The Cincinnati daily star. [volume] ([Cincinnati, Ohio]) 1875-1880, 1880-01-08
Prehistoric Man.

These earliest human inhabitants of
Haconby, who have left their rude weap-
ons among the river gravel or on the
hardened floor of the seward caves in
which they dwelt,, were black-skinned
savages, lower in development than the
lowest races of mankind now in exist
ence. Their features probably resemble
those of the Australian black-fellows;
but they had larger and coarser jaws, in
which their great canine teeth were
widely placed, SO as to allow room in
each row to receive the projecting fangs
of the opposite set.
+ Their foreheads, too, were apparently
low and brutal looking, while they
planted their feet less firmly, and stood
less erect than even the naked Andaman
Islanders of our own day. Altogether a
more sorry set of colonists than those
who first took possession of Haconby you
could hardly wish to see. Entering the
Peninsula of Britain at its broad south
eastern isthmus, the primitive black
men pushed their way along the coast of
the German Ocean, then a gulf like the
Baltic in our own day, and fed them
selves as they went with mussels and
periwinkles, or with the flesh of ami
mails which they killed with their simple
weapons.
They had no implements of iron or
copper; nothing but rude knives and
spear-heads of flint. Even these were
not ground and polished like the beauti-
fully-fnished greensboro hatchets from
the West Indies, which may be seen in
any of our museums, but were mere
roug-hewn ends of flint Clipped by a
few dexterous side-blows into the rude
sembance of a knife. Anything more
simple in the way of mans handicraft
can scarcely be conceived, so much so
that many inexperienced people who see
for the first time the weapons from the
Haconby caverns refuse to believe that
they are really the products of human
art. But those who have compared them
with others found in like situations else
where can not doubt for a moment that
they do veritably bear the genuine i'm
press Of the hand of man.
The black fellow crept cautiously along
the shore we may be sure; for the forests
of the interior were thickly stocked with
savage wild beasts, lions, bears, wolver-
ines, and other natural enemies of our
race. But generation after generation,
as their numbers increased, fresh colo
MES must have set out northward and
westward, family or two at time, in
search of caves in which they found
safety from the attacks Of their forestine
foes. Crossing the low-lying tertiary
jungle-lands, where Essex and the East
Anglican Counties now stand, and passing
through the like country of the Fen dis
trict and the Humber Valley, they
reached at length the Yorkshire Wolds
and the mouth of the Line.
The caverns of the West Cliff, which
they dug out by means of horn splinters,
offered capital shelter for little knot
of families, and the black fellows set
tied down quietly at Haconby as their
home. The wooded valley of the little
stream and the open moorland in the
rear supplied them with game in abund-
ance-elk, urus, bison and red deer; and
here they lived for vast and unknown
number of centuries, chipping the fints
of the cliff for their spears and arrows,
gnawing the bones of animals and
finging away the remnants on
the floor Of their caves, decorating
themselves with drilled ammonites and
fossil sea-urchins from the neighboring
shore, and fishing in the Line with rude
hooks of bone, almost too obvious one
would say, to deceive even the most un-
sophisticated Of primeval trout On the
floor Of their rocky shelters one may find
to the present day these relics of their i'll
du-try, matted together by earth and
water, but still testifying clearly to the
mode Of life led by the earliest colonists.
l have spent many pleasant summer
day in digging out the remains and ex-
amining their contents.
The English memorial to the late Prin-
cess Alice 6f England and Hesse ia tn