Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/78

Rh The Rhinoceros appears also to have been eaten by the Pyrenean aborigines. Some molar teeth, and a certain number of bones belonging to a young individnal, were found at Aurignac in the layer of earth above the ashes. All the vertebræ and the spongy parts of the long bones had disappeared, devoured without doubt by the Hyænas; but the thick and compact portions of the shafts of the long bones were left. They are broken in the same manner as those of the other Herbivora, and several fragments still bear the traces of cutting instruments. Another proof, moreover, that when the carcase of this young Rhinoceros was brought there, it had been recently slain, is afforded by the circumstance that its bones, after they had been broken by man, had afterwards been gnawed by the Hyænas, which would not have been the case had they not been still fresh and filled with their gelatinous juices.

The rarity of the common Deer and of the Irish Elk, represented at Aurignac, each by the remains of a single individual, might be explained perhaps by the great abundance of those of the Reindeer. We know that in a wild state, antipathies exist between certain closely allied species, or sometimes between species belonging to the same genus, which lead them to inhabit perfectly distinct districts.

The Aurochs and the Reindeer, then, are the species which have figured the most often in the feasts of whose relics we find only what was spared by the Hyænas. The situation of the hearth, on a plattorm overlooking the valley and stream of the Rode, allow also of the supposition that a great part of the bones might have been thrown to the bottom of the valley, whence they would afterwards be removed by the current of water, or decomposed by atmospheric agencies.

The long bones of these ruminants, so rich in marrow, have all been broken for its extraction. Not one has been forgotten; every bone, down to the first phalanges of the Stags and Reindeer, which, like the long bones, contain a medullary cavity, has been carefully opened. But the way in which this has been done is neither so methodical nor so elegant as that noticed in the Danish kitchen- middens, the bones in which have all been split with remarkable dexterity, in such a way as to expose, at a single blow, the whole of the marrow they contained: as may be seen for instance in the cannon-bone, or metatarsus, of the Aurochs, and of the Deer. At Aurignac, as well as at Massat, this mode of fracture is rather rare,