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EARTHEN VASE, FOUND IN THE CAVE OF FURFOOZ, BELGIUM.

[1.  Maclean’s “Antiquity of Man,” p. 87.]

{p. 348}

Here we have the evidence that the people who inhabited this cave, or some race with whom they held intercourse, manufactured pottery; that they wore clothing which they sewed with needles; that they used the bow and arrow; that they caught fish with hooks; that they ornamented themselves; that they cooked their food; that they engraved on stone; and that they had already reached some kind of primitive alphabet, in which signs were used to represent things.

We have already seen, (page 124, ante,) that there is reason to believe that pre-glacial Europe contained a very barbarous race, represented by the Neanderthal skull, side by side with a cultivated race, represented by the fine lines and full brow of the Engis skull.  The latter race, I have suggested, may have come among the former as traders, or have been captured in war; precisely as today in Central Africa the skulls of adventurous, civilized Portuguese or Englishmen or Americans might be found side by side with the rude skulls of the savage populations of the country.  The possession of a piece of pottery, or carving, by an African tribe would not prove that the Africans possessed the arts of engraving or manufacturing pottery, but it would prove that somewhere on the earth’s surface a race had advanced far enough, at that time, to be capable of such works of art.  And so, in the remains of the pre-glacial age of Europe, we have the evidence that some of these people, or their captives, or those with whom they traded or fought, had gone so far in the training of civilized life as to have developed a sense of art and a capacity to represent living forms in pictures or carvings, with a considerable degree of taste and skill.  And these works are found in the most ancient caves, “the archaic caves,” associated with the bones of the animals that ceased to exist in Europe at the time of the

{p. 349}

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PRE-GLACIAL MAN’S PICTURE OF THE MAMMOTH

{p. 350}

Drift deposits.  Nay, more, a picture of a mammoth has been found engraved upon a piece of mammoth-tusk.  The engraving on page 349 represents this most curious work of art.

The man who carved this must have seen the creature it represented; and, as the mammoth did not survive the Drift, that man must have lived before or during the Drift.  And he was no savage.  Says Sir John Lubbock: 

“No representation, however rude, of any animal has yet been found in any of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Stone-Age lake-villages.  Even on objects of the Bronze Age they are so rare that it is doubtful whether a single well-authenticated instance could be produced."[1]

In the Dordogne caves the following spirited drawing was found, representing a group of reindeer: