The cave of Cro-Maguon, in the same department, was rich in human skulls, skeletons, and handiwork; among other articles were perforated shells, evidently once worn in necklaces. Contrary to rule, bones of the mammoth were here associated with those of the reindeer.
At Chavaux, Belgium, was a deposit of remains, the disposition and other indications of which almost compel the belief that the place was the scene of a cannibal feast. The human skulls and bones are all of young women and boys, witnessing to a decided preference for young and tender flesh on the part of our anthropophagic ancestors. These bones were split open longitudinally, as was the custom with those of animals, for the extraction of marrow. This and similar discoveries in other caves throw a singular light upon the habits and culture of the men of this time.
Many Belgian caves, and notably that of Chaleux on the Lesse, yield large collections of mammal bones and stone implements.
The digging of a mill-race through a peat-bed at Schussenried, a village not far from Ravensburg, revealed a station very rich in archaeological relics of this age. It was probably little more than the rubbish-heap of a station near at hand. There was here a profusion of flint articles, and bones and antlers of the reindeer. The mosses and snail-shells of the peat of this vicinity belong, like the mammals mentioned, to arctic and Alpine species, and are thus another evidence of the rigors of the climate of that time.
A station at Salêve, near the Swiss frontier, contains reindeer-bones of the Reindeer age, and stone axes, and human bones of the preceding Age of Mammoths.[1]
Switzerland and the Rhine valley below Basle have furnished but few relics of the Reindeer age, while France has many localities yielding quantities from both this and the Mammoth period, which are the two earlier Stone ages, the third and last of which will be next discussed.
So far, we have found human bones, skulls, skeletons, axes, knives, spear-heads, needles, ornaments, etc., of the periods discussed, in almost every country of Europe—in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the soil of classic Rome itself, as well as in the northern regions.
The Age of Polished Stone.—This name has been given by French writers to the third era of prehistoric human existence, on account of the characteristic smoothness and polish of the stone implements.
The distribution of land and sea, the relief of the surface, the climate, and the flora and fauna of this age, were substantially as they are now.
Among its oldest memorials—and the age probably ended about
- ↑ After a new and critical study of this deposit, Prof. Rütimeyer believes it to be a confused mingling of remains from various epochs.
