Prehistoric Horses of Europe. 103 



the line of old land routes, though long obliterated by inter- 

 vening seas, these "Eurafrican" peoples kept up their 

 original sources of relationship until the art of navigation 

 facilitated better means of intercourse. As the herds of 

 wild horses and reindeer, and other animals, on which the 

 Pala3olithic hunters chiefly depended for their living, gradu- 

 ally died out, necessity compelled them to find other means 

 of subsistence. In the regions to the north of the Pyrenees, 

 owing to the continued survival of their favourite animals in 

 this part of France, long after they disappeared elsewhere in 

 Europe, these Palceolithic hunters existed as isolated groups 

 till they became absorbed among people possibly belonging 

 to their own race, who meantime had adapted themselves to 

 the Neolithic methods and customs which reached them 

 from Mediterranean sources of culture. In the extreme west 

 of Europe we find in the kitchen-middens of Mugem, in the 

 valley of the Tagus, evidence of a people, probably as old as 

 the reindeer hunters of France, who lived largely on shell- 

 fish. According to M. Eibeiro (''Congres International, 

 etc.," 1880, p. 287) they did not possess any of the domestic 

 animals, but yet, among their food refuse, bones of the 

 following genera were identified — Bos, Cervus, Ovis, Equus, 

 Sus, Canis, Fclis, etc. Professor Sergi's hypothesis of a 

 " Mediterranean race " seems to me to offer the best 

 solution of the ethnological problems of Western Europe. 



5. As I have elsewhere discussed the ethnology of 

 Britain ('' Prehistoric Scotland," chap, xii.), it is un- 

 necessary now to say more than that the primary Dolmen- 

 builders of the British Isles belonged to the same dolicho- 

 cephalic " Iberian," or " Mediterranean," race just mentioned 

 above. It would also appear, according to the opinion of 

 the most competent archaeologists, that the horse was not 

 among their domestic animals until the Bronze Age ; but 

 whether the animal was then domesticated from a still 

 surviving indigenous wild stock, or imported from the 

 Continent by the first Celtic immigrants, there is no avail- 

 able evidence to show. Since then, the frequency with 

 which broken horse bones are found in the later tumuli, and 

 among the food refuse on Eoman and Romano-British sites, 



