Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/263

] Near one a stone cooking-vessel was lying, and had probably been buried at the same time as the body.

"In addition to the above specimens, I was so fortunate, after a long chase, as to shoot a snowy owl, an extremely rare and beautiful bird, and seldom seen even in these regions."

Time and place being changed, this account would stand, in its main outlines, for a description of one of the refuse-heaps on the banks of the Vezère, or of the tributaries of the Humber, or in the valleys of the Lesse, of the Meuse, or the Adour. The bones are broken in the same way, and belong to a large extent to the same animals. In both are the remains of the reindeer, musk sheep, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, grouse, and snowy owls, as well as traces of whales and seals. The differences are merely those resulting from the fact that the Eskimos live, to a very great extent, upon marine animals, while the Cave-men were surrounded by the rich and varied fauna inhabiting Europe in the late Pleistocene age.

The rarity of human bones in the refuse-heaps of the Cave-men is satisfactorily explained by the abun- dance of the hyænas, which would inevitably eat up any human body left insufficiently protected. The few cases in which fragments of the human skeleton have been found in the refuse-heaps of the Cave-men, coupled with the absence of any well-authenticated case of an interment, renders it very probable that they cared as little for their dead as the Eskimos, who leave them covered up with a few slabs of snow, to be eaten up by their dogs and foxes, with the greatest indifference. Captain Parry was informed by a friend of a deceased Eskimo at Igloolik, that when he left the huts "with his wife, a