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Updated: June 5, 2025
To come to matters of certainty and not of speculation, we know that man by clearing the land, as well as by actively hunting and killing it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of Cæsar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain in the two continents.
In the fourth century of our era Jerome speaks of having met in Gaul with the Attacotes, descended from a savage Scotch tribe, who fed on human flesh, and that though they possessed great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, with numbers of pigs, for whom their vast forests afforded excellent grazing grounds ; and though the Scandinavian kitchen-middings have not so far yielded any traces of the practice of cannibalism, Adam of Bremen, who preached Christianity at the court of King Sweyn Ulfson, represents the Danes of his day as barbarians clad in the skins of beasts, chasing the aurochs and the eland, unable to do more than imitate the cries of animals and devouring the flesh of their fellow-men.
In all probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins of the old black European savage.
Tribes, formed at first of members of the same family, must have existed from the very dawn of humanity. In the Cottes Cave were found some reindeer and aurochs' shanks, which may naturally be supposed to have served the same purpose. The curious objects preserved in the Christy collections must also have been used in war or in the chase.
Still it is more natural, if not inevitable, to infer, that, if the aurochs of that olden time were the ancestors of the aurochs of the Lithuanian forests, so likewise were the men of that age if men they were the ancestors of the present human races.
Were those European barbarians of the Drift Period a primeval race, destroyed before the creation of our own race, and lower and more barbarian than the lowest of the present inhabitants of the world? or, as seems more probable, were these mysterious beings the hunters of the mammoth and the aurochs the earliest progenitors of our own family, the childish fathers of the human race?
This was very near the truth, but the Mountains of the Moon cannot be identified with the Lokinga, or mountains of Bisa, from which many of the springs do actually arise. Unless, indeed, we are nearer to the great alterations in climate which have taken place, as we are supposed to be nearer the epoch of the mammoth, aurochs, and others.
The Rowski's horse was speedily brought to the door of his pavilion; and that redoubted warrior, blazing in a suit of magnificent brass armor, clattered into his saddle. Long waves of blood-red feathers bristled over his helmet, which was farther ornamented by two huge horns of the aurochs.
Reindeer grazing, from the Thayngen Cave. The representation of the human figure is extremely rare. I have already mentioned the young man trying to strike an aurochs which is running away from him; and the woman wearing a necklace.
I have an idea the cattle love it for this too, and as they chew its cud inherited memory stirs within them, and they roam the marshes with the aurochs and tingle with the savage joy of freedom. Out along the rocks to seaward at low tide go the mossers and with long rakes rip the carragheen from its hold and load their dories with its golden-brown masses.
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