[25] Reinach in his “Catalogue of the Saint-Germain museum” gives the best description I know of this now celebrated reindeer.
[26] A. Milne Edwards: Acad. des Sciences, May 8, 1888.
[27] “De Natura Rerum,” book v., v. 951, etc.
CHAPTER IV.
Caves, Kitchen-Middings, Lake Stations, “Terremares,” Crannoges, Burghs, “Nurhags,” “Talayoti,” and “Truddhi.”
The earliest races of men lived in a climate less rigorous than ours, on the shores of wide rivers, in the midst of fertile districts, where fishing and the chase easily supplied all their needs. These races were numerous and prolific, and we find traces of them all over Western Europe, from Norfolk to the middle of Spain. What were the homes of these men and their families? Did they crouch in dens, as Tacitus says the German tribes did in his day? In his “Ancient Wiltshire,” Sir R. Coalt Hoare says that the earliest human habitations were holes dug in the earth and covered over with the branches of trees. Near Joigny there still remain some circular holes in the ground, about fifty feet in diameter by sixteen to twenty deep, known in the country under the name of buvards. The trunk of a tree was fixed at the bottom and rose above the ground, and the branches plastered with clay formed the roof. The floor of these buvards consists of a greasy black earth mixed with bones, cinders, charcoal, and worked flints. Amongst the last named, polished hatchets predominate, which proves that these refuges were inhabited in Neolithic times, but there is nothing to prevent our supposing that they were also occupied in the Palæolithic period. Ameghino gives a still more striking example of an earth-dwelling. Near Mercedes, about twenty leagues from Buenos Ayres, he picked up numerous human bones, together with arrow-heads, chisels, flint knives, bone stilettos and polishers, and bones of animals scratched and cut by man. Later, Ameghino discovered the actual dwelling of this primeval man, and his strange home was beneath the carapace of a gigantic armadillo, the now extinct glyptodon seen in [Fig. 48.]
Figure 48.
The glyptodon.
“All around the carapace,” says Ameghino, “in the reddish agglomerate of the original soil lay charcoal cinders, burnt and split bones, and flints. Digging beneath this, a flint implement was found, with some long split llama and stag bones, which had evidently been handled by man, with some toxodon and mylodon teeth.” [Fig. 49] represents the now extinct mylodon. Some time afterwards, the discovery of another carapace under similar conditions added weight to Ameghino’s supposition.[1] In the midst of the pampas, those vast treeless plains, where no rock or accident of conformation affords shelter from heat or cold or a hiding-place from wild beasts, man was not at a loss; he hollowed out for himself a hole in the earth, roofing it over with the shell of a glyptodon, and securing a retreat where he could be safe at least for a time.