ON PRIMITIVE MAN : I. HIS TIMES AND HIS COMPANIONS. 251 



necklaces of perforated teeth and of fish vertebrae, together 

 Avith shell or bone ornaments, also some large flint imple- 

 ments, roughly chipped, thin and curved, were in the hands 

 or close to the skeletons. Mr. A. Vaughan Jennings, who 

 has described these finds {Nat. Science, No. 4), is inclined to 

 look upon them as of Palteolithic age, but at the same time 

 admits that they may well belong to the Neolithic age, or 

 perhaps to a transition period. However these disputed 

 (}ut^stions may be settled, we may perhaps rightly assume 

 tliat tlie cave men were nearly as careless of their dead as 

 are the Esquimaux, who leave the bodies of their relatives 

 unburied, the bones of man having been often seen mingled 

 with those of the Avalrus, the seal, the dog, and other animals 

 in their refuse heaps. 



NoAv this oft-repeated reference to the Esquimaux leads 

 us directly to the question, have these old Palaeolithic 

 hunters any living i-epresentatives ? As we have seen, many 

 of their implements, especially those of bone and of carved 

 antler, as Avell as the engravings on some of these, very 

 closely resemble the corresponding tools and weapons of the 

 Esquimaux and of some allied tribes of tliefar North. When 

 we also call to mind the habits of life, as revealerl to us by 

 the remains left in the caves, and consider what must have 

 been the state of their dwellings, very charnel houses in fact, 

 when we see few, if any, traces of formal burial of the dead 

 amongst them, the only race of man presenting anything 

 analogous to all this.is that race almost lost amongst the 

 Pohir snows and ice. M. Dupont, the Marquis de Nadaillac, 

 Professor Boyd Dawkins, and others have dwelt upon these 

 analogies, which, as they justly observe, are too numerous to 

 be merely accidental, and they conclude that there is an 

 actual blood relationship between the Palseolithic man and 

 those Northern tribes to which the Esquimaux belong. 

 These men retreated with the reindeer. How and when 

 that retreat was brought about, and the causes which led to 

 it, are as yet involved in the greatest obscurity. 



We find no intermingling of their remains with those of the 

 succeeding age, as we do in the case of these latter with 

 those of the age which followed it, a mingling witnessing to 

 the pressure of invading tribes, and I cannot agree with M. 

 Dupont, Dr. Verneau, and other writers, that there has been 

 a direct derivation of the Neolithic civilisation, from that 

 which preceded it ; or that the two were at any time found 

 side by side, as contemporaries, in these regions of the earth. 



