Notes on the Fenland; with A Description of the Shippea Man — John Shaqi
Notes on the Fenland; with A Description of the Shippea ManHughes, Thomas McKenny
Science
Notes on the Fenland; with A Description of the Shippea Man
Hughes, Thomas McKenny
Geology -- England -- Bedford Level
[7] "The Evolution of the British Breeds of Cattle," _Journ.
R. Agric. Soc._ Vol. V, Ser. 3, pp. 561-563, 1894. "On the
more important Breeds of Cattle which have been recognised in
the British Isles in successive periods, and their relation
to other archaeological and historical discoveries,"
_Archaeologia_, Vol. V, Ser. 3, pp. 125-158, 1896. Cf. also
Morse, E. W., "The Ancestry of domesticated Cattle,"
_Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal
Industry_, 1910, Department of Agriculture, U.S.A.
The Urus (_Bos primigenius_) is common in the Fen Beds and is of
special importance for our present enquiry, as there is in the Sedgwick
Museum a skull of this species found in Burwell Fen with a Neolithic
flint implement sticking in it. The implement is thin, nearly parallel
sided, rough dressed, except on the front edge which is ground, and it
is made of the black south-country flint. It is very different in every
respect from the thick bulging implements with curved outlines, which
being made of the mottled grey north-country flint or of felstone or
greenstone suggest importation from a different and probably more
northerly source.
This gives us a useful synchronism of peat, a Neolithic implement of a
special well-marked type, and the Urus.
The Bison is the characteristic ox of the Gravels and never occurs in
the Fen Beds; while the Urus, as I have pointed out above, occurs in
both the Turbiferous and Areniferous deposits.
_Bos longifrons_ is the characteristic ox of the Fen Beds and never
occurs in the Gravels. It is the breed which the Romans found here,
and we dig up its bones almost wherever we find Roman remains. I
cannot adduce any satisfactory evidence that it was wild, that is to
say more wild than the Welsh cattle or ponies or sheep which roam
freely over wide tracts of almost uninhabited country. This species,
like the Urus, has horns pointing forward, but the cattle introduced
by the Romans had upturned lyre-shaped horns, as in the modern
Italian, the Chillingham or our typical uncrossed Ayrshire breed, and
soon we notice the effect of crossing the small native cattle (_Bos
longifrons_) with the larger Roman breed.
The Horse appears to have lived continuously throughout Pleistocene
times down to the present day and to have been always used for food.
Unfortunately the skull of a horse is thin and fragile and therefore it
has been difficult to obtain a series sufficiently complete to found
any considerable generalisations upon it. The animal found in the peat
and alluvium appears to have been a small sized, long faced pony.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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