Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/41

Rh domesticated species comprise the dog, horse, ass, pig, goat, sheep, and several bovine races.

The greater number, if not all, of these animals served for food, and all the bones which contained marrow have been split open in the same way as the corresponding ones found in the shell-mounds of Denmark before mentioned. The bones both of the wild bull and the bison are invariably split in this manner. As a rule, the lower jaws with teeth occur in greater abundance than any other parts of the skeleton,—a circumstance which, geologists know, holds good in regard to fossil mammalia of all periods. As yet the reindeer is missing in the Swiss lake-settlements as in the Danish 'refuse-heaps,' although this animal in more ancient times ranged over France, together with the mammoth, as far south as the Pyrenees.

A careful comparison of the bones from different sites has shown that in settlements such as Wangen and Moosseedorf, belonging to the earliest age of stone, when the habits of the hunter state predominated over those of the pastoral, venison, or the flesh of the stag and roe, was more eaten than the flesh of the domestic cattle and sheep. This was afterwards reversed in the later stone period and in the age of bronze. At that later period also the tame pig, which is wanting in some of the oldest stations, had replaced the wild boar as a common article of food. In the beginning of the age of stone, in Switzerland, the goats outnumbered the sheep, but towards the close of the same period the sheep were more abundant than the goats.

The fox in the first era was very common, but it nearly disappears in the bronze age, during which period a large hunting-dog, supposed to have been imported into Switzerland from some foreign country, becomes the chief representative of the canine genus.

A single fragment of the bone of a hare (Lepus timidus)