Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/264

236 dog was devouring the body as he passed," and, in a second and worse case, of the body being attacked by dogs, the friends did not hesitate to laugh as they heard or told the story. This total want of reverence for the dead is exhibited, so far as I know, by no other people of the present time, and it is therefore not a little remarkable to find the traces of a similar insensibility among the Cave-men.

An appeal to the implements and weapons proves that the manner of life of the Cave-men was the same as that of the Eskimos. The scrapers made of stone for the preparation of skins are of exactly the same pattern in both (Fig. 89). The original of the above figure has its handle made of mammoth ivory, with which the Eskimos are very well acquainted, and which they use for making various articles, as we have seen the Cave-men employed it, who hunted the animal in Auvergne. It is very possible that this habit of the Eskimos may have been handed down from the late Pleistocene times. Their supply is obtained from the fossil tusks preserved from decay by the intense cold of the Arctic regions. The sewing-needles also are of the same pattern in both, and, as Professor Ed. Lartet has pointed out, the same tendons in the reindeer's feet were used for thread for sewing skins together among