60,000-Year-Old Boy

According to legend in Lebanon, long ago a defeated army was driven into a cave in the valley of Antelias and walled up to die of starvation. The man who breaks into the cave, says the legend, will find whitened skeletons like the valley full of dry bones that the Lord showed the Prophet Ezekiel.*

For centuries, native treasure hunters have searched for that cave, reasoning that the walled-up soldiers must have carried valuable loot. One of the searchers found an empty cave in Antelias valley. Near by he noticed a similar rock formation, its mouth choked with debris. He dug a narrow shaft, and found not a walled-up army lying among its treasures, but at least a few chips of man-worked flint. The chips were spotted by a kibitzing U.S. archeologist, and a Jesuit task force attacked the cave to find what manner of ancient man had lived in it.

Skull with a Smile. Last week the S.S. Marine Carp got back to the U.S. bearing an archeological treasure. It was the skull of an eight-year-old boy whom Father J. Franklin Ewing, SJ. has posthumously named (60,000 years after death) Egbert. Most of the little cave boy's bones are still imbedded in a block of stone, but the skull is exposed. It has, thinks Father Ewing, "a very pleasant smile."

Digging down through the debris before finding Egbert was like journeying into the past with a time machine. The cave was a very desirable parcel of Stone Age real estate. Family after family had lived and worked in its shelter, gradually raising the floor level with dirt and refuse. In the upper layers tools and weapons were comparatively sophisticated. Grinding stones showed that Neolithic exquisites had used pigments for painting or cosmetics. Lower down, artifacts were cruder.

Compressed into 75 feet of debris were proofs of slow climatic changes as the great glacier to the north advanced or receded. During one long period the cave dwellers ate snails, heaping the empty shells around the dinner table. At another, the ancient hunters fed their families on rhinoceros meat. Father Ewing believes that the cave deposits give an accurate chronology of climate and cultural changes in the ancient Near East.

Father Was Human. Some 37 feet down, Father Ewing found Egbert. His little body must have been buried right at home by affectionate elders and gradually covered with material which lime-charged seepage turned to hard stone. He is an Aurignacian boy, genuinely human but following closely in period the semi-human Neanderthals. In fact, he may be a link between the two types. Perhaps his Aurignacian father captured a lowbrowed Neanderthal girl, kept her as a slave, and had a child by her.

* Ezekiel 37.

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