STORY OF CAVEMEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 84, 6 October 1936, Page 16

STORY OF CAVEMEN

RECORD IN BRITAIN

DERBYSHIRE DISCOVERIES

FINDS IN PIN HOLE

Hidden beneath the too-learned name of speleologist the cave hunter has an exciting time of it, and something of the glamour of his pursuits has been conveyed to the public by the holding of the first annual conference of the British Speleological Association at Buxton recently, writes a correspondent in the "Manchester -Guardian." It is ages since the mammoth and rhinoceros roamed Derbyshire. Was man their contemporary? It was an issue that gave rise to much digging ir* Europe more than sixty years ago, when the theory of man's remote ancestry had not the acceptance it has today. It led to the first exploration ever undertaken with some such purpose in mind of the caves of Derbyshire by the Rev. Magins Mello, the incumbent of a Parish near Chesterfield. Virtually all that the country has yielded in the way of anthropological knowledge has come from the caves of Creswell Crags, on the borders of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and situated roughly between Chesterfield and Worksop. It was to Creswell Crags that Mr. Mello went, and, about 1874-75, examined first what has since proved a perfect treasure-house of ancient man, the now celebrated Pin Hole Cave. He found large bones which he did not understand. He supposed them to be the bones of extinct animals, and thus he got into touch with the late Professor (afterwards Sir) William Boyd Dawkins, who then took charge of the work. BOYD DAWKINS'S WORK. But Professor Boyd Dawkins did not excavate long in the Pin Hole Cave. He saw that there were larger and probably more profitable caves lower down the gorge, and on these he concentrated. Professor Boyd Dawkins dusr thre^ caves: the Robin Hood Cave, the* Church Hole, and the whimsically named Mother Grundy's Parlour. And largely as the result of his findings there he. was able to establish beyond question the fact that man was contemporary with those extinct mammals the mammoth and the rhinoceros. From 1875. onwards other excavations were carried out. Unfortunately, there was also a good deal of uncoordinated and sometimes inexpert work done by inquisitive pot-hunters, and it was not until recent times that the work was put upon a really sound and scientific footing. In 1921 the British Association, meeting in Edinburgh, acting jointly \Vith the Royal Anthropological Institute, set up a committee for the exploration of caves in the Derbyshire area. The conduct of the investigations was largely entrusted to Mr. A. Leslie Armstrong, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Fellow of the Anthropological Institute, who has been working under the committee ever since. SYSTEMATIC EXPLORATION. The first thing to do was to make a general reconnaissance of the Creswell Crags caves and to see what had survived the indiscriminate diggings and scratchings of the past. One virgin site was the platform in front of Mother Grundy's Parlour. This was the first job to be tackled, and in eighteen months over 2000 flint implements and bone tools were recovered from a space twelve feet by fourteen feet, which earlier explorers had missed entirely. This evidence showed the platform to have been occupied with fair continuity since Mousterian times. In other words, at least two glacial periods had come and gone since the platform was first inhabited. That was a start. In 1923 the systematic investigation was begun of the Pin Hole, where Professor Boyd Dawkins and Mr. Mello had excavated only the upper layers of the deposit for the first twenty-three feet. This work has been carried on continuously until June of the present year, when the excavations were completed and the cave scheduled as an ancient monument. Pin Hole Cave is today regarded by archaeologists as the most complete illustratian of cave occupation so far discovered in Britain, and an eminent Continental archaeologist, speaking at the recent Speleological Conference at Buxton, went so far as to say it is the best In Europe. Though the finds in it have not been exceptional in number, the scientific evidence they have yielded has been tremendous, and the result of its excavation is a .complete scientific record of the cave's occupation. THROUGH GLACIAL PERIODS. A type section of the deposit has been preserved in position at the rear of the cave, and is a record of the life of early man from, say, 50,000 years ago to about 10,000 B.C. It shows a depth of twenty feet, with records of three occupations in Mousterian times, separated by layers which indicate glacial periods. These Mousterian periods are succeeded by a deposit nearly, six feet thick belonging to the upper paleolithic period and sealed at the top with a layer of stalagmite, which formed the floor of the cave before excavation was begun. In Pin Hole Cave had been found the charred bones of bison, reindeer, and mammoth, flint implements, cooking stones; the egg of a large species of duck—broken at the end as if for the extraction of the contents—the bones of Arctic hare and fox, horse, wolf, pig, bats, frogs, and over thirty species of birds, as well as the skull of a full-grown cave bear. The most "human" find, however, is that of a piece of reindeer rib bearing at one end an engraved drawing of a masked

figure, half human, half animal, in the act of dancing some ceremonial dance. This is the first paleolithic drawing of a human figure ever found in this country. On one of the walls of the painted caves of Altamira, in Spain, is an engraved figure not dissimilar to the masked figure of Pin Hole Cave. This wall figure was considered by the Abbe Breuil, who found it, to be on» of the earliest known examples of the art of primitive man. (The paintings belong to a much, later period.) Through its association with other evidence the masked man at Creswell confirms the Abbe's view. It dates from the Aurignacian age of 25,000 to 30.000 years ago. One of the latest of Mr. Armstrong s finds is a bull-roarer, a bone implement (still surviving among civilised people as a toy) in use among primitive peoples, such as the aborigines of Australia, for initiation ceremonies. This was found in the middle Mousterian deposit and occurs tens of thousands of years earlier in time than any bull-roarer ever found before. METHOD OF EXAMINATION. The modern methods of exploring a cave are extremely nice. They miss nothing, or so one is apt to think. The deposit is examined in layers of about six- inches thickness and every thimbleful of earth is passed through a sieve, so that even such things as scales of perch and roach are retrieved. Each of the finds is marked in pencil with its depth in the deposit and distance from the datum point, so that, if necessary, they may all be restored to the relative positions they occupied before they were disturbed. Twenty yards of the Pin Hole Cave has been left unexcavated, a possibly rich legacy for the future investigator and Mr. Armstrong has now turned his'attention to the Boat House Cave at Creswell. for, apart from Creswell. Derbyshire caves have not yielded much really valuable evidence. No other cave has been excavated so scientifically and so thoroughly as the Pin £nd none so fruitfully. Meanwhile, there is to He no more indiscriminate digging. The Office Works is going to exercise its poweis to schedule every cave known to have a deposit likely to repay investigation, so as to safeguard it from those whose dSlry It is only right that this should be so. ApabTJfiWOT^th* ity does not allow the readers of the public's books to mark or tear them. Why should a national authority, allow the mutilation of that more dimly written Si irreplaceable book of Nature, the record of the rocks?