64 THE OX AND ITS KINDRED 
slender, and their proportions are regarded by 
Dr. Hilzheimer as approximately true to nature, 
although this may be doubtful, since they appear 
stouter and shorter in the figure here reproduced. 
Going back to prehistoric times (by which, it may 
be well to mention, is meant the period immediately 
preceding the historical, and not any of the ante- 
cedent geological epochs), it is curious to find that no 
sculptured or pictorial representations of the aurochs 
An Assyrian Representation of the Aurochs 
have been discovered among the remains of the early 
Stone Age. There is, however, a rude painting on 
the walls of the cavern of Combarelles. Apart from 
this, evidence is afforded that the aurochs was 
hunted and killed by the hunters of those days by 
the circumstance that skulls have been found both 
in England and Denmark with flint axe-heads or 
spear-heads embedded in the forehead. A whole 
skeleton from the English fens, in which the fore- 
head is thus pierced, is exhibited in the University 
Zoological Museum at Cambridge ; and another 
skeleton from Denmark, exhibiting the marks of 
