This conclusion is to a great extent confirmed by a consideration of the animals found in the caves. The reindeer and the musk sheep afford food to the Eskimos now, just as they afforded it to the palæolithic hunters in Europe. No naturalist would deny that the pleistocene musk sheep is of the same species as that of North America, and although the animal is extinct in Europe and Asia, its remains, scattered through Germany, Russia in Europe, and Siberia, show that it formerly ranged in the whole of that area. The enormous distance, therefore, of southern France from the northern shores of America, cannot be considered as an obstacle to this view, for, to say the least, palæolithic man would have had the same chance of retreating to the north-east as the musk sheep. The mammoth and bison have also been tracked by their remains in the frozen river gravels and morasses through Siberia, as far to the north-east as the American side of the Straits of Behring. Palæolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them. And since his implements are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos, it may reasonably be concluded that he is represented at the present time by the Eskimos, for it is most improbable that the convergence of the ethnological, and zoological evidence should be an accident. These views,[236] which I advanced in 1866, have been to a great extent accepted by Sir John Lubbock in his last edition of Prehistoric Man. _Pleistocene Animals living to the North of the Alps and Pyrenees._ The principal mammalia inhabiting Britain, France, and Germany during the pleistocene age, and contemporary with man in Europe, are given in the following table, which shows that the fauna of the region to the north of the Alps and Pyrenees was remarkably uniform. The cave-fauna of Provence, Italy, and Spain, will be treated of in the next chapter.