HOLMES J ABORIGINAL AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES PART I 91 



geological antiquity. Eeferring to his work in the Port Kennedy 

 cave, Bucks County, Pa., Mercer writes as follows: 



Six months' work, leaving the chasm incompletely excavated, had failed 

 to reveal traces of humanity in the deposit. If man had 

 [PortlvennedyCave, gristed at the period, we might have expected, not unrea- 

 sonably, that the waters which gathered togetlier and poured 

 into this tomb so many living creatures had seized him also, and that at some 

 unexpected moment .lur discovery of a fragment of his skeleton, a hand- 

 made implement of bone, a potsherd, or a chip of jasper would have 

 settled the much-vexed question of his presence in pleistocene America. But 

 no such sign appeared, and this fact is negative evidence of weight. . . . 

 Nevertheless, though our labor had thus no direct bearing upon anthropology, 

 Port Kennedy must retain a strong indirect interest for the student of primi- 

 tive humanity in the New World. As if preserved in a bottle the remains of 

 so many bears, cats, herbivores, rodents, and reptiles of extinct race help to 

 illustrate the conditions of the geological time immediately preceding the pres- 

 ent and known as the pleistocene, the period when early man is known to have 

 existed in Europe and in which he has been alleged to have existed in America.^ 



The results of Mercer's exploration of the caverns of Tennessee 

 confirm the evidence obtained from the caverns of other sections, 

 that the Indian tribes were the sole prehistoric occupants. 



The fossil sloth bones found in Big Bone Cave, Tenn., illustrate an investi- 

 gation at one of the points of contact between paleontology 



[Big Bone Cave, ^^^^l arclmeology. They explain an effort made during the 

 Tgoiigssgg 1 



last several years by the Department of Archreology and 



Paleontology of the X'niversity of Pennsylvania to settle the question of man's 

 antiquity in North America through a study of the association of human with 

 animal remains in caves. Turning away, for a time, from mounds, village sites, 

 and buried cities, we have sought the help of the naturalist in a systematic 

 attempt to penetrate the crust of recent earth under foot, to trace man through 

 a mixture of the familiar vestiges of such animals as the deer, the bison, the 

 bear, the beaver, the muskrat, and the wolf, still existing in the American forest, 

 and to follow him down into that older world layer next below called the 

 Pleistocene. There we have endeavored to find, if possible, his bones still asso- 

 ciated with the remains of the extinct mastodon, the mammoth, the tapir, the 

 giant beaver, and the fossil sloth.^ 



Peabod.y's explorations in a cave at Cavetown, Md., were equally 

 unproductive of traces of early man,^ and long-continued work in a 

 rock crevice near Cumberland, Md., by representatives of the National 

 Museum, though fruitful in finds of fossil mammals, yielded no 

 trace of man. Explorations in the caves of the Ozark region, 

 Arkansas, by Peabody and of the Wyandotte cave in Indiana by 

 Fowke were equally barren of results. It is true that Baird reported 



^ Mercer, The Bone Cave at Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, and Its Partial Excavation 

 in 1894, 1895, and 1896, p. 285. 



2 Mercer, The Finding of the Remains of the Fossil Sloth at Big Bone Cave, Tennessee, 

 in 1890, pp. 3G-37. 



' Peabody, The Exploration of Bushey Cavern, near Cavetown, Maryland, p. 5. 



