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With difficulty she had reached it, after having been stalked by a cave-lion and almost seized. I trembled at the risk she had run. It had been her intention to wait until after midnight, when most of the carnivora would have made their kills, and then attempt to reach the cave in which I was imprisoned and rescue me.
With this staff of office were picked up some pieces of ivory covered with geometrical designs, engraved with some sharp implement, stilettos, bone needles, knives, flint scrapers, and, stranger still, the remains of the cave-lion, the cave-hyena, and the RHINOCEROS TICHORHINUS, all contemporaries of the most ancient Quaternary fauna. Staff of office found at Montgaudier.
We have gone back to the very earliest days of man upon the earth; we have shown that he was the contemporary of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, of the cave-lion and the cave-bear; we have seen him crouching in the deep recesses of his cave and fighting the battle of life with no weapon but a few scarcely sharpened flints, leading an existence infinitely more wretched than the animals about him.
Among the bones were those of the mammoth and the hairy rhinoceros, species evidently contemporary with man, though they have long since vanished from the earth. At a somewhat earlier date, implements of men, mingled with bones of the cave-bear, cave-lion, hyena, and other species, had been found in the caves of France and Belgium.
The mammalia obtained from the bone-earth consisted of Elephas primigenius, or mammoth; Rhinoceros tichorhinus; Ursus spelaeus; Hyaena spelaea; Felis spelaea, or the cave-lion; Cervus tarandus, or the reindeer; a species of horse, ox, and several rodents, and others not yet determined.
At the beginning of the Quaternary period there were alive the cave-bear, the cave-lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the rhinoceros with chambered nostrils, the mammoth. In fact, the mammoth swarmed. He delighted in a boreal climate. By degrees the reindeer, the horse, the ox, the bison, multiplied, and disputed with him his food.
That the growing power of Man may have lent its aid as the destroying cause of many Pleistocene species, must, however, be granted; yet, before the introduction of fire-arms, or even the use of improved weapons of stone, it seems more wonderful that the aborigines were able to hold their own against the cave-lion, hyaena, and wild bull, and to cope with such enemies, than that they failed to bring about their speedy extinction.
Material proofs of the presence of animals are not wanting. Nordmann took from a cave near Odessa 4,500 bones of ursidae, associated with no less numerous relics of the large cave-lion and cave-hyena.
The women had, evidently, been quitting the pool and slowly returning toward the caves, when they were confronted by a monstrous cave-lion which stood directly between them and their cliffs in the center of the narrow path that led down to the pool among the tumbled rocks. Screaming, the women were rushing madly back to the pool.
These implements are found not only in the alluvium as are the Chelleen COUPS DE POING, but also in the cave or rock-shelter deposits. Amongst the mammalian remains with which they are associated are those of the mammoth, the RHINOCEROS TICHORHINUS, the elk, the horse, the aurochs, the cave-lion, the cave-hyena, and the cave-bear, remarkable for the constancy of their characteristics.
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