Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and ArtOsborn, Henry Fairfield
History
Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art
Osborn, Henry Fairfield
Art, Primitive; Prehistoric peoples; Stone age
The woolly mammoth now reaches the height of its evolution and
specialization; as preserved in the frozen tundras of northern Siberia,
and as represented in very numerous drawings and engravings by the Upper
Palæolithic artists, it is the most completely known of all fossil
mammalia.(22) Its proportions, as shown in the accompanying figure, which
represents the information gathered from all sources, are entirely
different from those of either the Indian or African elephant. The head is
very high and surmounted by a great mass of hair and wool; behind this a
sharp depression separates the back of the head from the great hump on the
back; the hinder portion of the back falls away very rapidly and the tail
is short; the overcoat of long hair nearly reaches the ground, and beneath
this is a warm undercoating of wool. It is not improbable that the humps
on the head and the back were fat reservoirs. The color of the hair was a
yellowish brown, varying from light brown to pure brown; woolly hair, from
an inch to an inch and a half in length, covered the whole body
interspersed with the shorter hairs was a large number of longer and
thicker hairs, which formed mane-like patches on the cheeks, chin,
shoulders, flanks, and abdomen. A broad fringe of this long hair extended
along the sides of the body, as depicted in the work of the Upper
Palæolithic artists in the Combarelles Cave. Especially interesting to us
is the food found in the stomach and mouth of the frozen Siberian
mammoths, which consists chiefly of a meadow flora such as flourishes
during the summer in northern Siberia at the present day, including
grasses and sedges, wild thyme, beans of the wild oxytropis, also the
arctic variety of the upright crowfoot (_Ranunculus acer_). This was the
summer food. The winter food undoubtedly included the leaves and stems of
the willow, the juniper, and other winter plants.
[Illustration: FIG. 102. The woolly mammoth (_Elephas primigenius_) and
the contemporary Neanderthal hunters (_Homo neanderthalensis_), after the
drawings of Upper Palæolithic artists and the frozen mammoths found in
northern Siberia. By Charles R. Knight, 1915.]
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