204 Man and the Pleistocene Mammals of Great Britain. 



form, with a flat base and cutting edge all round, somewhat 

 similar to a cast, in my possession, of one from the cave of 

 Aurignac. All these were found either on or within two feet 

 of the floor of the cave. They were imbedded in red earth, con- 

 taining large stones, and enormous quantities of the remains of 

 mammalia. Above the flint implements, in some places, were 

 layers of comminuted bone and coprolites of hysena ; and in 

 and around these was the greatest quantity of bones. These 

 layers indicated old floors. I continued the excavations up 

 to the year 1 866, and the list of mammals which I have de- 

 termined, is second only to that of Kent's Hole. It com- 

 prises cave lion, cave hy^na, wolf, fox, badger, cave bear, 

 brown bear, grizzly bear, urus, bison, Irish elk, stag, reindeer, 

 mammoth, horse, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, JR. leptorhinus of 

 Owen, water-rat, and lemming. 



There was clear evidence that the cavern had been in- 

 habited by hygenas, and that the animals to which the remains 

 belonged had fallen a prey to them. The traces of old floors 

 above the flint implements prove that they inhabited it after 

 the departure of man. Such as this is the evidence of the 

 coexistence of man with the Pleistocene mammals, afforded 

 by the contents of caverns in Britain. The small proportion 

 which those caverns that contain the traces of man bear to 

 those in which no traces of him have been found, shows that 

 he was small in point of numbers as compared with most of 

 the other animals. 



Out of the thirty caverns explored in Great Britain, the 

 contents of which I have classified, four only have yielded 

 human remains ; while out of forty river-deposits containing 

 mammalia, only three have furnished any trace of man. Had 

 man been very abundant in those days, we might certainly 

 have hoped to have found his implements more widely spread, 

 and especially as they were fashioned out of a material that is 

 almost indestructible. That, however, he formed an integral 

 member of the post-glacial fauna of the Pleistocene, is proved 

 by the following table, in which I have arranged in order the 

 animals found with man in old river-beds and in caverns, and 

 the animals from river-beds and caverns in which he has not 

 been found. The correspondence of these four columns show 

 that the deposits from which the animals were derived are of 

 the same geological age. The Bos longifrons,* which has been 

 inserted among the British fossil mammals by Professor Owen, 

 is purposely omitted, because there is no evidence that the 

 animal was living at the time in Great Britain : — 



* " Quart. Geo]. Journ.,'* 1867, vol. xxiii. Brit. F033. Oxen. 



