1 82 THE EARLIEST MEN 



MM. les Abbes A. and J. Bouyssonie et L. 

 Bardon.* 



Around this body lay a great number of well- 

 made implements of the period, and bits of the 

 red ochre with which we may reasonably conclude 

 that the members of the tribe, like other savages, 

 were in the habit of decorating their bodies. Fur- 

 ther, bones were placed over the head, in fact, as 

 Sollas says, " this was evidently a ceremonial in- 

 terment, accompanied by offerings of food and 

 implements for the use of the deceased in the 

 spirit world." And he continues : " It is almost 

 with a shock of surprise that we discover this 

 well-known custom, and all that it implies, already 

 in existence during the last episode of the Great 

 Ice Age." 



After this digression we may return to the ques- 

 tion of interment which may not in an over- 

 whelming number of cases could not have taken 

 place in a cave. Then the survivors must have (a) 

 dug a hole in the ground, or (b) in the side of a 

 bank, or (c) have heaped up a pile of earth or stones 

 or both a cairn in fact over the remains. It will 

 be observed that a similar result, so far as the 

 remains are concerned, might occur from natural 

 causes, and the first thing which has to be deter- 

 mined when bones of an early man are in question, 

 is whether they were interred or not, and this is 

 by no means always a problem easy of solution. 



* L Anthropologie^ 1908, p. 513. Perhaps one may be allowed 

 to call attention here to the extraordinary number of facts in con- 

 nection with prehistoric archaeology which have been brought to 

 light by Catholic clerics, e.g., Breuil, McEnery, and those men- 

 tioned above cum multis altis. 



