Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/247

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CHAP. VII.]
FOWLING AND FISHING.
219

Southern France. Among them the most important are the snowy owl, now mainly confined to the cold climate of the north, where it feeds on lemmings and various small birds; the willow grouse, also an Arctic species; the ptarmigan, now living in the High Alps and Pyrenees as well as in the Arctic regions; the capercailzie and the grey partridge, the wild duck, and an extinct kind of crane (Grus cinerea). A group of birds, probably ducks, unable to fly, and scuttling away as fast as possible, is represented on a rounded lance-head from La Madelaine.[1] The moulting season is the chief time for fowling among the Eskimos of the present day. The birds were probably shot with arrows or taken with snares, or with barbed spears, such as those of the Eskimos (see Fig. 90). Some of the barbed arrow or spear points, so commonly found in the caves of France, have most probably been employed for this purpose, as well as for fishing (Figs. 65, 66, 70, 71, 72).

Fishing.

Fig. 84.—Pike incised on Canine of Bear, Duruthy Cave, 1/1.

The fishes[2] which were caught with barbed spears of the kind noticed above, were the salmon, trout, carp, bream, dace, chub, and pike, of which one engraving has

  1. Rel. Aq. Pl. 24, Fig. 5.
  2. Ib. p. 219.