u6 PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



is supposed to characterise the Eeindeer period, may reasonably 

 be accounted for by the fact that it would be more easily cap- 

 tured by a savage hunter than the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, 

 cave-bear, lion, or hyaena." * 



There is much force in these remarks, and one cannot but 

 feel that the considerations urged by Professor Dawkins would 

 be to a great extent unanswerable if the relative antiquity of 

 cave-deposits were to be decided solely by an appeal to the 

 evidence which he calls in question. But when we discover, in 

 such caves as contain a succession of several deposits, that the 

 higher beds are frequently charged with human relics of better 

 finish and more varied design than those of the lower strata, 

 while the reverse appears never to occur, we cannot in such 

 cases admit that his objections have much weight. We have 

 seen that in Kent's Cave the implements obtained from the 

 lower stages were of a much ruder description than the various 

 objects detected in the upper cave-earth and the black-band. 

 And a very long time must have elapsed between the formation 

 of the lower and upper Palaeolithic beds in that cave. Precisely 

 the same phenomena are met with in several of the bone-caves 

 in Belgium and Prance, and the conclusion is forced upon us 

 that in these particular cases the caves were tenanted in late 

 Palaeolithic times by tribes considerably farther advanced than 

 the savages who occupied them at an earlier date. Whether the 

 latest Palaeolithic tribes were the same race as the latter, who 

 in the course of the ages had gradually attained a somewhat 

 more advanced stage ; or whether, as there is some reason for 

 thinking, they may have been immigrants from some other region 

 who dispossessed the older inhabitants, we cannot yet say, but 

 future discoveries will probably decide. 



Again, it may well be admitted that the mere abundance of 

 the reindeer in the deposits of the so-called Eeindeer period is 

 no proof that the extinct mammalia such as mammoths, woolly 

 rhinoceroses, and so forth, were not living in great numbers 

 during that period. No doubt all those animals that were 

 1 Cave-hunting, p. 352. 



