in the rivers they speared salmon, trout, and pike. They also appear to have eaten, as well as to have been eaten by, the cave-lion and cave-bear. Many details of their life are preserved to us through their extraordinary taste for engraving and darving. Sketches of reindeer, mammoths, horses, cave-bears, pike, and seals, and hunting scenes have been found by the hundred, incised upon antlers or bones, or sometimes upon stone; and the artistic skill which they show is really astonishing. Most savages can madd rude drawings of objects in which they feel a familiar interest, but such drawings are usually excessively grotesque, like a child’s attempt to depict a man as a sort of figure eight, with four straight lines standing forth from the lower half to represent the arms and legs. But the Cave-men, ’with a piece of sharp-pointed flint, would engrave on a reindeer antler an outline of a urus so accurately that it can be clearly distinguished from an ox or a bison. And their drawings are remarkable not only for their accuracy, but often equally so for the taste and vigor with which the subject is treated. —Atlantic Monthly.