NATCHEZ ON THE MISSISSIPPI DISCUSSED.
Question as to the Authenticity of the Fossil Man of Denise,
near Le Puy-en-Velay, considered.
Antiquity of the Human Race implied by that Fossil.
Successive Periods of Volcanic Action in Central France.
With what Changes in the Mammalian Fauna they correspond.
The Elephas meridionalis anterior in Time to the Implement-bearing
Gravel of St. Acheul.
Authenticity of the Human Fossil of Natchez on the Mississippi
discussed.
The Natchez Deposit, containing Bones of Mastodon and Megalonyx,
probably not older than the Flint Implements of St. Acheul.
Among the fossil remains of the human species supposed to have claims to
high antiquity, and which have for many years attracted attention, two
of the most prominent examples are:--
First--"The fossil man of Denise," comprising the remains of more
than one skeleton, found in a volcanic breccia near the town of Le
Puy-en-Velay, in Central France.
Secondly--The fossil human bone of Natchez, on the Mississippi, supposed
to have been derived from a deposit containing remains of Mastodon
and Megalonyx. Having carefully examined the sites of both of these
celebrated fossils, I shall consider in this chapter the nature of the
evidence on which the remote date of their entombment is inferred.
FOSSIL MAN OF DENISE.
An account of the fossil remains, so called, was first published in 1844
by M. Aymard of Le Puy, a writer of deservedly high authority both as a
palaeontologist and archaeologist.*
(* "Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France" 1844, 1845,
1847.)
M. Pictet, after visiting Le Puy and investigating the site of the
alleged discovery, was satisfied that the fossil bones belonged to the
period of the last volcanic eruptions of Velay; but expressly stated in
his important treatise on palaeontology that this conclusion, though it
might imply that Man had co-existed with the extinct elephant, did not
draw with it the admission that the human race was anterior in date
to the filling of the caverns of France and Belgium with the bones of
extinct mammalia.*
(* "Traite de Paleontologie" volume 1 1853 page 152.)
At a meeting of the "Scientific Congress" of France, held at Le Puy in
1856, the question of the age of the Denise fossil bones was fully gone
into, and in the report of their proceedings published in that year, the
opinions of some of the most skilful osteologists respecting the point
in controversy are recorded. The late Abbe Croizet, a most experienced
collector of fossil bones in the volcanic regions of Central France, and
an able naturalist, and the late M. Laurillard, of Paris, who assisted
Cuvier in modelling many fossil bones, and in the arrangement of the
museum of the Jardin, declared their opinion that the specimen preserved
in the museum of Le Puy is no counterfeit. They believed the human bones
to have been enveloped by natural causes in the tufaceous matrix in
which we now see them.
In the year 1859, Professor Hebert and M. Lartet visited Le Puy,
expressly to investigate the same specimen, and to inquire into the
authenticity of the bones and their geological age. Later in the same
year, I went myself to Le Puy, having the same object in view, and had
the good fortune to meet there my friend Mr. Poulett Scrope, with whom
I examined the Montagne de Denise, where a peasant related to us how he
had dug out the specimen with his own hands and in his own vineyard, not
far from the summit of the volcano. I employed a labourer to make under
his directions some fresh excavations, following up those which had been
made a month earlier by MM. Hebert and Lartet, in the hope of verifying
the true position of the fossils, but all of us without success. We
failed even to find in situ any exact counterpart of the stone of the Le
Puy Museum.
The osseous remains of that specimen consist of a frontal and some other
parts of the skull, including the upper jaw with teeth, both of an adult
and young individual; also a radius, some lumbar vertebrae, and
some metatarsal bones. They are all embedded in a light porous tuff,
resembling in colour and mineral composition the ejectamenta of several
of the latest eruptions of Denise. But none of the bones penetrate into
another part of the same specimen, which consists of a more compact rock
thickly laminated. Nevertheless, I agree with the Abbe Croizet and M.
Aymard, that it is not conceivable even that the less coherent part of
the museum Specimen which envelopes the human bones should have been
artificially put together, whatever may have been the origin of certain
other slabs of tuff which were afterwards sold as coming from the same
place, and which also contained human remains. Whether some of these
were spurious or not is a question more difficult to decide. One of
them, now in the possession of M. Pichot-Dumazel, an advocate of Le Puy,
is suspected of having had some plaster of Paris introduced into it to
bind the bones more firmly together in the loose volcanic tuff. I was
assured that a dealer in objects of natural history at Le Puy had been
in the habit of occasionally securing the cohesion in that manner of
fragments of broken bones, and the juxtaposition of uninjured ones
found free and detachable in loose volcanic tuffs. From this to the
fabrication of a factitious human fossil was, it is suggested, but
a short step. But in reference to M. Pichot's specimen, an expert
anatomist remarked to me that it would far exceed the skill, whether of
the peasant who owned the vineyard or of the dealer above mentioned, to
put together in their true position all the thirty-eight bones of
the hand and fingers, or the sixteen of the wrist, without making any
mistake, and especially without mixing those of the right with the
homologous bones of the left hand, assuming that they had brought bones,
from some other spot, and then artificially introduced them into a
mixture of volcanic tuff and plaster of Paris.
Granting, however, that the high prices given for "human fossils" at
Le Puy may have led to the perpetration of some frauds, it is still
an interesting question to consider whether the admission of the
genuineness of a single fossil, such as that now in the museum at Le
Puy, would lead us to assign a higher antiquity to the existence of Man
in France than is deducible from many other facts explained in the last
seven chapters. In reference to this point, I may observe that although
I was not able to fix with precision the exact bed in the volcanic
mountain from which the rock containing the human bones was taken, M.
Felix Robert has, nevertheless, after studying "the volcanic alluviums"
of Denise, ascertained that, on the side of Cheyrac and the village of
Malouteyre, blocks of tuff frequently occur exactly like the one in the
museum. That tuff he considers a product of the latest eruption of
the volcano. In it have been found the remains of Hyaena spelaea and
Hippopotamus major. The eruptions of steam and gaseous matter which
burst forth from the crater of Denise broke through laminated Tertiary
clays, small pieces of which, some of them scarcely altered, others half
converted into scoriae, were cast out in abundance, while other portions
must have been in a state of argillaceous mud. Showers of such materials
would be styled by the Neapolitans "aqueous lava" or "lava d'aqua," and
we may well suppose that some human individuals, if any existed, would,
together with wild animals, be occasionally overwhelmed in these tuffs.
From near the place on the mountain whence the block with human bones
now in the museum is said to have come, a stream of lava, well marked by
its tabular structure, flowed down the flanks of the hill, within a few
feet of the alluvial plain of the Borne, a small tributary of the Loire,
on the opposite bank of which stands the town of Le Puy. Its continuous
extension to so low a level clearly shows that the valley had already
been deepened to within a few feet of its present depth at the time of
the flowing of the lava.
We know that the alluvium of the same district, having a similar
relation to the present geographical outline of the valleys, is of
Pleistocene date, for it contains around Le Puy the bones of Elephas
primigenius and Rhinoceros tichorhinus; and this affords us a
palaeontological test of the age of the human skeleton of Denise, if the
latter be assumed to be coeval with the lava stream above referred to.
It is important to dwell on this point, because some geologists have
felt disinclined to believe in the genuineness of the "fossil man of
Denise," on the ground that, if conceded, it would imply that the
human race was contemporary with an older fauna, or that of the Elephas
meridionalis. Such a fauna is found fossil in another layer of tuff
covering the slope of Denise, opposite to that where the museum specimen
was exhumed. The quadrupeds obtained from that more ancient tuff
comprise Elephas meridionalis, Hippopotamus major, Rhinoceros
megarhinus, Antilope torticornis, Hyaena brevirostris, and twelve others
of the genera horse, ox, stag, goat, tiger, etc., all supposed to be of
extinct species. This tuff, found between Malouteyre and Polignac, M.
Robert regards as the product of a much older eruption, and referable to
the neighbouring Montagne de St. Anne, a volcano in a much more wasted
and denuded state than Denise, and classed by M. Bertrand de Doue as of
intermediate age between the ancient and modern cones of Velay.
The fauna to which Elephas meridionalis and its associates belong, can
be shown to be of anterior date, in the north of France, to the flint
implements of St. Acheul, by the following train of reasoning. The
valley of the Seine is not only geographically contiguous to the valley
of the Somme, but its ancient alluvium contains the same mammoth and
other fossil species. The Eure, one of the tributaries of the Seine, in
its way to join that river, flows in a valley which follows a line of
fault in the Chalk; and this valley is seen to be comparatively modern,
because it intersects at St. Prest, 4 miles below Chartres, an older
valley belonging to an anterior system of drainage, which has been
filled by a more ancient fluviatile alluvium, consisting of sand and
gravel, 90 feet thick. I have examined the site of this older drift, and
the fossils have been determined by Dr. Falconer. They comprise Elephas
meridionalis, a species of rhinoceros (not R. tichorhinus), and other
mammalia differing from those of the implement-bearing gravels of the
Seine and Somme. The latter, belonging to the period of the mammoth,
might very well have been contemporary with the modern volcanic
eruptions of Central France; and we may presume, even without the aid of
the Denise fossil, that Man may have witnessed these. But the tuffs and
gravels in which the Elephas meridionalis are embedded were synchronous
with an older epoch of volcanic action, to which the cone of St. Anne,
near Le Puy, and many other mountains of M. Bertrand de Doue's middle
period belong, having cones and craters, which have undergone much
waste by aqueous erosion. We have as yet no proof that Man witnessed
the origin of these hills of lava and scoriae of the middle phase of
volcanic action.
Some surprise was expressed in 1856, by several of the assembled
naturalists at Le Puy, that the skull of the "fossil man of Denise,"
although contemporary with the mammoth, and coeval with the last
eruptions of the Le Puy volcanoes [18], should be of the ordinary
Caucasian or European type; but the observations of Professor Huxley on
the Engis skull, cited in the fifth chapter, showing the near approach
of that ancient cranium to the European standard, will help to remove
this source of perplexity.
HUMAN FOSSIL OF NATCHEZ ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
I have already alluded to Dr. Dowler's attempt to calculate, in years,
the antiquity of the human skeleton said to have been buried under four
cypress forests in the delta of the Mississippi, near New Orleans (see
above, Chapter 3). In that case no remains of extinct animals were found
associated with those of Man: but in another part of the basin of
the Mississippi, a human bone, accompanied by bones of Mastodon and
Megalonyx, is supposed to have been washed out of a more ancient
alluvial deposit.
After visiting the spot in 1846, I described the geological position
of the bones, and discussed their probable age, with a stronger bias, I
must confess, as to the antecedent improbability of the contemporaneous
entombment of Man and the mastodon than any geologist would now be
justified in entertaining.
[Illustration: Figure 26. Alluvial Plain of the Mississippi]
(FIGURE 26. SECTION THROUGH THE ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
1. Modern alluvium of the Mississippi.
2. Loam or loess.
3. f. Eocene.
4. Cretaceous.)
In the latitude of Vicksburg, 32 degrees 50 minutes north, the broad,
flat, alluvial plain of the Mississippi, a b, Figure 26, is bounded on
its eastern side by a table-land d e, about 200 feet higher than the
river, and extending 12 miles eastward with a gentle upward slope. This
elevated platform ends abruptly at d, in a line of perpendicular cliffs
or bluffs, the base of which is continually undermined by the great
river.
The table-land d-e consists at Vicksburg, through which the annexed
section, Figure 26, passes, of loam, overlying the Tertiary strata f-f.
Between the loam and the Tertiary formation there is usually a deposit
of stratified sand and gravel, containing large fragments of silicified
corals and the wreck of older Palaeozoic rocks. The age of this
underlying drift, which is 140 feet thick at Natchez, has not yet been
determined; but it may possibly belong to the glacial period. Natchez is
about 80 miles in a straight line south of Vicksburg, on the same left
bank of the Mississippi. Here there is a bluff, the upper 60 feet of
which consists of a continuous portion of the same calcareous loam as at
Vicksburg, equally resembling the Rhenish loess in mineral character
and in being sometimes barren of fossils, sometimes so full of them that
bleached land-shells stand out conspicuously in relief in the vertical
and weathered face of cliffs which form the banks of streams, everywhere
intersecting the loam.
So numerous are the shells that I was able to collect at Natchez, in
a few hours, in 1846, no less than twenty species of the genera Helix,
Helicina, Pupa, Cyclostoma, Achatina, and Succinea, all identical with
shells now living in the same country; and in one place I observed (as
happens also occasionally in the valley of the Rhine) a passage of the
loam with land-shells into an underlying marly deposit of subaqueous
origin, in which shells of the genera Limnaea, Planorbis, Paludina,
Physa, and Cyclas were embedded, also consisting of recent American
species. Such deposits, more distinctly stratified than the loam
containing land-shells, are produced, as before stated, in all great
alluvial plains, where the river shifts its position, and where marshes,
ponds, and lakes are formed in its old deserted channels. In this part
of America, however, it may have happened that some of these lakes
were caused by partial subsidences, such as were witnessed, during
the earthquakes of 1811-12, around New Madrid, in the valley of the
Mississippi.
Owing to the destructible nature of the yellow loam, d e, Figure 26,
every streamlet flowing over the platform has cut for itself, in its way
to the Mississippi, a deep gully or ravine; and this erosion has of
late years, especially since 1812, proceeded with accelerated speed,
ascribable in some degree to the partial clearing of the native forest,
but partly also to the effects of the earthquake of 1811-12. By
that convulsion the region around Natchez was rudely shaken and much
fissured. One of the narrow valleys near Natchez, due to this fissuring,
is now called the Mammoth Ravine. Though no less than 7 miles long,
and in some parts 60 feet deep, I was assured by a resident proprietor,
Colonel Wiley, that it had no existence before 1812. With its numerous
ramifications, it is said to have been entirely formed since the
earthquake at New Madrid. Before that event, Colonel Wiley had ploughed
some of the land exactly over a spot now traversed by part of this
water-course.
I satisfied myself that the ravine had been considerably enlarged
and lengthened a short time before my visit, and it was then freshly
undermined and undergoing constant waste. From a clayey deposit
immediately below the yellow loam, bones of the Mastodon ohioticus, a
species of Megalonyx, bones of the genera Equus, Bos, and others,
some of extinct and others presumed to be of living species, had been
detached, and had fallen to the base of the cliffs. Mingled with the
rest, the pelvic bone of a man, os innominatum, was obtained by Dr.
Dickeson of Natchez, in whose collection I saw it. It appeared to be
quite in the same state of preservation, and was of the same black
colour as the other fossils, and was believed to have come like them
from a depth of about 30 feet from the surface. In my "Second Visit
to America," in 1846, I suggested, as a possible explanation of this
association of a human bone with remains of Mastodon and Megalonyx, that
the former may possibly have been derived from the vegetable soil at the
top of the cliff, whereas the remains of extinct mammalia were dislodged
from a lower position, and both may have fallen into the same heap or
talus at the bottom of the ravine. The pelvic bone might, I conceived,
have acquired its black colour by having lain for years or centuries
in a dark superficial peaty soil, common in that region. I was informed
that there were many human bones, in old Indian graves in the same
district, stained of as black a dye. On suggesting this hypothesis
to Colonel Wiley of Natchez, I found that the same idea had already
occurred to his mind. No doubt, had the pelvic bone belonged to any
recent mammifer other than Man, such a theory would never have been
resorted to; but so long as we have only one isolated case, and are
without the testimony of a geologist who was present to behold the bone
when still engaged in the matrix, and to extract it with his own hands,
it is allowable to suspend our judgment as to the high antiquity of the
fossil.
If, however, I am asked whether I consider the Natchez loam, with
land-shells and the bones of Mastodon and Megalonyx, to be more ancient
than the alluvium of the Somme containing flint implements and the
remains of the mammoth and hyaena, I must declare that I do not. Both
in Europe and America the land and freshwater shells accompanying the
extinct pachyderms are of living species, and I could detect no shell
in the Natchez loam so foreign to the basin of the Mississippi as is
the Cyrena fluminalis to the rivers of modern Europe. If, therefore, the
relative ages of the Picardy and Natchez alluvium were to be decided on
conchological data alone, the fluvio-marine beds of Abbeville might rank
as a shade older than the loess of Natchez. My reluctance in 1846 to
regard the fossil human bone as of Pleistocene date arose in part from
the reflection that the ancient loess of Natchez is anterior in time to
the whole modern delta of the Mississippi. The table-land, d e, Figure
26, was, I believe, once a part of the original alluvial plain or delta
of the great river before it was upraised. It has now risen more than
200 feet above its pristine level. After the upheaval, or during it, the
Mississippi cut through the old fluviatile formation of which its
bluffs are now formed, just as the Rhine has in many parts of its
valley excavated a passage through the ancient loess. If I was right in
calculating that the present delta of the Mississippi must have required
many tens of thousands of years for its growth, and if the claims of the
Natchez man to have co-existed with the mastodon are admitted, it would
follow that North America was peopled by the human race many tens of
thousands of years before our time. But even were that true, we could
not presume, reasoning from ascertained geological data, that the
Natchez bone was anterior in date to the antique flint hatchets of St.
Acheul. When we ascend the Mississippi from Natchez to Vicksburg, and
then enter the Ohio, we are accompanied everywhere by a continuous
fringe of terraces of sand and gravel at a certain height above the
alluvial plain, first of the great river, and then of its tributary.
We also find that the older alluvium contains the remains of Mastodon
everywhere, and in some places, as at Evansville, those of the
Megalonyx. As in the valley of the Somme in Europe, those old
Pleistocene gravels often occur at more than one level, and the ancient
mounds of the Ohio, with their works of art, are newer than the old
terraces of the mastodon period, just as the Gallo-Roman tombs of St.
Acheul or the Celtic weapons of the Abbeville peat are more modern than
the tools of the mammoth-bearing alluvium.
In the first place, I may remind the reader that the vertical movement
of 250 feet, required to elevate the loess of Natchez to its present
height, is exceeded by the upheaval which the marine stratum of
Cagliari, containing pottery, has been ascertained by Count de la
Marmora to have experienced. Such changes of level, therefore, have
actually occurred in Europe in the human epoch, and may therefore have
happened in America. In the second place, I may observe that if, since
the Natchez mastodon was embedded in clay, the delta of the Mississippi
has been formed, so, since the mammoth and rhinoceros of Abbeville and
Amiens were enveloped in fluviatile mud and gravel, together with flint
tools, a great thickness of peat has accumulated in the valley of the
Somme; and antecedently to the first growth of peat, there had been time
for the extinction of a great many mammalia, requiring, perhaps, a lapse
of ages many times greater than that demanded for the formation of 30
feet of peat, for since the earliest growth of the latter there has been
no change in the species of mammalia in Europe.
Should future researches, therefore, confirm the opinion that the
Natchez man co-existed with the mastodon, it would not enhance the value
of the geological evidence in favour of Man's antiquity, but merely
render the delta of the Mississippi available as a chronometer, by which
the lapse of Pleistocene time could be measured somewhat less vaguely
than by any means of measuring which have as yet been discovered or
rendered available in Europe.