From Fraas’s description there seems to be no doubt whatever that the relic-bed, with its remains of civilisation, was perfectly undisturbed, and its palæontological contents plainly show its great geological age. It was perfectly protected by Nature. On the top lies peat, the same that covers the lowlands of the whole neighbourhood for miles, and forms the extensive moorlands of Upper Swabia, on which no other formations are to be seen than the gravel drift-walls thrown up by glaciers of the Drift Period. Under the peat lies a layer of calc-tufa, four to five feet thick, a fresh-water formation from the water-courses that now unite with the source of the Schussen. Under this protecting cover of tufa were the remains of the Glacial Period and Glacial Man. The tufa covered a bed of moss of a dark brown colour, inclining to green, the moss still splendidly preserved. Under this bed of moss was the glacier drift. The moss was dripping full of and intermingled with moist sand. In it were the relics of Glacial Man—all lying in heaps as fresh and firm as if they had been only recently collected. A sticky, dark-brown mud filled the moss and sand and the smallest hollow spaces of antlers and bones, and emitted a musty smell.
EARLY DRINKING VESSEL
Reindeer’s skull used as drinking vessel by men of the Stone Age. British Museum collection.
TREASURE-STORES OF PRIMEVAL KNOWLEDGE
Such to-day are the mounds of prehistoric rubbish accumulated by the people of the Stone Age. These Danish “kitchen middens” have vastly enriched our knowledge of the remote past.
Glacial Man had used the place as a refuse-pit. Among the bones and splinters of bone of animals that had been slaughtered and consumed by man, among ashes and charred remains, among smoke-stained hearthstones and the traces of fire, there lay here, one upon the other, numerous knives, arrow-heads, and lance-heads of flint, and the most varied kinds of hand-made articles of reindeer horn. All this was in a shallow pit about seven hundred square yards in extent, and only four to five feet deep in the purest glacier drift, clearly showing that the excellent preservation of the bones and bone implements was solely due to the water having remained in the moss and sand. The bank of moss was like a saturated sponge; it closed up its contents hermetically from the air, and preserved in its ever-damp bosom what had been entrusted to it thousands of years before.
Under the peat and tufa at the source of the Schussen we find only the type of a purely Northern climate, with Northern flora and Northern fauna. There are no remains of domestic animals—not even of the dog, nor any bones of the stag, roe, chamois, or ibex. Everything corresponds to a Northern climate, such as begins to-day at 70° north latitude. We see Upper Swabia traversed by moraines and melting glaciers, whose waters wash the glacier-sand into moss-grown pools. We find a Greenland moss covering the wet sands in thick banks; between the moraines of the glaciers we have to imagine wide green pastures, rich enough to support herds of reindeer, which roved about there as they do in Greenland, or on the forest borders of Norway and Siberia, at the present day. Here, also, are the regions of the carnivora dangerous to the reindeer—the glutton and the wolf, and, in the second rank, the bear and Arctic fox.
