BONE- AND CAVE-DEPOSITS OF THE EEINDEEE-PEEIOD. 175 



attract the attention of a savage accustomed to construct his weapons for the 

 chase from hone or horn ; and accordingly we find at Le Moustier and Laugerie 

 portions of such teeth, and at Les Eyzies a portion of a tusk hearing traces of 

 human work. The plates of the molars, however, are detached, suggesting that 

 the teeth were already in a somewhat altered condition when deposited in the 

 refuse-heap. The metacarpal of the large Felis, which I have mentioned as 

 bearing cut marks upon it, I have not seen ; hut there is not much probability 

 of the animal being represented by only a single bone, had it been killed at the time 

 when these deposits were formed ; and there is at least a possibility of cut marks 

 being caused upon it by its being trodden in a mass of rubble all bristling with 

 flint knives. We may therefore, I think, for the present regard all the remains 

 of the older fauna as being of casual introduction unless possibly some of those 

 found at Le Moustier may be considered to have belonged to a deposit of another 

 character than that of a mere " kjokken-modding." Confining ourselves, therefore, 

 to the second group, of some members of which the remains occur in such abun- 

 dance, we still find that a vast change has taken place in the fauna of the country 

 since these deposits were formed. The Reindeer, the Aurochs, the Chamois, the 

 Saiga, have all now retreated, some to the extreme north, others to the forests of 

 Lithuania or Moldavia, or to the snow-capped summits of the Alps or the Pyrenees. 

 The Spermophilus has also disappeared. Whether we are to attribute this retreat 

 to a change in the climate or to the advance of cultivation and the persecutions of 

 Man, the process must necessarily have been slow. And yet, to judge from the 

 fact recorded by M. Lartet, that no Reindeer-remains are ever found associated 

 with the ancient Celtic monuments of Gaul, it would appear that the animal 

 which formed the staple food of the occupants of these Caves had already disap- 

 peared from the South of France, even in an early prehistoric period. The absence 

 of all domesticated animals, and even of the Dog, which has always been regarded 

 as Man's earliest companion, also seems to testify to a great antiquity for these 

 deposits. The fact, too, pointed out by M. Lartet*, that in a cave on Mont Saleve, 

 near Geneva, similar breccia occurs of charcoal and worked flints mixed up with 

 fractured bones of Ox, Horse, and Reindeer, while Reindeer has not been noticed 

 among the remains of any of the Swiss lake-habitations, seems to place these cave- 

 dwellings earlier in point of time. It must, however, be borne in mind that they 

 are in a district which, not improbably, civilization would be slow to reach, and that 

 it does not of necessity follow that the extinction of the Reindeer in Switzerland 

 and in the South of France was contemporaneous. The " bos cervi figura " men- 



* Ann. des Sciences Nat. xv. p. 227. 



