Page:Excavations at the Kesslerloch.djvu/24

Rh horses lived wild or as domestic animals naturally cannot be made out from the bones, for though by taming or domestication the race may be improved, it is uncommonly difficult, if not impossible to recognise in the bones such an amelioration. The fact that amongst the number eaten one-fifth were foals would lead us to infer that these animals were wild; for if they had been kept as domestic animals for any particular service, they would certainly not have been killed and eaten when quite young. We need not think that horses were domesticated for the sake of their flesh, for it is evident that at that period nature had given to man abundance of flesh to eat. In fact, on the whole, we have not one single reason for believing that horses were domesticated for food; and at the present day we find the horse running wild, though not in any great numbers, as, for instance, on the high steppes and plateaux of Asia and Africa, where small herds of wild horses are known to roam. There can be no doubt whatever that the number of those horses which have become wild is much greater—that is, those which at one time were domesticated, and afterwards escaped from the dominion of man. Our cave cannot show a single trace of these Asiatic or African wild horses of the present day. What is found here is the genuine Equus caballus.

The bones of the reindeer (Cervus tarandus) were those found in the greatest abundance. At least ninety per cent, of the whole belonged to this animal, as besides a great number of worked and unworked antlers, very many vertebræ, broken bones of the extremities and those of the foot and the toe were met with, and more particularly, a great many broken pieces of the under-jaw, together with the teeth. In order to ascertain the number of reindeer which had been killed here, the lower under- most molars from the right side, and also those from the left side, were selected and counted, as by their form they are easily distinguished from the other molars; they numbered 200 lower hindermost molars from the right side, together with 48 milk-teeth of the same kind, and 180 lower hindermost molars from the left side, together with 18 milk-teeth, so that at least 200