Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples — John Shaqi
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric PeoplesNadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
History
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples
Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
Archaeology; Prehistoric peoples
Whilst he evidently preferred to hunt and eat the larger mammals, man
when pressed by hunger did not despise the small rodents, which were,
of course, more easily captured. Amongst piles of the bones of horses
and stags have been found the remains of martens, hedgehogs, and mice;
and from the Thayngen Cave have been taken the bones of more than five
hundred bares. In Belgium the water-rat seems to have been considered a
dainty, and in the Chaleux Cave alone were found more than twenty
pounds’ weight of the bones of this creature, nearly all bearing traces
of having been subjected to the action of fire.
The remains of birds are rarer, and Broca has remarked that the most
ancient hunting implements which have come down to us; those from the
Moustier Cave, for instance, were adapted rather to attack animals that
would show fight than those that would simply fly or run away. The
Gourdan Cave, however, has yielded the bones of the moor-fowl, the
partridge, the wild duck, and even the domesticated cock And hen; the
Frontal Cave, the thrush, the duck, the partridge, and the pigeon; and
in other caves were found the bones of the goose, the swan, and the
grouse. Milne-Edwards enumerates fifty-one species belonging to
different orders found in the caves of France, and M. Rivière picked up
the remains of thousands of birds in those of Baoussé-Roussé on the
frontier of Italy.2
The skulls of the mammals bad been opened, and the bones split. Brains
and marrow probably figured at feasts as the greatest delicacies.
Travellers, whose tales are a help to us in building up a picture of
the remote past of our race, relate that the Laplanders, as soon as an
animal is killed, break open its skull and devour the brain whilst it
is still warm and bleeding. This was probably also the custom amongst
prehistoric cave-men.
The flesh of animals was not, alas, the only meat eaten, and
excavations in different parts of the globe have led to the discovery
of traces of the practice of cannibalism which it is difficult not to
accept.3
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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