These offer as vivid a picture of the life of the cave-men as
that revealed of Italian manners in the 1st century by the buried cities
of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The old floors of human occupation consist
of broken bones of animals killed in the chase, mingled with rude
implements and weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and with charcoal
and burnt stones, which indicate the position of the hearths. Flakes
without number, awls, lance-heads, hammers and saws made of flint rest
_pele-mele_ with bone needles, sculptured reindeer antlers, arrowheads
and harpoons, and bones of the reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, Saiga
antelope and musk sheep. These singular accumulations of debris mark the
places where the ancient hunters lived, and are merely the refuse cast
aside. The reindeer formed by far the greater portion of the food, and
must have lived in enormous herds at that time in the centre of France.
From this, as well as from the presence of the most arctic of the
herbivores, the musk sheep, we may infer the severe climate of that
portion of France at that time. Besides these animals the cave bear and
lion have been met with in one, and the mammoth in five localities, and
their remains bear marks of cutting or scraping which showed they fell a
prey to the hunters. The most remarkable remains left behind in these
refuse heaps are the sculptured reindeer antlers and figures engraved on
fragments of schist and on ivory. A well-defined outline of an ox stands
out boldly from one piece of antler; a second represents a reindeer
kneeling down in an easy attitude with his head thrown up in the air so
that the antlers rest on the shoulders, and the back forms an even
surface for a handle, which is too small to be grasped by an ordinary
European hand; in a third a man stands close to a horse's head, and on
the other side of the same cylinder are two heads of bisons drawn with
sufficient clearness to ensure recognition by any one who has seen that
animal. On a fourth the natural curvature of one of the tines has been
taken advantage of by the artist to engrave the head and the
characteristic recurved horns of the ibex; and on a fifth horses are
represented with large heads, upright dishevelled manes and shaggy
ungroomed tails. The most striking figure is that of the mammoth
engraved on a fragment of its own tusk; the peculiar spiral curvature of
the tusk and the long mane, which are now not to be found in any living
elephant, prove that