Pre -Historic Mammalia Associated with Man. 403 



ON THE PRE-HISTORIC MAMMALIA FOUND ASSO- 

 CIATED WITH MAN, IN GREAT BRITAIN. 



BY W. BOYD DAWKTNS, 1I.A., P.E.S., F.G.S.* 



At the time man first appeared on the earth, the physical 

 conditions obtaining in Western Europe were altogether dif- 

 ferent from those under which we now live. Britain formed 

 part of the mainland of Europe, and low fertile plains covered 

 with the vegetation peculiar to a moderately severe climate, 

 stretched far away into the Atlantic from the present western 

 coast line. The Thames also, instead of flowing into the 

 German Ocean, joined the Elbe and the Rhine in an estuary 

 opening on the North Sea about the latitude of Berwick. The 

 climate also was very severe, and strongly resembled that of 

 Siberia and North America. One would naturally expect that 

 the animals living on that vast pleistocene continent, under 

 sueh conditions of life would differ materially from those 

 now living on what are the mere relics of that submerged 

 land. Some of them have utterly disappeared from the face 

 of the earth, such as the sabre-toothed lion, the cave-bear, 

 the Irish elk, the mammoth, EJlephas antiquus, the hippo- 

 potamus, and the woolly rhinoceros and the Rhinoceros Lep- 

 torhinus of Owen. Others again have departed to northern 

 regions, such as the glutton, the reindeer, the true elk, the 

 musk-sheep, the pouched marmot, and the lemming, while 

 others, such as the cave-lion and cave-hygena have retired south- 

 wards, and taken refuge, the one in Africa, the other in that 

 continent and in Asia. The history of all these animals, and 

 of the race of men associated with them, is, to a certain 

 extent, familiar to most of you. The subject that I have now 

 to bring before you relates to the animals which lived from the 

 disappearance of the post-glacial mammals down to the times 

 of history — a period of uncertain length, to be reckoned cer- 

 tainly by centuries, and probably by tens of thousands of years. 

 The human remains found in Britain, and belonging to the 

 stone and bronze folk, have been diligently looked after by the 

 archasologists and craniologists, but the remains of the animals, 

 carefully sought after in Switzerland and Denmark, have for 

 the most part either been overlooked in this country or con- 

 founded with the animals of the preceding epoch. They have 

 been derived from villages and tumuli of unknown antiquity, 

 from refuse heaps and from caverns, which were at once the 

 abodes and burial places of some early race of man. For this 

 group of animals, and those from alluvia and peat-bogs, I 



* " Sur les Mammiferes Pre-historiques trouves avec l'homme dans Grande 

 Bretagne," read at the Congres Internationale d' Anthropologic et d'Archeologie 

 Pre-historiques in Paris, 1867. 



