Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/268

240 Basse been found in a museum without a history, it would be ascribed to the same people as those who engraved the arrow-straightener (Fig. 92).

The probable identity of the Cave-men with the Eskimos is considerably strengthened by a consideration of some of the animals found in the caves. The reindeer and the musk sheep, the marmots, the Arctic foxes, the grouse, and snowy owls, which afforded food to the Cave-men, are still used for food by the Eskimos; and the group of animals hunted by the former in Europe is represented by fossil remains found throughout the vast region which divides the Cave-man of the Upper Danube from the inhabitant of West Georgia.

Numerous fossil bones have long been known to occur in the frozen morasses, as well as in the river-deposits in the caverns, in Central and Southern Russia in Europe, as well as throughout Siberia. In the list of animals described by Dr. Brandt, discovered in the caverns of the Altai Mountains, we may remark the cave-hyæna, brown bear, pouched marmot, beaver, alpine hare, elk, stag, roe, bison, horse, and wild boar, as well as the three extinct species, the Irish elk, the woolly rhinoceros, and the mammoth. We do not lose sight of this group of animals until we cross the Straits of Behring into the land of the Eskimos. The remains obtained by Captains Beechey and Kellett in the frozen gravels composing the cliffs of Eschscholtz Bay