CHAPTER II 



THE WILD TARPAN AND ITS RELATIONS 



SINCE the time of Cuvier it has been known 

 that teeth 'and bones of horses are of common 

 occurrence in the Prehistoric and other superficial 

 formations of the continent of Europe and the 

 British Isles, and consequently that wild horses 

 inhabited this area contemporaneously with the 

 mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the men of 

 the Stone Age. There is, moreover, abundant 

 evidence to show that during that long-past age 

 primitive man hunted these wild horses for the 

 sake of their flesh ; the long bones of the limbs being 

 split for the purpose of extracting the marrow, 

 while in some instances the brain-chamber of the 

 skull has likewise been fractured and opened in order 

 that the brain itself might be used for food. Nor 

 is this all, for some of the men of the Stone Age 

 have left in the caves which afforded them shelter 

 from the weather crude but life-like outline sketches 

 of the horses they hunted for food, and subsequently 

 domesticated ; these sketches serving to show that, 

 in certain instances, at any rate, these Stone Age 

 horses were closely allied to the existing tarpan, 



