. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology. THE PROBLEM OE MAN'S ANTIQUITY 107 His curiosity aroused, he dug a trench into the hillside and revealed a cave whose mouth had been closed by a vertical slab of limestone, and behind which there was a cavity almost filled with human bones representing seventeen skeletons of almost all ages. The mayor of Aurignac decreed that all the human bones must be reburied in the local Christian cemetery. The labourer's trench had also brought to light some bones of extinct animals and bone carvings. When Edouard Lartet, a lawyer who had turned
. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology. THE PROBLEM OE MAN'S ANTIQUITY 107 His curiosity aroused, he dug a trench into the hillside and revealed a cave whose mouth had been closed by a vertical slab of limestone, and behind which there was a cavity almost filled with human bones representing seventeen skeletons of almost all ages. The mayor of Aurignac decreed that all the human bones must be reburied in the local Christian cemetery. The labourer's trench had also brought to light some bones of extinct animals and bone carvings. When Edouard Lartet, a lawyer who had turned to palaeontology and prehistory, heard of these finds eight years later he visited Aurignac and began digging into the deposits on the slope below the cave. He discovered a number of hearths and a fair number of flint implements, bone points and worked pieces of reindeer antler, together with bones of cave-bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and bison (Text-fig. 13). >> >,!, ^(^•tCi-Mim>'. Fig. 13. The cave at Aurignac as figured by Edouard Lartet. A, Burial chamber, presumed Neolithic ; B, Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian) occupation deposit. Lartet formed the opinion that the human skeletons and the glacial fauna at Aurignac were contemporaneous,1 but this view was disputed by other investigators. The final conclusion was that the human skeletons represented a collective burial of the Neolithic period on top of a disturbed cave deposit of Upper Palaeolithic Lartet found some detached human bones mixed with bones of glacial mammals in the substratum of the burial chamber. At his request, chemical analysis was made of one of the human bones, as well as of bones of associated rhinoceros and other extinct animals. All the analysed bones proved to contain the same percentage of nitrogen, that is to say they had all lost about the same proportion of gelatine. This is of historic interest because it was the first application of what has become known more recently as
Size: 2427px × 1030px
Photo credit: © Book Worm / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthorbritishmuseumnaturalhistory, bookcentury1900, bookcoll
