592 



W. BOYD DAWKINS ON THE MAMMAL-FAUNA. 



Fig. 1. — Incised Jig ure of Horse, i. 



The most important discovery of the handiwork of man is the head 

 and fore quarters of a horse (fig. 1) incised on a smoothed and 

 rounded fragment of rib, cut short off at one end and broken at the 

 other. On the flat side the head is represented with the nostrils and 

 mouth and neck carefully drawn. A series of fine oblique lines show 

 that the animal was hog-maned. They stop at the bend of the back, 

 which is very correctly drawn. Indeed the whole is very well done 

 and is evidently a sketch from the life. As is usually the case, the 

 feet are not represented. 



On comparing this engraving with those of horses from the caves 

 of Perigord * and from the recently described cave of the Kesslerloch t, 

 near Thayingen, in Switzerland, the identity of style renders the 

 conclusion tolerably certain that the palaeolithic hunters who occu- 

 pied the Creswell cave during the accumulation of the upper part of 

 the cave-earth were the same as those who hunted the Reindeer and 

 Horse in Switzerland and the south of France. 



A bone awl was also found, composed of the metacarpal of a Rein- 

 deer, and carefully rounded and smoothed ; it had been broken into 

 three pieces before it was thrown away. By a fortunate chance I 

 found two out of the three fragments. 



The pointed antlers may have been used by man ; but they may 

 also be the result of the action of carbonic acid in wearing away 

 the bruised surfaces, as we shall presently see. 



Of the flint implements it is only necessary to say that they are 

 all of the types which I have described, with two exceptions, the one 

 being an oval trimmed flake, and the other a double scraper of the 



The quartzite implements are of the forms already described : and 

 same form as those of the caves of Southern France and of the 

 Kesslerloch. 



of those made of clay iron-stone, only one demands special notice. 

 It is a small oval implement of the St.-Acheul and Moustier type, 

 blunt at the base and tapering to a rounded point (fig. 2). 



The numerous split quartzite pebbles are of the same sort as those 

 recently described by Captain Jones, U. S. A., as being in use among 

 the American Indians of Wyoming. He writes, " Certain articles of 

 a very rude character are still in use to some extent among our 

 western Indians, and even in the case of such tribes as have now 



* Reliquiae Aquitanicae. 



t See ' Excavations at the Kesslerloch Cave, near Thayingen.' By Conrad 

 Merk. Translated by J. E. Lee. Longmans, 1876. 



