332 THE TUNDRAS AND STEPPES OF PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



and preserved at that time. Many of the so-called "rubble drifts" of 

 middle Europe— sheets of rocky rubbish which have traveled down 

 gentle hill slopes and spread themselves over the adjacent low grounds — 

 point to the former presence of great snow drifts, in and upon which 

 the rock debris traveled. These were not glaciers, but simply sheets 

 of neve-like snow, charged with and covered by earthy and rocky debris, 

 which kept moving outward, more especially in spring and summer 

 when the heaps were more or less rapidly melting. The occurrence in 

 this debris of bones of the reindeer and other mammals shows that the 

 deposits belong to prehistoric times. Again, certain phenomena con- 

 nected with the river gravels of the same period lead to the conviction 

 that the drainage was often interfered with by snowdrifts in tundra 

 times. The river valleys would seem to have become filled in places 

 with alternate sheets of congealed snow or ice and layers of gravel and 

 shingle. Long afterwards, when the interbedded strata of ice melted 

 slowly away, the associated river detritus quietly settled down, and 

 owing to the differential movement of the subsiding materials the 

 longer stones naturally arranged themselves in lines of least resistance, 

 so that now we find them most usually standing on end in the gravel 

 beds. 



Thus, apart from the evidence supplied by the bone accumulations of 

 the loss, we have good reason to believe that snowdrifts were of common 

 occurrence in middle Europe in prehistoric times. Doubtless most of 

 the snow which covered the plains of our continent in winter melted and 

 disappeared in summer, just as is the case in the tundras and steppes" of 

 our own day. The carcasses of animals that may have perished in 

 blizzards would thus most frequently become uncovered in spring, to be 

 devoured by hyenas, wolves, and bears, and the disarticulated skeletons 

 might often be bleached and weatherworn before they were finally 

 buried in loss. Nor was it only in plains and open valleys that sudden 

 death may have overtaken large numbers of animals at a time. In 

 tundras and steppes alike the wild and semiwild denizens of the plains 

 seek refuge from the drifting snow in the fissures, caves, gullies, and 

 ravines of the hills and mountains, where they are sometimes frozen to 

 death or smothered in snow. Herbivorous and carnivorous animals thus 

 often perish together, for in the presence of a common danger, whether 

 it be prairie or forest fire, or flood or blizzard — natural antipathies and 

 animosities are forgotten, and all alike struggle to escape. 



Man, as I have already mentioned, lived in middle Europe in tundra 

 times, and we have abundant evidence of his presence there throughout 

 the succeeding steppe epoch. Again and again his relics and remains 

 have been met with at all levels in the loss throughout central Europe. 

 Thus in the valleys of the Danube and some of its tributaries they have 

 been discovered in undisturbed loss at depths of from 20 to nearly 100 

 feet from the surface. Not a few of these finds evidently represent old 

 prehistoric camping stations — marked by the presence of quantities of 



