CAVES AND THEIR OCCUPANTS. 
38 r 
the earliest, that in which man was a savage in the very 
lowest state of culture, with such tools only as he could 
roughly fashion out of the nearest pebbles, a single flake or 
two struck from their sides being sufficient to adapt them 
for their respective uses, whether as axes, or hammers, or 
scrapers. Then came the discovery of flint as a more -tractable 
material, and also giving sharper cutting edges ; and flint tools 
were gradually improved, and bone and other materials were 
also made use of. The men who used the more perfectly shaped 
implements, especially those made of bone, must have been 
in a higher state of civilization than those who had but a 
broken pebble; and the discoveries at Creswell, where the 
more finished type of implements is found above the ruder, 
show that the more civilized man succeeded the earlier savage 
race, or else that this latter, in the course of ages, improved in 
the arts of tool-making, and learnt not only to shape the flint 
Fig. 13. 
FRAGMENT OF RIB "WITH ENGRAVING OF HORSE (full size). 
Cave earth. Robin Hood Cave. 
more elaborately, but also to make use of bone for domestic and 
other purposes. What these Palaeolithic men were like we have 
no certain means of knowing, but it has been shown by a care- 
ful comparison of their implements and habits of life, so far as 
these latter can be ascertained, that they may not improbably 
have been of the same race as the existing Eskimos, a hardy 
race of hunters and fishermen, who have in the long course of 
ages been driven gradually, in company with the reindeer and 
other arctic animals, to more northern climes. It is strange for 
us to realize that these men once speared their fish in the ice- 
bound rivers of England and France, roaming with the changing 
seasons as far to the south as Switzerland, and to the north as 
Derbyshire and Yorkshire in England, in pursuit of such animals 
as the horse, reindeer, urus, bison, and even the rhinoceros and 
mammoth. It is strange indeed to realize all the wondrous 
changes of climate, physical geography, and of human history, 
that have taken place since that remote past, when man, the 
hunter and fisherman, made his home in the caves, and wandered 
through the far-extending forests and swamps of these countries. 
