Page:Excavations at the Kesslerloch.djvu/25

Rh grown animals and about 50 young ones, or in all 250 reindeer had been slaughtered and become food for the inhabitants of the Kesslerloch. It may easily be imagined that this was not the whole number of the animals destroyed, for it is hardly to be supposed that every meal was taken inside of the cave. Very probably these primitive hunters consumed a great many in the open air on their hunting expeditions; it was therefore more or less a chance that so many reindeer bones were found in the cave.

At the present time the reindeer does not live in our latitudes, but has withdrawn to the extreme north of the Old World, and if the American reindeer may be considered the same species as ours, to the corresponding parts of the New World also. It lives in all countries north of 60 degrees, but in many places it is found occasionally up to 52 degrees of north latitude. Thus it is restricted by the climate to a band of about thirteen degrees in the north. From this fact it may be safely concluded that the climate of our district at that time must have been much colder than it is at present. The bones of the reindeer of that age do not differ in the smallest degree from those of the animals living wild at the present day, so that we may conclude with tolerable certainty that the reindeer lived wild here as well as in Veyrier, France, and Belgium. Cæsar gives the following account of this animal:—'In the Hercynian forest there is an ox in the form of a stag, and from the middle of the forehead between the ears there arises a single horn, higher and more straight than those horns which are known to us, the top of which spreads out widely, like a hand, or like branches of trees. The female is just the same, both in appearance and the size of her horns.' According to the view of Mr. C. Vogt, the absence of the domestic dog indicates the wild condition of the reindeer. In fact it is difficult to conceive how herds of these animals could have been preserved by man without having careful and watchful assistants well accustomed to running and jumping.

Another animal with divided hoofs is the stag (Cervus elaphus),