CHAPTER II. Food, Cannibalism, Mammals Fish, Hunting, and Fishing.

The first care of man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations of bones of all sorts in the caves and other places inhabited by him leave no doubt on that point. The horse, which in Europe was hunted, killed, and eaten for many centuries before it was domesticated, was an important article of diet, and was supplemented by the aurochs, the stag, the chamois, the wild goat, the boar, the bare, and failing them, the wolf, the fox, and above all the reindeer, which multiplied rapidly in districts suitable to it. The elephant bones picked up on Mount Dol and elsewhere are nearly all those of young animals; and it is probable that they had been killed for food by man.

In the Sureau Cave in Belgium,1 in that of Aurignac in France, and Brixham in England, have been found complete skeletons of the Ursus spelæus, which bad evidently been dragged in with the flesh still on them, for all the bones are in their natural position. In other caves, the thorax and the vertebræ of the skeletons were missing; the cave-man, having despatched his victim, bad evidently taken only the more succulent parts into his retreat. Beasts of prey merely gnaw the comparatively tender and spongy tops of the bones, leaving the hard, compact parts untouched. In the caves that were inhabited by man, however, we find the apophyses neglected, whilst the diaphyses are split open. We cannot, therefore, make any mistake on this point, or attribute to the beast of prey what is certainly the work of man.

Whilst he evidently preferred to hunt and eat the larger mammals, man when pressed by hunger did not despise the small rodents, which were, of course, more easily captured. Amongst piles of the bones of horses and stags have been found the remains of martens, hedgehogs, and mice; and from the Thayngen Cave have been taken the bones of more than five hundred bares. In Belgium the water-rat seems to have been considered a dainty, and in the Chaleux Cave alone were found more than twenty pounds’ weight of the bones of this creature, nearly all bearing traces of having been subjected to the action of fire.

The remains of birds are rarer, and Broca has remarked that the most ancient hunting implements which have come down to us; those from the Moustier Cave, for instance, were adapted rather to attack animals that would show fight than those that would simply fly or run away. The Gourdan Cave, however, has yielded the bones of the moor-fowl, the partridge, the wild duck, and even the domesticated cock And hen; the Frontal Cave, the thrush, the duck, the partridge, and the pigeon; and in other caves were found the bones of the goose, the swan, and the grouse. Milne-Edwards enumerates fifty-one species belonging to different orders found in the caves of France, and M. Rivière picked up the remains of thousands of birds in those of Baoussé-Roussé on the frontier of Italy.2

The skulls of the mammals bad been opened, and the bones split. Brains and marrow probably figured at feasts as the greatest delicacies. Travellers, whose tales are a help to us in building up a picture of the remote past of our race, relate that the Laplanders, as soon as an animal is killed, break open its skull and devour the brain whilst it is still warm and bleeding. This was probably also the custom amongst prehistoric cave-men.

The flesh of animals was not, alas, the only meat eaten, and excavations in different parts of the globe have led to the discovery of traces of the practice of cannibalism which it is difficult not to accept.3

Dr. Spring noticed at Chauvaux a great many bones which were nearly all those of women and children, side by side with which lay others of ruminants belonging to species still extant. All these bones bad alike been subjected to great heat, and none but those which bad contained no marrow were left unbroken. This appears an incontrovertible proof of cannibalism, and Dr. Spring concludes that it was certainly practised by the earliest inhabitants of Belgium. We must add, however, that other excavations in the same cave at Chauvaux prove that it was used as a burial-place, some skeletons being ranged in regular order with weapons and stone implements placed beside them.4 M. Dupont mentions having found in the caves of the Lesse, which date from the Reindeer period, human bones mixed with other remains of a meal. He notes a similar fact in another cave that he considers belongs to Neolithic times. “But,” he adds, “none of these bones bear any trace of having been struck with a flint or other tool with a view to their fracture.

If any of them are broken it is transversely, and the cause of the fracture has been merely the weight of the earth above them; moreover, they show no trace of the action of fire.”5 M. Dupont, therefore, still retains some doubt of the cannibalism of the cave-men of the valley of the Lesse, and attributes the presence of the bones of the dead amongst the rubbish of all kinds accumulated by the living, to their idleness and indifference. One example at the present day tends to confirm this opinion, for travellers tell us of the same revolting carelessness amongst the Esquimaux, who cannot certainly be classed amongst cannibals.

The Abbé Chierici, speaking at the Brussels Congress6 of the excavations in one of the Reggio caves, remarked that human bones were mixed with those of animals, and that both showed traces of having been burnt. These bones date from the Neolithic period, and with them were picked up various objects of remarkable workmanship, including fragments of pottery, half a grindstone for crushing grain, and some admirably polished serpentine hatchets.

Other facts leave no doubt of the cannibalism of the earliest inhabitants of Italy. Moreover, hesitation on this point is impossible for other reasons, as Roman historians allude to the practice. Pliny,7 in saying how little removed was a human sacrifice from a meal, adds, that it ought not to surprise us to meet with this monstrous custom amongst barbarian races, as it prevailed in ancient times in Italy and Sicily.

It is generally admitted that we can tell whether the fracture of long bones was intentional by the way in which they were broken. This fact, which is true alike with the bones of men and of animals, is the most important proof we have of the cannibalism of the men of the Stone age. To the examples already given, we can easily add others culled from France. In the Pyrenees and in the caves of Lourdes and Gourdan, for instance, human bones have been found mixed with the cinders and ashes of the hearth, and still bearing the marks of the implements with which they were broken.

At Bruniquel a human skull was found which had been opened in the same way as the heads of ruminants amongst which it was picked up, and on its external surface were deep notches, which appear to have been made with a flint hatchet. Similar traces of revolting feasts on human flesh are not at all rare; near Paris, at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, and at Varenne-Saint-Maur, for instance.8

The excavations in the Montesquieu-Avantès Cave, about six miles from Saint-Girons, have brought to light a hearth covered over with a layer of stalagmite; numerous fragments of human bones, crania, femora, tibiæ, humeri, and radii were found in this layer, and in that of the subjacent clay. In many cases the medullary orifice had been enlarged to make it easier to get out the marrow. It is impossible to attribute this to a rodent, for the bones gnawed by animals of that kind present a regular series of marks. The conclusion is inevitable: these bones, alike of men and of animals, were the remains of a meal.9

In Kent’s Hole, the celebrated cave in Devonshire, amongst many objects dating from the Stone age, were found some human bones bearing traces of having been gnawed by man. The eminent anthropologist, Owen, came to a similar conclusion—that cannibalism had been practised—after examining the jaw-bone of a child found in Scotland; and so did the Rev. F. Porter, after the excavations near Scarborough, where several skeletons were found under a tumulus, which had apparently been thrown where they were discovered by accident.

The Cesareda caves in Portugal have yielded some bones split lengthwise; and beneath the dolmen near the village of Hammer, in Denmark, human bones and those of stags have been found half gnawed, and showing only too clearly the origin of the marks upon them. Worsaae quotes similar facts at Borreby, Chantres refers to the same thing in the caves of the Caucasus, Captain Burton at Beitsahur, near Jerusalem, Wiener in the sambaquis of Brazil, even in deposits which he considers of recent origin.10

Brazil is not the only part of the American continent in which we find traces of the use of this revolting food. In the kitchen-middings of Florida Wyman found human bones, which had been intentionally broken, mixed with those of deer and beavers. The marrow had been taken from all of them and eaten by man. Yet more recent discoveries of a similar kind have been made in New England.11

We must, however, add that many of these facts are contested. Every people considers it a point of honor to repudiate the idea that its ancestors fed on human flesh, and yet everywhere history tells us of the practice of cannibalism. Herodotus speaks of it amongst the Androphagæ and the Issedones, people of Scythian origin; Aristotle amongst the races living on the borders of the Pontus Euxinus; Diodorus Siculus amongst the Galatians; and Strabo, in his turn, says: “The Irish, more savage than the Bretons, are cannibals and polyphagous; they consider it an honor to eat their parents soon after life is extinct.”12

From the ancient tombs of Georgia have been taken human bones that have been boiled or charred, which were doubtless those of the victims eaten by the assistants in the fêtes which have ever accompanied funeral rites.

In the fourth century of our era Jerome speaks of having met in Gaul with the Attacotes, descended from a savage Scotch tribe, who fed on human flesh, and that though they possessed great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, with numbers of pigs, for whom their vast forests afforded excellent grazing grounds13; and though the Scandinavian kitchen-middings have not so far yielded any traces of the practice of cannibalism, Adam of Bremen, who preached Christianity at the court of King Sweyn Ulfson, represents the Danes of his day as barbarians clad in the skins of beasts, chasing the aurochs and the eland, unable to do more than imitate the cries of animals and devouring the flesh of their fellow-men.14

Nothing could exceed the barbarity of the Mexican sacrifices, the numbers of the victims, and the refinements of torture to which they were subjected. Prisoners, who had often been fattened for months previously, perished by thousands on the altars. The palpitating flesh was distributed amongst the assistants, and a horrible custom compelled the priests to clothe themselves in the still bleeding skins of the unfortunate wretches, and to wear them until they rotted to pieces.

Without going back to an antiquity so remote, in how many different regions of Africa and America, and in how many islands of Polynesia have not our sailors and missionaries reported the practice of cannibalism in our own day? It is difficult, therefore, not to believe, although the fact cannot perhaps be very distinctly proved, that the first inhabitants of Europe degraded as were the conditions of their existence, did eat human flesh and acquire a depraved taste for it; impelled thereto not only by the pangs of hunger, but also by a revolting superstition.

Animals, however, were very plentiful all around. Stags, elks, aurochs, horses, and the large pachyderms multiplied very rapidly in the wide solitudes, the pasture lands of which afforded them a constantly renewed supply of food, and the beasts of prey in their turn found an easy prey in the ruminants.15 The ways of animals do not change, and the travellers who are exploring the interior of Africa tell us that now, as in the day we are trying to recall, hundreds of elephants and rhinoceroses congregate in a limited area, whilst innumerable herds of giraffes, zebras, and gazelles graze peacefully in the presence of man, whose destructive powers they have not yet learnt to dread.

Delegorgue speaks of one lake peopled by more than one hundred hippopotami, and of a region less than three miles in diameter containing six hundred elephants. Livingstone tells us that he saw troops of more than four thousand antelopes pass at a time, and that these animals showed absolutely no fear. We may give a yet more curious instance. Captain Gordon Cumming, crossing the plains stretching away on the north of the Cape, saw troops of gazelles and antelopes, compelled by a long drought to migrate in search of the water indispensable to them, and be describes with enthusiasm one of these migrations, telling us that the plain was literally covered with animals, the hurrying herds defiling before him in an endless stream. On the evening of the same day, a yet more numerous herd passed by in the same direction, the numbers of which were absolutely incalculable, but which, according to Cumming, must have exceeded several hundred thousand.

Such must have been animal life in Europe in Quaternary times. “Grand indeed,” cries Hugh Miller, “was the fauna of the British Isles in those days. Tigers, as large again as the biggest Asiatic species, lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants, of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon, roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros forced their way through the primeval forest, and the lakes and rivers were tenanted by hippopotami as bulky and with as great tusks as those of Africa.”16

Material proofs of the presence of animals are not wanting. The accumulation of coprolites in the cave of Sentenheim (Alsace) bears witness to the number of bears which once haunted it. Nordmann took from a cave near Odessa 4,500 bones of ursidæ, associated with no less numerous relics of the large cave-lion and cave-hyena.17 The Külock Cave, now some six hundred and fifty feet above the river, contained the remains of no less than 2,500 bears, and similar relics occur by thousands in the osseous breccia of Santenay and in the cave of Lherm, where they form a regular ossuary. It would be easy to quote similar facts from Belgian, German, and Hungarian caves. In almost every case the position of the skeletons seems to show that the bears sought a last refuge in the caves, and that death had surprised them during their winter sleep. Pachyderms were no less numerous than bears. The remains of mammoths are found from the north of Europe to Greece and Spain, and we meet with them in Algeria, in Asia from the Altai Mountains to the Arctic Ocean, and in America in Mexico and Kentucky.

They seem to have entrenched themselves especially in Siberia, whence tusks are still exported as an article of commerce. In the extreme North, those parts of Wrangel’s Land which have been explored are strewn with the bones of mastodons, and in some parts of Sonora and Columbia these remains form almost inexhaustible deposits.

Animals of the cervine and equine groups were, if possible, yet more numerous. M. Piette estimates the number of reindeer whose bones he has picked up in the Gourdan Cave as over. 3,000, and the number of cervidæ found at Hohlefels is positively incalculable.

In 1826, Marcel de Serres called attention to the great number of the bones of animals of the equine family found in the neighborhood of Lunel-Viel; at Solutré, the remains of horses cover a great portion of the slope which stretches from the eastern side of the mountain to the bottom of the valley. Here are found those vast accumulations to which the inhabitants of the valley give the characteristic name of horse-walls. The number of horses, the bones of which have gone to form these walls, may be estimated without exaggeration at 40,000. The bones are mixed together in the greatest confusion, many of them show traces of having been burnt, and the flesh of the horse was evidently the favorite diet of the people of Solutré.18

At first man obtained by force, often aided by strategy, the animals he coveted. He bad not yet learnt to tame them and reduce them to servitude. Neither the reindeer nor the horse was as yet domesticated, and neither in the caves nor in the various deposits elsewhere has a complete skeleton been found, but only—a very significant fact—the bones on which had been the greater amount of flesh. The absence of any remains of the dog, so indispensable an animal in the keeping of flocks, is yet another proof that domestication was still unpractised.

It was with most miserable weapons, such as a few stones, scarcely even rough-hewn, and a few flint arrows, that the cave-man did not hesitate to attack the most formidable animals, and with such apparently inadequate means he succeeded in wounding and even killing them. The French Museum possesses mammoth and rhinoceros bones bearing fine scratches produced by the weapons which had been used to despatch the animals. The metacarpus of a large beast of prey, found at Eyziès, retains marks no less clear, and the skull of a bear front Nabrigas has in it a large wound which must have been made by a missile of some kind.

In Ireland a stone hammer was found wedged into the head of a Cervus megaceros; in Cambridgeshire, the skull of an Ursus spelæus still containing the fragment of a celt which had given the animal his deathblow; at Richmond (Yorkshire) the bones of a large deer which had been sawn with a flint implement. The fine collection in the University of Lund, contains a vertebra of a urns pierced by an arrow, and the Copenhagen Museum, the jaw of a stag pierced by a fragment of flint. Steenstrup mentions two bones of a large stag into which stone chips had penetrated deeply, and in which the fracture had been gradually covered over by the bony tissue. A bone of some bovine animal with an arrow deeply imbedded in it has been taken from a bed of peat in the island of Moën, celebrated for its tumuli and the number of objects found in them. At Eyziès, a flint flake has been found firmly fixed in one of the lumbar vertebrae of a young reindeer, and M. de Baye mentions an arrow with a tranverse edge stuck in the bone of a badger.19 The Abbé Ducrost found a flint arrow-head sticking in a vertebra of a horse.

Nor were those already mentioned the only animals on which man made war. We shall speak presently of the contests with each other, which began amongst men in the very earliest days of humanity. Human bones, perforated by arrows and broken by stone hatchets, bear ineffaceable traces to this day of homicidal struggles.

In many places fresh-water and marine fish were utilized as food by man. In the numerous caves of the Vezère, in those of Madeleine, Eyziès, and Bruniquel, excavations have brought to light the vertebræ and other bones of fishes, amongst which predominate chiefly those of the jack, the carp, the bream, the drub, the trout, and the tench—in a word, all the fish which still people our rivers and lakes. In the Lake Stations of Switzerland, fish of all kinds are no less abundant. At Gardeole, amongst the bones of mammals have been found the shells of mollusca, and remains of the turtle and of goldfish. Fish was not, however, caught by all these primitive people, not even by all those who lived by the sea. In researches carefully carried on for years in the Maritime-Alps, M. Rivière found neither fishing-tackle nor fish-lines.

Whilst the cave-men of the south of France seem not to have utilized any but fresh-water fish, the Scandinavians, at a date probably less remote however, did not hesitate to brave the ocean. The kitchen-middings contain numerous remains of fish, amongst which those of the mackerel, the dab, and the herring are the most numerous. There, too, we meet with relics of the cod, which never approaches the coast, and must always be sought by the fisherman in the open sea.

Although we are in a position to assert that men were able to catch fish during every prehistoric period, if not in every locality, we can speak less positively of their mode of doing so. The earliest fishing-tackle was doubtless of the most primitive description: the bone of some animal, a fragment of hard wood, or even a fish-bone pointed at each end and pierced with a hole, served their purpose (Fig. 10). The Exhibition of Fishing-Tackle held at Berlin in 1880 contained several such implements, some of wood, others of bone. Others have also been found in the Madeleine Cave, and in different stations of the ancient inhabitants of Switzerland. It is interesting to note their resemblance to those still in use amongst the Esquimaux.

Figure 10.

1. Fragments of arrows made of reindeer horn from the Martinet Cave (Lot-et-Garonne).—2. Point of spear or harpoon in stag-horn (one third natural size).—3. and 4. Bone weapons from Denmark.—5. Harpoon of stag-horn from St. Aubin.—6. Bone fish-hook; pointed at each end, from Wangen.

Prehistoric mail also turned to account the teeth of animals. We may quote in this connection the molars of a bear from which the enamel and the crown have been removed, and the thickness of which has been lessened by rubbing (Fig. 11). The small flints picked up in great numbers in the department of the Gironde also date from a remote antiquity; they are sixteen millimetres long by four wide, and though we cannot assert it as a fact, they are supposed to have been used for catching fish.