70 THE FOSSIL SLOTH AT BIG BONE CAVE, TENN. [Jan. 5, 



Had these bones lain within reach of the percolating chloride of 

 lime, this mineral filling the cavities vacated by animal matter 

 might have hardened them as cave bones are often hardened, but 

 lying where we found them we may well doubt whether they ever 

 would have fossilized. Under such circumstances, let us believe 

 that a nut, a seed, a leaf, or even a fly, would preserve the fresh- 

 ness of its structure for a long time, and hence that the interestmg 

 remains found with the bones may not be so modern as they seem. 

 With this reservation, and without attempting to deal definitely 

 with dates, it seems safe to class the evidence not only as geologi- 

 cally but as historically recent. Not more ancient in appearance, 

 not more brittle than the bones of animals found by me in the In- 

 dian midden-heaps of several caves, the position of the bones in the 

 upper and later part of the rubbish, their gnawed condition, and 

 their association, as described above, offer nowhere a suggestion of 

 great antiquity. Separated from all association with the remains of 

 other Pleistocene animals, they fail to lend the color of antiquity to 

 the situation. On the contrary, like the peccary bones found at 

 Durham cave,^ like the remains of tapir and mylodon discovered in 

 Lookout cavern,'^ they seem modernized by their surroundings. 

 Let us infer that we have found a species which, long surviving its 

 day and earlier relationship, had become an anomaly ; that we 

 have modernized the fossil sloth, if we have not definitely increased 

 the antiquity of the Indian hunter, whose first coming the animal 

 doubtless witnessed in the woods of Tennessee. 



1 An exploration of Durham cave by H. C. Mercer. Publications of University of 

 Pennsylvania, Vol. vi. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1897. 



2 Bulletin distributed by the Department of American and Prehistoric Archaeology 

 at the University of Pennsylvania. January, 1894. 



