Cave water, charged as it is with carbonate of lime, in some way tends to preserve these remains; but it is a strange and puzzling fact, that frequently two bones from the same carcass, lying side by side, which have apparently endured the same treatment, exhibit such different results: one will be found as hard and fresh as on the day of death; the other in what cave hunters call a "biscuity" condition, ready to crumble into dust at a touch. Why this may be it is hard to say.
Another crux presents itself to Pembrokeshire cave searchers. How comes it that the caves situate in the little island of Caldy contain a vast collection of bones, representing large herds of mammoth rhinoceros, &c., while the forage produced on so small an island would prove insufficient to keep half-a-dozen of these great mammals for a week?
Professor Boyd Dawkins, in his interesting work, Cave Hunting, answers this question:—
The discovery of Mammoth, Rhinoceros, Horse, Irish Elk, Bison, Wolf, Lion, and Bear, in so small an island as Caldy, indicates that a considerable change has taken place in the relation of the land to the sea in that district since those animals were alive, It would have been impossible for so many, and such large animals, to have obtained food on so small an island. It may therefore be reasonably concluded that when they perished in the fissures Caldy was not an island, but a precipitous hill, overlooking the broad valley now covered by the Bristol Channel, but then affording abundant pasture. The same inference may therefore be drawn from the vast number of animals found in the Gower caves, which could not have been supported by the scant herbage afforded by the limestone hills of that district. We must therefore picture to ourselves, a fertile plain occupying the whole of the Bristol Channel and supporting herds of reindeer, horses, bisons, many elephants and rhinoceroses, and now and then being traversed by a stray hippopotamus, which wonld afford prey to the lions, bears, and hyænas inhabiting the accessible caves, as well as to their great enemy and destroyer man.[1]
The Professor goes on to prove that this was no local phenomenon, but part of a general elevation that affected the whole of north-western Europe. His arguments are the identity of the pleistocene British Fauna with that found on the continent of Europe, and the innumerable pleistocene remains dredged up from the bed of the German Ocean, by fishermen while trawling. This, he might have added, occurs now and then in Carmarthen Bay. But the Pembrokeshire jetsam and flotsam is as nothing when compared with the findings on the East Coast. If we could see the sea bottom there, it must resemble the track of a retreating army, excepting that the line of march is defined by the great bones of huge mammoths instead of dead men, dead horses, guns, and cast-off garments; perhaps this may really have been the line of retreat for the pleistocene herds, may be they, and their master, paleolithic man, flourished in the wilds of Siberia long after all memory concerning them had died out in West Wales.
It is generally believed that the earth’s surface has sunk about too fathoms since the days of the great mammals. If so, the nearest sea-shore to Tenby in those times would be a point about 120 miles to the south-west of Cape Clear, in Ireland, where the Atlantic deepens suddenly from 100 fathoms to 2000. This theory is immensely strengthened by the fact that Captain White dredged up a shell of the fresh-water mussel (unio pictorum) from a depth of water something between 50 and 100 fathoms, and about 200 miles south-west of the Land's End. Here then was the mouth of a great river, which perhaps received as tributaries all the streams of southern England and northern France, west of the Straits of Dover. The bank at this point forming the watershed. The rivers now falling into the German Ocean from England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, running north, either traversed the great tract of land which is now covered by the sea, and found an
- ↑ Cave Hunting, by W. Boyd Dawkins, F.G.S., F.S.A.; Macmillan, 1874; p, 289.
