ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 227 



boughs, heather, rushes, and similar substances, taken 

 in as bedding, and also the husks and other debris of 

 vegetable food, may be added to the mass. Further 

 than the accumulation of such debris, which may indi- 

 cate several centuries of continued habitation, and the 

 accumulation of fallen stones which may have been 

 detached by frosts and earthquakes, there is nothing 

 to indicate the great antiquity of these caves and 

 shelters, except the want of metals, the presence of the 

 bones of extinct mammalia, and the coating of stalag- 

 mite covering the remains. 



A remarkable confirmation of this is the fact that, 

 while the physical characteristics of the people of the 

 Dordogne caverns, as well as of the man of Mentone, 

 are essentially those which would indicate American 

 or Turanian habits of life : they are also, according to 

 the elaborate comparisons of Pruner Bey, as given by 

 Christy and Lartet, similar in important points to those 

 of the modern Lithuanians that is, to an existing 

 European race, and one inhabiting the only country 

 where the otherwise extinct bison survives. These 

 Palaeolithic men are, therefore, not of an extinct 

 species, nor even of an extinct variety of man, but 

 identical with races still existing. 



If, then, we have to deal, in the case of these 

 ancient remains, with no extinct species of man, 

 but with a variety allied to modern races ; if [ he was 

 contemporary in the main with modern mammals j 

 and if some of those that are locally extinct existed 

 in Europe up to historic times, while the others 



