Note 14 — Chapter I · The Stone Age: its Duration and its Place in Time.

One of the masters of modern science, Cuvier, has said14: “Everything tends to prove that the human race did not exist in the countries where the fossil bones were found at the time of the convulsions which buried those bones; but I will not therefore conclude that man did not exist at all before that epoch; he may have inherited certain districts of small extent whence he re-peopled the earth after these terrible events.” Cuvier’s disciples went beyond the doctrines of their master. He made certain reservations; they admitted none, and one of the most illustrious, Élie de Beaumont, rejected with scorn the possibility of the co-existence of man and the mammoth.15 Later, retracting an assertion of which perhaps he himself recognized the exaggeration, he contented himself with saying that the district where the flints and bones had been collected belonged to a recent period, and to the shifting deposits of the slopes contemporary with the peaty alluvium. He added—scientific passions are by no means the least intense, or the least deeply rooted—that the worked flints may have been of Roman origin, and that the deposits of Moulin-Quignon may have covered a Roman road! This might indeed have been the case in the Département du Nord, where a road laid down by the conquerors of Gaul has completely disappeared beneath deposits of peat, but it could not be true at Moulin-Quignon, where gravels form the culminating point of the ridge. Moreover, the laying down of the most ancient peats of the French valleys did not begin until the great watercourses had been replaced by the rivers of the present day; they never contain, relics of any species but such as are still extant; whereas it was with the remains of extinct mammals that the flints were found.