Fig. 1.—Incised figure of Horse, 11.
The most important discovery of the handiwork of man is the head and fore quarters of a horse (fig. 1) incised on a smoothed and rounded fragment of rib, cut short off at one end and broken at the other. On the flat side the head is represented with the nostrils and mouth and neck carefully drawn. A series of fine oblique lines show that the animal was hog-maned. They stop at the bend of the back, which is very correctly drawn. Indeed the whole is very well done and is evidently a sketch from the life. As is usually the case, the feet are not represented.
On comparing this engraving with those of horses from the caves of Périgord[1] and from the recently described cave of the Kesslerloch[2], near Thayingen, in Switzerland, the identity of style renders the conclusion tolerably certain that the palæolithic hunters who occupied the Creswell cave during the accumulation of the upper part of the cave-earth were the same as those who hunted the Reindeer and Horse in Switzerland and the south of France.
A bone awl was also found, composed of the metacarpal of a Reindeer, and carefully rounded and smoothed; it had been broken into three pieces before it was thrown away. By a fortunate chance I found two out of the three fragments.
The pointed antlers may have been used by man; but they may also be the result of the action of carbonic acid in wearing away the bruised surfaces, as we shall presently see.
Of the flint implements it is only necessary to say that they are all of the types which I have described, with two exceptions, the one being an oval trimmed flake, and the other a double scraper of the
The quartzite implements are of the forms already described: and same form as those of the caves of Southern France and of the Kesslerloch.
of those made of clay iron-stone, only one demands special notice. It is a small oval implement of the St.-Acheul and Moustier type, blunt at the base and tapering to a rounded point (fig. 2).
The numerous split quartzite pebbles are of the same sort as those recently described by Captain Jones, U. S. A., as being in use among the American Indians of Wyoming. He writes, "Certain articles of a very rude character are still in use to some extent among our western Indians, and even in the case of such tribes as have now
- ↑ Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ.
- ↑ See 'Excavations at the Kesslerloch Cave, near Thayingen.' By Conrad Merk. Translated by J. E. Lee. Longmans, 1876.
