Brixham Cave appears to have long been the resort of hyænas, who dragged their prey into its main passages, and left there the gnawed bones of the rhinoceros, the fossil horse and ox, the reindeer, roebuck, great red-deer, etc. It included unmistakable traces of the mammoth, or other huge proboscidian, was visited by the cave-tiger (_Felis spelæa_), and finally became a favourite haunt of the great cave-bear (_Ursus spelæus_), as well as of two other species of bears, one of which seems to correspond to the _Ursus arctos_, or brown bear, and another has been supposed to be identical with the _Ursus ferox_, or grizzly bear. From time to time it was also visited, and some of its remote recesses explored by man. Thirty-six flints in all have been recovered in the different strata of the cave beds. A few of those are simply unworked flints; but twenty-three of them betray traces of human workmanship and use; and include knives and oval and lanceolate blades, closely analogous to implements found in the Cavern of Aurignac, in the Pyrenees, and in that of Le Moustier, in the Dordogne. Others, though mere flint-flakes, bear decided marks of use as scraping tools. Another implement is a round pebble of siliceous sandstone, weighing 1 lb. 3 oz., which must have been brought from a distance, and shows on the side opposite to that by which it is most readily grasped by the hand distinct evidence of its use as a hammer stone. One, and only one, object wrought from animal substance, a small cylindrical pin, or rod of ivory, accompanied the more durable flints. Some of those indications of the presence of man were found in the bottom, or shingle-bed, overlaid by undisturbed cave-earth rich in mammalian remains; and the entire succession of beds was overlaid by a layer of stalagmite in which bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other fossil mammals occurred.
It does not appear that Brixham Cave had at any time been inhabited by man. It has no accumulation of split bones or broken tools, nor any traces of the hearth, as in Kent’s Hole, or in the Caves of Dordogne and the Pyrenees. But the men of the mammoth period had resorted thither occasionally,—for hiding, it may be, or in pursuit of their prey; and thus dropped the worked flints which now reveal the evidence of their presence. There is no trace of human bones, or any indication that man fell a prey to the powerful wild animals which chiefly haunted the cave. But he explored its recesses, in one case at least, to a distance of seventy-four feet from the entrance; and unless we suppose him to have groped his way thither, when in search of a more effectual hiding-place from some human foe, it seems no unfair surmise that he carried with him the illuminating torch. The extinguished hearths of the French Caves, as at Aurignac and the Vezère, leave no room to question man’s early acquaintance with fire. Nor does it seem to me probable that, under the rigorous climate to which he was exposed in that remote post-glacial period, he could fail, as man, to employ the art of fire-making to alleviate his necessities, even as is now done under corresponding exigencies by the Arctic Esquimaux. Nevertheless it is to be noted that the flint implements found in Brixham Cave are of the rudest character; and like other specimens of the worked-flints of the men of the Drift or Cave periods, indicate a very slight development of constructive skill: unless, as hereafter shown from analogous American examples, there may be reason to regard many of them as merely in the first stage of manufacture into weapons or tools.