Animals of the cervine and equine groups were, if possible, yet more numerous. M. Piette estimates the number of reindeer whose bones he has picked up in the Gourdan Cave as over. 3,000, and the number of cervidæ found at Hohlefels is positively incalculable.
In 1826, Marcel de Serres called attention to the great number of the bones of animals of the equine family found in the neighborhood of Lunel-Viel; at Solutré, the remains of horses cover a great portion of the slope which stretches from the eastern side of the mountain to the bottom of the valley. Here are found those vast accumulations to which the inhabitants of the valley give the characteristic name of horse-walls. The number of horses, the bones of which have gone to form these walls, may be estimated without exaggeration at 40,000. The bones are mixed together in the greatest confusion, many of them show traces of having been burnt, and the flesh of the horse was evidently the favorite diet of the people of Solutré.[18]
At first man obtained by force, often aided by strategy, the animals he coveted. He bad not yet learnt to tame them and reduce them to servitude. Neither the reindeer nor the horse was as yet domesticated, and neither in the caves nor in the various deposits elsewhere has a complete skeleton been found, but only—a very significant fact—the bones on which had been the greater amount of flesh. The absence of any remains of the dog, so indispensable an animal in the keeping of flocks, is yet another proof that domestication was still unpractised.
It was with most miserable weapons, such as a few stones, scarcely even rough-hewn, and a few flint arrows, that the cave-man did not hesitate to attack the most formidable animals, and with such apparently inadequate means he succeeded in wounding and even killing them. The French Museum possesses mammoth and rhinoceros bones bearing fine scratches produced by the weapons which had been used to despatch the animals. The metacarpus of a large beast of prey, found at Eyziès, retains marks no less clear, and the skull of a bear front Nabrigas has in it a large wound which must have been made by a missile of some kind.
In Ireland a stone hammer was found wedged into the head of a Cervus megaceros; in Cambridgeshire, the skull of an Ursus spelæus still containing the fragment of a celt which had given the animal his deathblow; at Richmond (Yorkshire) the bones of a large deer which had been sawn with a flint implement. The fine collection in the University of Lund, contains a vertebra of a urns pierced by an arrow, and the Copenhagen Museum, the jaw of a stag pierced by a fragment of flint. Steenstrup mentions two bones of a large stag into which stone chips had penetrated deeply, and in which the fracture had been gradually covered over by the bony tissue. A bone of some bovine animal with an arrow deeply imbedded in it has been taken from a bed of peat in the island of Moën, celebrated for its tumuli and the number of objects found in them. At Eyziès, a flint flake has been found firmly fixed in one of the lumbar vertebrae of a young reindeer, and M. de Baye mentions an arrow with a tranverse edge stuck in the bone of a badger.[19] The Abbé Ducrost found a flint arrow-head sticking in a vertebra of a horse.
Nor were those already mentioned the only animals on which man made war. We shall speak presently of the contests with each other, which began amongst men in the very earliest days of humanity. Human bones, perforated by arrows and broken by stone hatchets, bear ineffaceable traces to this day of homicidal struggles.
In many places fresh-water and marine fish were utilized as food by man. In the numerous caves of the Vezère, in those of Madeleine, Eyziès, and Bruniquel, excavations have brought to light the vertebræ and other bones of fishes, amongst which predominate chiefly those of the jack, the carp, the bream, the drub, the trout, and the tench—in a word, all the fish which still people our rivers and lakes. In the Lake Stations of Switzerland, fish of all kinds are no less abundant. At Gardeole, amongst the bones of mammals have been found the shells of mollusca, and remains of the turtle and of goldfish. Fish was not, however, caught by all these primitive people, not even by all those who lived by the sea. In researches carefully carried on for years in the Maritime-Alps, M. Rivière found neither fishing-tackle nor fish-lines.
Whilst the cave-men of the south of France seem not to have utilized any but fresh-water fish, the Scandinavians, at a date probably less remote however, did not hesitate to brave the ocean. The kitchen-middings contain numerous remains of fish, amongst which those of the mackerel, the dab, and the herring are the most numerous. There, too, we meet with relics of the cod, which never approaches the coast, and must always be sought by the fisherman in the open sea.
Although we are in a position to assert that men were able to catch fish during every prehistoric period, if not in every locality, we can speak less positively of their mode of doing so. The earliest fishing-tackle was doubtless of the most primitive description: the bone of some animal, a fragment of hard wood, or even a fish-bone pointed at each end and pierced with a hole, served their purpose ([Fig. 10]). The Exhibition of Fishing-Tackle held at Berlin in 1880 contained several such implements, some of wood, others of bone. Others have also been found in the Madeleine Cave, and in different stations of the ancient inhabitants of Switzerland. It is interesting to note their resemblance to those still in use amongst the Esquimaux.