356 



SCARCITY OF MEN IN ANCIENT TIMES. 



ments obtained hitherto from the drift of the Somme Valley 

 probably does not much exceed 5000 ;* the settlement at 

 Concise alone (Lake of Neufchatel) has supplied about 24,000, 

 and yet has not produced a single human skeleton.^ Probably 

 this absence of bones is in part attributable to the habit of 

 burying or burning; the instinct of man has long been in 

 most cases to bury his dead out of his sight. Still, so far as 

 the drift of St. Acheul is concerned, the difficulty will alto- 

 gether disappear, if we remember that no trace lias ever yet 

 been found of any animal as small as a man. Even of the 

 elephant and rhinoceros, the ox, horse, and stag,J only the 

 larger arid more solid bones remain ; every vestige of the 

 smaller ones has perished. No one supposes that this scanty 

 list fairly represents the mammalian fauna of this time and 

 place. When we find at St. Acheul the remains of the wolf, 

 boar, roedeer, badger, and other animals which existed during 

 the drift period, then, and not till then, we may perhaps 

 begin to wonder at the entire absence of human skeletons. 



We must also remember that when man lived on the pro- 

 duce of the chase, there must have been a very large number 



* One of the tumuli in the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley is estimated to have 

 alone contained nearly four thou- 

 sand stone implements. This, how- 

 ever, must have been a very excep- 

 tional case. 



f Rapport a la Commission des 

 Musees, October, 1861, p. 16. 



J The bones of the stag owe their 

 preservation perhaps to another 

 cause. Prof. Riitimeyer tells us 

 that among the bones from the 

 Pfahlbauten none are in better con- 

 dition than those of the stag : this 

 is the consequence, he says, of their 

 " dichten Gefiige, ihrer Harte und 

 Sprodigkeit, so wie der grossen 



Fettlosigkeit," peculiarities which 

 recommended them so strongly to 

 the men of the Stone Age, that 

 they used them in preference to all 

 others, nay, almost exclusively, in 

 the manufacture of those instru- 

 ments which could be made of bone 

 (Fauna der Pfahlbauten, p. 12). 

 How common the bones of the stag 

 are in quaternary strata geologists 

 know, and we have here perhaps 

 an explanation of the fact. The 

 antler of the reindeer is also pre- 

 ferred at the present day by the 

 Esquimaux in the manufacture of 

 their stone weapons. (Sir E. Bel- 

 cher, Trans. Ethn. Soc. vol. i. p. 13U.) 



