300 GENERAL VIEWS ON ARCHAEOLOGY. 



even with respect to that, it could not be ascertained a priori, whether 

 the bones of the dogs which were found had belonged to a domestic or 

 a wild race. The following is the way in which they have been able 

 to solve the question indirectly. 



It was surprising not to find, among the exuviae of birds any but 

 the middle part of the long bones, the heads having been broken off 

 very irregularly. Whilst, numerically, the long bones form very 

 nearly the fifth part of the sum total of the bones of a bird, they 

 are in the Kjoekkenmoedding from twenty to twenty-five times more 

 numerous than the other. Whence comes this singular preponder- 

 ance of the long bones? It was thought at first that the ancients had 

 consumed on the spot merely the limbs of the birds, reserving the car- 

 casses for a stock of provisions at sea. This was rather far-fetched. 

 Mr, Steenstrup bethought himself of keeping some dogs in confine- 

 ment, and giving them for a certain time birds to eat. He then found 

 that all that the dogs left were the same long bones, such as the 

 Kjoekkenmoedding present. All the rest had been devoured. Some 

 other carnivorous animal, such as the wolf or the fox, might, it is 

 true, have done the same, although the wolf, for example, generally 

 drags off his prey, and does not devour it on the spot. But as these 

 numerous fragments of birds, thus gnawed, are found everywhere, in 

 all the Kjoekkenmoedding that have been examined and in .every part 

 of each of these deposits, 1 it follows, that the people were accompanied 

 by a domestic carnivorous animal, which is only represented by the 

 dog. This induction is confirmed by the abundance of gnawed bones 

 of quadrupeds. Nearly all the cartilaginous and more or less soft 

 parts of the bones have been irregularly subtracted. Often the marks 

 of the teeth that have gnawed the bone, are sharply defined. Thus 

 one rarely finds a shoulder-blade that has not been gnawed, or a rib 

 whose extremities are entire. 



The marks of knives which Mr. Steenstrnp observed on the bones of 

 the dog, led him to conclude that the primitive population ate this 

 animal, as is still done in many parts of the globe, in America, Ocean- 

 ica, Africa, and, as it would appear, even in Europe. Mr. Forel de 

 Morges has asserted that in the Riviera of Genoa they eat dogs, and 

 that rats are considered a delicacy there. 



They have not yet found in the Kjoekkenmoedding any traces of 

 those young aquatic birds, which are taken in their nests, and of 

 which there is at present a great consumption, in Jutland, for exam- 

 ple. It is a dish in great request, and very abundant in certain local- 

 ities ; and there are some islets, perfectly barren in other respects, 

 where the right to collect eggs and young birds produces a very hand- 

 some income. We might have been tempted to conclude from the 

 absence of the remains of young birds, that the primitive population 

 absented itself from the localities of the Kjoekkenmoedding from the 

 month of May to August. But it is more likely that the dogs caused 

 the disappearance of the smallest traces of the young birds, inasmuch 

 as they left merely the very hard middle part of the long bones of 



1 About forty have been examined minutely. 



