ne
implements applicable to breaking bones certainly indicates a
wholesale cutting of flesh and preparation of marrow. In the "Story of
the Earth," I have suggested in connection with this that there may
have been towns or villages of these people unknown to us, and which
would afford higher conceptions of their progress in the arts. This
anticipation appears recently to have been realized in the discovery
of such a town or fortified village of the mammoth age at Soloutre, in
France, and which seems to afford evidence that these ancient people
had already domesticated the horse, using it as food as well as a
beast of burden, in the manner of the Khirgis and certain other Tartar
tribes of Central Asia.[135] This, with the undoubtedly high cerebral
organization indicated by the skulls of the mammoth age, notably
raises our estimate of the position of man at this early date.

With regard to caves of sepulture, the same remark may be made as with
regard to the caves of residence. They do not seem to have been the
burial-places of large populations, but only occasional places of
interment, few bodies being found in them, and these often interred in
the midst of culinary debris, evidencing previous or contemporary
residence. With regard to the latter, it seems to have been no
uncommon practice with some North American tribes to bury the dead
either in the floors of their huts or in their immediate proximity. It
is probable, however, that the few examples known of caves of
sepulture of this period indicate not tribal or national places of
burial, but occasional and accidental cases, happening to hunting or
war parties, perhaps remote from their ordinary places of residence.
In so far as method of burial is concerned, the men of the Palaeocosmic
or Mammoth age seem to have buried the dead extended at full length,
and not in the crouching posture usual with some later races. Like the
Americans, they painted the dead man, and buried him with his robes
and ornaments, and probably with his weapons, thus intimating their
belief in happy hunting-grounds beyond the grave.[136] I may remark
here that all the known interments of the mammoth age indicate a race
of men of great cerebral capacity, with long heads and coarsely marked
features, of large stature and muscular vigor, surpassing indeed much
in all these respects the average man of modern Europe. These
characteristics befit men who had to contend with the mammoth and his
contemp