Fishes' bones are discovered in great abundance in the kitchen-middens.
They belong to the cod, herring, dab, and eel. From this we may infer
that the primitive inhabitants of Denmark were not afraid of venturing
out to brave the waves of the sea in their frail skiffs; for the herring
and the cod cannot, in fact, be caught except at some little distance
from the shore.
Mammalian bones are also plentifully distributed in the Danish
kitchen-middens. Those most commonly met with are the remains of the
stag, the roe, and the boar, which, according to M. Steenstrup's
statement, make up ninety-seven hundredths of the whole mass. Others are
the relics of the urus, the wolf, the dog, the fox, the wild-cat, the
lynx, the marten, the otter, the porpoise, the seal, the water-rat, the
beaver and the hedgehog.
The bison, the reindeer, the elk, the horse, and the domestic ox have
not left behind them any trace which will permit us to assume that they
existed in Denmark at the period when these deposits were formed.
Amongst other animals, we have mentioned the dog. By various
indications, we are led to the belief that this intelligent creature had
been at this time reduced to a state of domesticity. It has been
remarked that a large number of the bones dispersed in these
kitchen-middens are incomplete; exactly the same parts are almost always
missing, and certain bones are entirely wanting. M. Steenstrup is of
opinion that these deficiencies may be owing to the agency of dogs,
which have made it their business to ransack the heaps of bones and
other matters which were thrown aside by their masters. This hypothesis
was confirmed, in his idea, when he became convinced, by experience,
that the bones which were deficient in these deposits were precisely
those which dogs are in the habit of devouring, and that the remaining
portions of those which were found were not likely to have been subject
to their attacks on account of their hardness and the small quantity of
assimilable matter which was on or in them.
Although primitive man may have elevated the dog to the dignity of being
his companion and friend, he was, nevertheless, sometimes in the habit
of eating him. No doubt he did not fall back upon this last resort
except in cases when all other means of subsistence failed him. Bones of
the dog, broken by the hand of man, and still bearing the marks of
having been cut with a knife, are amongst the remains found, and place
the fact beyond any question.
We find, besides, the same taste existing here which we have seen
manifested in other ages and different countries. All the long bones
have been split in order to extract their marrow--the dainty so highly
appreciated by man during the epochs of the reindeer and the mammoth.
Some remains of birds have been found in the kitchen-middens; but most
of the species are aquatic--a fact which may be readily explained by the
seaboard position of the men who formed these deposits.
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