Earth in Upheaval Revisited – Part 6
While researching the previous section of Earth in Upheaval, Sea and Land Changed Places, Immanuel Velikovsky consulted Georges Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth. On page 292 he would have come across the following passage:
Bears are of rare occurrence in alluvial strata. Remains of the large species of the caves (U. spelæus), are said, however, to have been found in Austria and Hainaut ; and in Tuscany there are bones of a particular species, remarkable for its compressed canine teeth (U. cultridens). The hyenas are more frequently met with. We have remains of them in France, found along with bones of elephants and rhinoceroses. A cave has lately been discovered in England, which contained prodigious quantities of them, where they were found of every age, and of which the soil presented even their excrements in a sufficient state of preservation to be easily recognised. It would appear that they had long lived there, and that it had been by them that the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, oxen, deer, and various animals of the class of glires, which are found along with them, and which bear evident marks of their teeth, had been dragged into the cave. But what must have been the soil of England, when these enormous animals lived upon it, and constituted the prey of ferocious beasts! These caves contain also bones of tigers, wolves and foxes; but the remains of bears are of excessively rare occurrence in them. [Footnote: See Mr Buckland’s excellent work, entitled Reliquiæ Diluvianæ.] (Cuvier, Kerr & Jameson 292-293)
A few lines later, Cuvier added:
These are the principal animals, the remains of which have been found in that mass of earth, sand, and mud, that Diluvium, which everywhere covers our large plains, fills our caverns, and chokes up the fissures in many of our rocks. They incontestibly formed the population of the continents, at the epoch of the great catastrophe which has destroyed their races, and which has prepared the soil, on which the animals of the present day subsist. (Cuvier, Kerr & Jameson 293-294)
In the source which Cuvier cited, William Buckland’s Reliquiae Diluvianae, Buckland used the geological term diluvium so often that he considered it necessary to define it at the very outset of the work:
As I shall have frequent occasion to make use of the word diluvium, it may be necessary to premise, that I apply it to those extensive and general deposits of superficial loam and gravel, which appear to have been produced by the last great convulsion that has affected our planet; and that with regard to the indications afforded by geology of such a convulsion, I entirely coincide with the views of M. Cuvier, in considering them as bearing undeniable evidence of a recent and transient inundation. On these grounds I have felt myself fully justified in applying the epithet diluvial, to the results of this great convulsion; of antediluvial, to the state of things immediately preceding it; and postdiluvial, or alluvial, to that which succeeded it, and has continued to the present time ... (Buckland 1823:2)
William Buckland
William Buckland was Vice President of the Geological Society of London and Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford University. A theologian—he was the Dean of Westminster for the last eleven years of his life—Buckland was an eccentric type of the British academic who believed that Holy Scripture could be reconciled with modern science. Unlike the fundamentalists who rejected James Hutton’s concept of deep time—according to which the history of the Earth was to be measured in millions rather than thousands of years—Buckland accepted the longevity of our world. As a proponent of what is now called Gap Creationism, he believed that Genesis 1:1 described the original creation of the World at some point in the remote past, while Genesis 1:2 ff described a second act of creation in six days that took place about six thousand years ago. The gap between these two acts of creation could be stretched at will to accommodate the dinosaurs and other species which had flourished and gone extinct long before the Biblical Flood.
The first fifty-one pages of Reliquiae Diluvianae are devoted to the famous Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire, in which a plethora of bones of numerous species were found. As several of these animals were not native to Britain—hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros, bison, bear, tiger, hyena—it was surmised that they had died elsewhere during the Flood and that subsequently their bones had been swept into the cave by the floodwaters. Buckland visited the cave in 1821 to investigate this hypothesis, but the evidence he uncovered did not support it. He concluded that the animals in question had been native to Britain in some remote epoch, that their bones had been dragged into the cave by scavenging hyenas, and that the Flood had subsequently covered them with diluvial loam, and transformed the local environment to such an extent that many of these species could no longer subsist in this part of the World.
Buckland published the results of his observations in 1822 in a paper which he read before the Royal Society of London. His subsequent account in Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) was largely unchanged.
Making His Case
It is obvious that Cuvier led Velikovsky to Buckland, a committed catastrophist. What is less easy to explain is why Velikovsky cites Buckland’s work on Kirkdale Cave in Earth in Upheaval. Although Buckland continued to argue for recent catastrophes in the history of the planet, including the Biblical Flood, his paper on Kirkdale Cave concluded that the accumulation of multifarious bones in this particular cavern did not involve anything more catastrophic than scavenging by local hyenas. Nevertheless, Buckland did agree with Cuvier that the presence of these animals in Britain was indicative of a dramatic alteration of the climate, and he accepted that this alteration was sudden and recent:
At present I am concerned only to establish two important facts, 1st, that there has been a recent and general inundation of the globe; and, 2d, that the animals whose remains are found interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high north latitudes, and not drifted to their present place from equatorial regions by the waters that caused their destruction. One things however, is nearly certain, viz. that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly; for how otherwise could the elephant’s carcase, found entire in ice at the mouth of the Lena, have been preserved from putrefaction till it was frozen up with the waters of the then existing ocean? Nor is it less probable that this supposed change was contemporaneous with, and produced by, the same cause which brought on the inundation. What this cause was, whether a change in the inclination in the earth’s axis, or the near approach of a comet, or any other cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the present memoir. (Buckland 1823:47)
Supporting Cast
In addition to Buckland, Velikovsky also cites the works of W B Dawkins, James Geikie, Georges Cuvier and E Lartet in support of the basic idea that the northern latitudes of Europe were recently home to many species of animals that today are either extinct or only found in remote parts of the globe. These scholars were among the first to benefit from the recent discovery of numerous hitherto unknown and unexplored caves throughout Western Europe. This was one of the favourable consequences of the Industrial Revolution, and the huge growth in coal mining which attended it.
William Boyd Dawkins
William Boyd Dawkins was a geologist and archaeologist. Velikovsky cites his 1869 paper On the Distribution of the British Postglacial Mammals in support of three related claims (Velikovsky 15):
- hippopotamus, reindeer and mammoth pastured together at Brentford near London
- Reindeer and grizzly bear lived with the hippopotamus at Cefn in Wales
- Lemming and reindeer bones were found together with bones of the cave lion and hyena at Bleadon in Somerset.
These facts were extracted from Dawkins’ Table of Distribution of British Postglacial Mammalia (which also included several preglacial species), for which Dawkins cites more than one hundred authorities. Among the data listed in this table are:
- The species of mammals discovered in the alluvial deposits of the Thames valley near Brentford in London
- Those uncovered at Cefn Caves in Wales
- Those found in a cave under Hutton Hill near Bleadon in Somersetshire, which was first explored in the 18th century by the clergyman Alexander Catcott:
| Species | Common Name | Brentford | Cefn | Bleadon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ursus arctos, L. | Brown bear | Yes | ||
| U[rsus] spelaeus, Gold. | Cave bear | Yes | Yes | |
| U[rsus] ferox, L. | Grizzly bear | Yes | ||
| Gulo luscus, Sab. | Wolverine | Yes | ||
| M[ustela] martes, L. | European pine martin | Yes | ||
| Lutra vulgaris, Erxl. | Eurasian otter | Yes | ||
| Canis vulpes, L. | Red fox | Yes | ||
| C[anis] lupus, L. | Gray wolf | Yes | Yes | |
| Hyaena spelaea, Gold. | Cave hyena | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Felis catus, L. | Cat | Yes | ||
| F[elis] (antiqua) pardus, L. | Leopard | Yes | ||
| F[elis] leo (var. spelaea, Gold.) | Eurasian cave lion | Yes | Yes | |
| Cervus megaceros, Hart | Irish elk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| C[ervus] tarandus, L. | Reindeer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| C[ervus] capreolus, L. | Roe deer | Yes | ||
| C[ervus] elaphus, L. | Red deer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Bos primigenius, Boj. | Aurochs | Yes | ||
| Bison priscus, Ow. | Steppe bison | Yes | Yes | |
| Hippopotamus major, Desm. | Giant European hippo | Yes | Yes | |
| Sus scrofa, L. | Wild boar | Yes | Yes | |
| Equus caballus, L. | Horse | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| R[hinoceros] leptorhinus, Ow. | Narrow-nosed rhinoceros | Yes | Yes | |
| R[hinoceros] tichorhinus, Cuv. | Woolly rhinoceros | ? | Yes | |
| Elephas antiquus, Falc. | straight-tusked elephant | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| E[lephas] primigenius, Blum. | Woolly mammoth | Yes | Yes | |
| Lemmus, sp. | Lemming | Yes | ||
| Lagomys speleaus, Ow. | Cave-pika | Yes | ||
| Spermophilus erythrogenoides, Falc. | Ground-squirrel | ? |
Cuv. = Cuvier, L. = Linnaeus, Gold. = Goldfuss, Blum. = Blumenbach, Ow. = Owen, Falc. = Falconer, Boj. = Bojanus, Desm. = Desmarest, Sab. = Sabine, Erxl. = Erxleben, Hart = John Hart
Source: Dawkins 1869:194-195
James Geikie
James Geikie was Professor of Geology at The University of Edinburgh for over thirty years. He is mentioned several times in Dawkins’ paper of 1869.
Velikovsky cites Geikie on the presence of early humans alongside these exotic animals in glacial Britain. In the passage he references, however, Geikie does not actually mention human artifacts, and even cautions against concluding that animals whose remains are found side by side in the gravel beds of the Thames valley were necessarily contemporaneous:
After a considerable accumulation of such deposits had taken place—many feet or even yards in depth, —the river might again gradually undermine and re-arrange them. The gravel would be pushed along and come to rest farther away, and so would it be with the sand and silt. Any animal remains, such as bones or teeth, which these older deposits may have contained would in like manner be rolled along and embedded in another position. Thus in a series of fluviatile strata like the Pleistocene gravels and sands, it is often quite impossible to tell whether the animal remains that lie side by side in the same stratum belong to species that were exactly contemporaneous, in the sense of occupying the same country at the same time. (Geikie 137)
He does, however, soften his opinion on the following pages:
But although it is unsafe to rely exclusively upon superposition as a test of the relative antiquity of fluviatile accumulations, yet as a general rule it still holds true that the beds which occupy the lower portion of any thick series will be, in the main, the oldest; while, on the other hand, those at the top will commonly be the youngest ... Now as it would appear that remains of musk-sheep and reindeer, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, hyaena, lion, elephant, hippopotamus, bison, and other animals belonging to the northern, temperate, and southern groups, occur at all levels in the Pleistocene river-deposits, it seems only reasonable to conclude that these groups must have occupied the ground alternately throughout the whole of the Pleistocene Period. (Geikie 138 ... 139)
Perhaps Velikovsky should have cited page 126 of Geikie’s Prehistoric Europe, which better supports his thesis:
An exhaustive examination of the gravels and loams in a number of the valleys in the north of France and the south of England enabled this geologist to demonstrate that they had been formed by river-action ... From these old “river-drifts” flint implements of undeniable human workmanship have been obtained in large numbers, and associated with them, in the same undisturbed strata of sand and gravel, numerous remains of the Pleistocene mammalia have been found ... There can be no doubt, therefore, that man and his congeners, the extinct and no longer indigenous mammalia, were in joint occupation of France and Southern England during the deposition of the ancient valley-deposits whose origin we are now considering. (Geikie 126)
W B Dawkins’ Cave Hunting of 1874 is cited alongside Geikie in support of the assertion that Hippopotamus, bison, and musk sheep were found together with worked flint in the gravels of the Thames Valley (Velikovsky 15), and here Velikovsky is on stronger ground:
The middle division of the pleistocene mammalia may now be examined ... It is represented in Britain by the mammalia obtained from the lower brick-earths of the Thames valley, at Crayford, Erith, Ilford, and Gray’s Thurrock, by those from the deposit at Clacton, and most probably by those of the older deposit in Kent’s Hole, and by the Rhinoceros megarhinus of Oreston. They consist of—
The discovery of a flint-flake in the undisturbed lower brick-earths of Crayford, by the Rev. O. Fisher, in the presence of the writer, in April 1872, proves that man was living while these fluviatile strata were being deposited. (Dawkins 1874: 415-416)
Georges Cuvier
Volume IV of Cuvier’s monumental Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes (Researches on the Fossilized Bones of Quadrupeds) is briefly cited in this same section:
The remains of reindeer lay with the bones of mammoth and rhinoceros in the cave of Breugue in France, in the same red clay, encased by the same stalagmites. (Velikovsky 15)
Cuvier was discussing the discovery in a cave near Breugue (in the French department of Lot) of the remains of some species of deer identical to the modern reindeer but for small differences in the morphology of the tibia:
J’avouerai cependant que ce sont là des différences bien légères, et sur lesquelles, tant qu’elles seront seules, on ne pourra asseoir, sans quelque incertitude, des caractères d’espèces; mais comment admettre que le renne, aujourd’hui confiné dans les climats glacés du nord, ait vécu en identité spécifique dans les mêmes climats que le rhinocéros? car il ne faut pas douter qu’il n’ait été enseveli avec lui à Breugue. Ses os y étoient pêle-mêle avec ceux de ce grand quadrupède, enveloppés dans la même terre rouge, et revêtus en partie de la même stalactite. (Cuvier 1823:94)
I will concede, however, that these are very slight differences, and so long as they are the only ones, we cannot, without some uncertainty, identify this as a separate species; but how can one accept that the same species of reindeer, which is now confined to the icy climates of the north, lived in the same environment as the rhinoceros? for it cannot be doubted that the former was buried with the latter at Breugue. Reindeer bones were scattered pell-mell alongside those of this great quadruped, enveloped in the same red earth, and partly encased by the same stalactite. (Cuvier 1823:94, my translation)
It is possible that Velikovsky found this passage in Henry Howorth’s The Mammoth and the Flood. Velikovsky never cites Howorth’s book in Earth in Upheaval, although Howorth himself is quoted several times. The Mammoth and the Flood is cited in Velikovsky’s unpublished work In the Beginning. On page 114 of Howorth’s text, where he is discussing this problem of cave deposits in which animals from different environments are found together, we come across the following passage, in which a few familiar names are dropped:
It has in the first place been argued that the animals did not live at the same time, but mark successive stages during the pleistocene age. This view has chiefly prevailed on the continent, but it has also been favoured by a school of inquirers in England, of which Mr. James Geikie is the head. In France students have supported the notion of a succession of stages marked by the presence of certain characteristic animals or the absence of others. In England the argument has been in favour of a number of temperate eras intercalated between a number of arctic ones, of in fact a number of interglacial periods. The continental theories most favoured are those of M. Dupont and M. Lartet; the one separating the pleistocene age into the Mammoth and the reindeer period, and the other into those of the cave-bear, Mammoth, reindeer, and bison. What do the facts say ?
Cuvier, whose prejudices were the other way, was long ago constrained to write of the remains of reindeer found with those of the Mammoth and rhinoceros in the cave at Breugue: “Il ne faut pas douter qu’il (the rhinoceros) n’ait été enseveli avec lui (the reindeer) à Breugue. Ses os y étaient pêle-mêle avec ceuix de ce grand quadrupède, envellopés dans la même terre rouge, et revêtus en partie de la même stalactite.” (Howorth 114)
The curious thing about this is that Cuvier never mentioned mammoths in connection with the cave in Breugue, only reindeer and rhinoceros: the mammoths were added by Howorth. Velikovsky also mentions mammoths: has he been mining Howorth for quotes? Note also that Velikovsky replaces Cuvier’s stalactite with stalagmites.
Édouard Lartet
In his citations of James Geikie and W B Dawkins, Velikovsky used the words worked flint. This precise phrase does not occur in either Geikie or Dawkins, but it is found in Velikovsky next source, E. Lartet, Reliquiae aquitanicae, pp. 147-48.
Édouard Lartet was a French geologist and palaeontologist. He was cited by Dawkins in his 1869 paper, and was also mentioned by Howorth. His explorations of the caves of Périgord in southern France were made possible by the assistance—financial as well as technical—of the wealthy English banker and amateur geologist Henry Christy. Velikovsky’s only citation from this work, however, refers to another cave at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France:
In France we have found the Hippopotamus in only one cavern, that of Arcy, where it was noticed by the Engineer Bonnard, who placed the specimens in our Museum of Natural History. De Vibraye found afterwards, in the same cavern of Arcy, numerous remains of Reindeer, accompanied by worked flint, and in the lowest layer a human jaw, associated with numerous remains of the great Bear, the Elephant, Rhinoceros, and Hyaena. (Lartet, Christy & Jones 147)
Velikovsky attributes this work to Lartet alone, probably because the passage he cites was written by Lartet alone. Reliquiae aquitanicae was actually begun by Christy around 1863. When Christy died in 1865, Lartet continued the work, and when he died in 1870, the book was completed by Christy’s executor Thomas Rupert Jones.
Conclusions
Velikovsky characterized these findings by quoting the prophet Isaiah:
According to the prophecy of Isaiah (11:6), in messianic times to come the lion and the calf would pasture together. But even prophetic vision has not conceived of a reindeer from snow-covered Lapland and a hippopotamus from the tropical Congo River living together on the British Isles or in France. Yet they did leave their bones in the same mud of the same caves, together with bones of other animals, in the strangest assortments. (Velikovsky 15)
The presence of reindeer and rhinoceros bones encased in the same stalactite in a cave in central France does seem to imply that these two species once lived here side by side, or that the local climate underwent a dramatic change from tundra to subtropical within a very short space of time. Either way, the uniformitarians have a riddle on their hands.
One thing is accepted even by mainstream academia: that within a geologically recent and short period of time the climate of Britain fluctuated dramatically. During the last few millennia, conditions in this part of the world were sometimes ideal for species of animals that are usually associated with the tundra (eg mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer), sometimes for species now found only in subtropical zones (eg hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, lion, tiger), and sometimes for animals that are now considered native to this region (eg sheep, otter, pine martin, red deer).
References
- William Buckland, Account of an Assemblage of Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Bear, Tiger, and Hyaena, and Sixteen Other Animals; Discovered in a Cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire, in the Year 1821: With a Comparative View of Five Similar Caverns in Various Parts of England, and Others on the Continent, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Volume 112 (1 January 1822), pp171-236, London (1822)
- William Buckland, Reliquiae Diluvianae [Relics of the Flood]: Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on Other Geological Phenomena Attesting the Action of An Universal Deluge, John Murray, London (1823)
- Alexander Catcott, A Treatise on the Deluge, [fn 360 ff], A Catcott, London (1768)
- Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes, Tome Quatrième, Troisième Partie, G Dufour & E D’Ocagne, Paris (1823)
- Georges Cuvier, Robert Kerr (translator), Robert Jameson (editor), Essay on the Theory of the Earth, Fifth Edition, William Blackwood, Edinburgh (1827)
- William Boyd Dawkins, On the Distribution of the British Postglacial Mammals, The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Volume 25, Part 1, pp 192-217, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London (1869)
- William Boyd Dawkins, Cave Hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves Respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe, Macmillan and Co, London (1874)
- Elizabeth Friend, The Lost Cave of Hutton, Axbridge Archaeological and Local History Society, (2016)
- James Geikie, Prehistoric Europe: A Geological Sketch, Edward Stanford, London (1881)
- Henry H Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood: An Attempt to Confront the Theory of Uniformity with the Facts of Recent Geology, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London (1887)
- Édouard Lartet, Henry Christy, Thomas Rupert Jones (editor), Reliquiae Aquitanicae: Being Contributions to the Archaeology and Palaeontology of Périgord and the Adjoining Provinces of Southern France, Williams & Norgate, London (1865-75)
- Immanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, New York (1955, 1977)
Image Credits
- Kirkdale Cave, North Yorkshire: Wikimedia Commons, © Martin Dawes, Creative Commons License
- William Buckland: Wikimedia Commons, Antoine Claudet (photographer), National Portrait Gallery, PD-Art
- Inside Kirkdale Cave: © 2014 Lily Hartley, Fair Use
- William Boyd Dawkins: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
- James Geikie: © The University of Edinburgh, Creative Commons License
- Georges Cuvier: Jacques (artist), Public Domain
- Édouard Lartet: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
