Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1875 — Discovery of an Ancient Cavern. [ARTICLE]

Discovery of an Ancient Cavern.

Another one of those wonderful caverns which served as the dwelling-place of man in the earliest epochs of our race has just been discovered and made to yield up its instructive treasures. It is called the grotto of Lortet and is located in the French Pyrenees. It has been inhabited at two distinct periods, for two heaps of bones and remains were found, one above the other, and separated by a deposit of white clay more than nine feet in thickness, caused by an eruption of waters heavily charged with steatite through crevices in the rock which are still visible. Of course this deposit must have been a long time in its formation. While it was going on the ancient hunters of wild horses and gigantic stags must have occasionally taken refuge in the cave, for here and there in the white clay a few flints were found; when the irruption ceased man again resumed his residence in the cavern. In the two fireplaces thus separated by the clay deposit were found cut flints, weapons and instruments made of bone or carved from the antlers of the reindeer and stag, especially spear-points, pins, needles, harpoons and barbed arrow-heads. Some pieces of engraved bones in the lower fire-places were imperfectly executed; but those discovered in the upper fireplace were admirably made. One fragment of a reindeer’s antler has pictures of reindeer and of fish engraved upon it with absolutely exquisite skill. In spite of its perfection this article is of incontestible authenticity and represents, in a new light, the artistic ability of the primeval man. It was found by Mr. Trutat, Director of the museum at’ Toulouse, who for a time conducted the explorations among the cinders of the upper fire-place beneath the stalagmite layer which forms the floor of the cavern and which afforded it a complete protection —so that this specimen of the handicraft of the reindeer age slept in its shelter as intact as the products of Roman civilization beneath the ashes of Pompeii. Another French investigator, M. Piette, has found that several curious tubes formed from bone, discovered in the caverns of the Pyrenees, and wLich have hitherto been a puzzle to pala:ologists, are really flutes, showing that music had its charms even for the ears of our cave-dwelling, horse-devouring ancestors of the pre-historic age.