34 REV. D. GATH WHITLEY, PRIMEVAL MAN IN BELGIUM. 
4 
Primeval Man. That there were naked savages in these remote 
times is, of course, certain, just as there were in Northern 
Europe in the palmy days of the Roman Empire.* But the 
men who frequented the caverns of France, England and 
Belgium, and who fought with the lion, the elephant, and the 
rhinoceros, were well clothed. The numerous bone needles, 
with well-drilled holes, which have been found in the caves of 
the Dordogne in Southern France, in Kent’s Hole near 
Torquay,! and in the caves of Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire,! 
all witness to the existence of the tailor’s art in primeval days. 
Roughly formed flints known as “ scrapers ” are common in 
nearly all the caverns in great numbers, and were doubtless 
used then, as they are now, by the Eskimo, § in cleaning the 
skins, which were designed for garments. Professor Boyd 
Dawkins even maintains, from the discovery of a carving on a 
bear’s tooth in the Duruthy cave in the Pyrenees, that the men 
of the early Stone Age|] wore gloves !1T But this is not all. In 
the recent discoveries carried on in the cave of Brassempouy in 
Western France, by MM. Piette and Laportcrie, carved 
statuettes were found of the greatest antiquity, and which 
showed that the earliest men wore dresses of cloth with tippets, 
and drawers confined at the waist with girdles, while their 
heads were covered with cloth caps, after the manner of the 
ancient Egyptians.** It is certain, therefore, that highly 
cultured races existed in those far-distant times, and the idea 
of a universal state of primitive human barbarism must be 
abandoned. 
A vast number of ornaments lay among the human relics in 
the cave of Chaleux. These were shells pierced for necklaces, 
small fragments of bright minerals, and miscellaneous gems for 
trinkets. Many of these had been brought from great distances, 
such as certain flints and fossil shells, which could only have 
been found near Paris and in Southern France. How came 
these foreign substances into Belgium ? M. Dupont thinks 
* The reader will recollect the description which Tacitus gives of the 
wretched state of the Fenni. Manners of the Germans , c. 46. 
f The Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain , by Sir John Evans, 
2nd Edition, p. 506. 
| Ibid., 524. 
Prehistoric Times , by Lord Avebury, 6th Edition, pp. 89, 90. 
|| i.e., the Palaeolithic Period. 
H Early Man in Britain , p. 211. 
** Bulletins de la Societe cV Anthropologie de Pans, Novembre-Dccembre, 
1894. 
