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ON THE PRE-HISTORIC MAMMALIA FOUND ASSOCIATED WITH MAN, IN GREAT BRITAIN.

BY W. BOYD DAWKINS, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S.*

Ar the time man first appeared on the earth, the physical conditions obtaining in Western Europe were altogether different from those under which we now live. Britain formed part of the mainland of Europe, and low fertile plains covered with the vegetation peculiar to a moderately severe climate, stretched far away into the Atlantic from the present western coast line. The Thames also, instead of flowing into the German Ocean, joined the Elbe and the Rhine in an estuary opening on the North Sea about the latitude of Berwick. The climate also was very severe, and strongly resembled that of Siberia and North America. One would naturally expect that the animals living on that vast pleistocene continent, under such conditions of life would differ materially from those now living on what are the mere relics of that submerged land. Some of them have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth, such as the sabre-toothed lion, the cave-bear, the Irish elk, the mammoth, Elephas antiquus, the hippopotamus, and the woolly rhinoceros and the Rhinoceros Leptorhinus of Owen. Others again have departed to northern regions, such as the glutton, the reindeer, the true elk, the musk-sheep, the pouched marmot, and the lemming, while others, such as the cave-lion and cave-hyæna have retired southwards, and taken refuge, the one in Africa, the other in that continent and in Asia. The history of all these animals, and of the race of men associated with them, is, to a certain extent, familiar to most of you. The subject that I have now to bring before you relates to the animals which lived from the disappearance of the post-glacial mammals down to the times of history-a period of uncertain length, to be reckoned certainly by centuries, and probably by tens of thousands of years. The human remains found in Britain, and belonging to the stone and bronze folk, have been diligently looked after by the archæologists and craniologists, but the remains of the animals, carefully sought after in Switzerland and Denmark, have for the most part either been overlooked in this country or confounded with the animals of the preceding epoch. They have been derived from villages and tumuli of unknown antiquity, from refuse heaps and from caverns, which were at once the abodes and burial places of some early race of man. For this group of animals, and those from alluvia and peat-bogs, I

"Sur les Mammifères Pre-historiques trouvès avec l'homme dans Grande Bretagne," read at the Congrès Internationale d'Anthropologie et d'Archéologie Pre-historiques in Paris, 1867.

have proposed the term Pre-historic,* because they came into being at a time far beyond the ken of the historian, some of them also long after the close of the post-glacial era. Unfortunately I cannot separate those belonging to the stone folk from those living in the bronze age in Britain.

The remains

found in tumuli and villages will be first considered.

In 1862 I had the opportunity of examining the remains at Stanlake,† a small hamlet in Berkshire. They were found in and around the circular depressions and trenches which mark the site of a village probably of Keltic age. They consisted of large quantities of the bones, teeth, and skulls of animals that had been used for food, such as Bos longifrons in great abundance, the sheep or goat, the horse, red-deer, pig; and there were also the dog, cat, and martin. The metacarpal of a roe-deer had been polished, and exhibited the marks of friction by a string. Along with them were large quantities of flint flakes, rudely chipped lumps of flint and coarse pottery and ashes. There was nothing found to stamp the absolute date of the village, but it probably may have been inhabited at the time of the Roman invasion. In the tumuli of Wiltshire the same group of animals has been met with by Dr. Thurnam, with the exception of the cat and martin. In the same county also the skull of urus has been found underneath a tumulus near Calne, associated with remains of the deer and wild boar, and fragments of pottery ornamented with right lines. It is remarkable as the only authenticated instance of the recurrence of the animal with the remains of man in pre-historic times in Britain.

A vast number of bones have been dredged out of the Thames near Kew Bridge, along with polished stone axes and bronze swords. Their condition proves them to have belonged to animals that were eaten for food, the horse, Bos longifrons, pig, sheep, goat, red-deer, and roe-deer. There were dredged up also with them several human skulls that had been gashed and partially cleft, and Roman horse trappings. The river at Kew is shallow, and when we take the number of bronze swords into consideration, some of them even with the metallic end of the scabbard still on the blade, the human skulls and the Roman phaleræ, it is very probable that it was the site of a battle between the Kelts and the Roman legions. All that can be said with reference to the date of the accumulation of bones, is that it was probably anterior to the time of the Romans. A little higher up the river, near the new water

*Introd. Pleistocene Mammalia." Part I., 1866. Paleontographical Society. "Archæologia," vol. xxxvii. p. 363. "Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries," vol. iv. p. 93.

"Fossil Skull of Ox." By Henry Woods, A.L.S. 4to. London, 1839.

works, a similar deposit of bones was discovered in the beginning of the year 1867. I found on examination that large oaken piles had been driven into the gravel which anciently formed the bottom of the Thames, and that a quantity of brushwood, principally of willow, had been pressed in between them. On the top was a large quantity of bones, broken more or less for food, and belonging principally to Bos longifrons. The whole was covered with alluvium from four to five feet in thickness. It is very probable in this case that the piles are the remains of dwellings somewhat similar to those in the Swiss lakes. There were, however, no fragments of pottery and no implements, the only human remains being some of the long bones.

We will now pass on to the consideration of the pre-historic caverns in Britain which have afforded traces of the abode of man. In 1859 I explored a small cave at the head of Cheddar pass in Somersetshire. The mammalia found in it consisted of the wolf, fox, badger, wild boar, goat, roebuck, Bos longifrons, and horse. A human skull, also from this cave, is preserved in the Oxford Museum, which is very well developed, and may have belonged to a person of considerable capacity. During the exploration of caverns in Somersetshire by Mr. Sanford and myself, in 1863,* a second cavern of pre-historic age came before our notice, also in the mountain limestone of the Mendip range in Burrington Combe, about twelve miles from Bristol. It was situated high up in the ravine, and was very nearly blocked up with earth mingled with charcoal. It contained a large quantity of the remains of Bos longifrons, reddeer, goat, wolf, fox, badger, rabbit, and hare. In the lower portion of the cave we disinterred fragments of a rude urn of the coarsest black ware, devoid of ornament, and with the rim turned at right angles, together with a piece of bent iron, which more closely resembles those found strengthening the angles of wooden chests in Roman graves on the banks of the Somme than anything else we have seen. The accumulation of bones and charcoal prove that the cave was inhabited by man for some considerable time. The interment is clearly of a later date than the occupation, because it is made in the mass of earth, bones, and charcoal which resulted from the latter. The interval between the two is of doubtful length. In the same year we explored another cavern in the same ravine, which consisted of two large chambers connected together by two passages not more than a few inches high. The natural entrance, but a little larger than a fox-hole, was in the roof of the first chamber, and through this we had to let ourselves "Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological and Natural History Society." 1864.

down into the cave. Subsequently we blasted a second entrance. The first chamber was at least half full of broken rocks, covered with a mortar-like mass of decomposing stalagmite. Underneath them was a group of four skulls, one of which belonged to the Bos longifrons, two others were those of a species of the goat tribe, approaching more closely to the Aegoceros Caucasica of Asia, than any other recent species in the oval section of the horncores, in their parallelism to one another, and their slight backward curvature. We have met with a similar form in a refuse heap in Richmond in Yorkshire,* and in the disturbed soil on which London stands, and M. Lartét writes me that he has detected it in a cave in the Pyrenees. In the absence, however, of the necessary materials for comparison from the museums of London, Oxford, and Paris, I do not feel justified in proposing a new specific name. The fourth skull belonged to the pig, and had a round hole in the frontals rather larger than a florin, which had the appearance of being made by human hands.

The presence of the lower jaws with the skulls indicates that they were deposited in the cavern while the ligaments still bound them together. They were all more or less covered with decaying stalagmite. The outer chamber was remarkable for the absence of earth of any kind, except underneath the hole in the roof, where there was a very little; while the inner one, running in the same slope, has its lower end entirely blocked up by a fine red earth, deposited by a stream which flows during heavy rains. Between the stones on the floor were numerous bones and teeth of wolf, fox, mole, arvicola, badger, bat, along with a metacarpal of red-deer and the remains of birds. How the animal remains were introduced, for they exhibit no marks of gnawing, and there are no fragments of charcoal in the cave, or any other traces of man, is altogether a matter of conjecture: but the fact of finding the skulls in one group, coupled with the presence of the hole in the frontal of the pig, leads us to believe that they have been introduced by the hand of man. The entrance was far too small to admit of an ox falling into the cave by accident, and scarcely large enough for a goat or deer to squeeze themselves through; had they been brought in by wolf or fox they would have exhibited marks of teeth.

In 1863 Mr. James Parker explored a cave in the limestone cliffs at Uphill, near Weston-super-Mare, and obtained human skulls and bones, along with rude pottery and charcoal. I have determined the presence of the following animals:the wild cat, wolf, fox, badger, Bos longifrons, pig, red-deer, dog, and water-rat. Most of the remains belong to young

* “Quarterly Geological Journal." November, 1865.