Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
A middle-sized race of dogs continued unaltered throughout the whole of
the stone period; but the people of the bronze age possessed a larger
hunting-dog, and with it a small horse, of which genus very few traces
have been detected in the earlier settlements--a single tooth, for
example, at Wangen, and only one or two bones at two or three other
places.
In passing from the oldest to the most modern sites, the extirpation of
the elk and beaver, and the gradual reduction in numbers of the bear,
stag, roe, and freshwater tortoise are distinctly perceptible. The
aurochs, or Lithuanian bison, appears to have died out in Switzerland
about the time when weapons of bronze came into use. It is only in a few
of the most modern lake-dwellings, such as Noville and Chavannes in the
Canton de Vaud (which the antiquaries refer to the sixth century), that
some traces are observable of the domestic cat, as well as of a sheep
with crooked horns and with them bones of the domestic fowl.
After the sixth century, no extinction of any wild quadruped nor
introduction of any tame one appears to have taken place, but the fauna
was still modified by the wild species continuing to diminish in number
and the tame ones to become more diversified by breeding and crossing,
especially in the case of the dog, horse, and sheep. On the whole,
however, the divergence of the domestic races from their aboriginal wild
types, as exemplified at Wangen and Moosseedorf, is confined, according
to Professor Rutimeyer, within narrow limits. As to the goat, it has
remained nearly constant and true to its pristine form, and the small
race of goat-horned sheep still lingers in some alpine valleys in the
Upper Rhine; and in the same region a race of pigs, corresponding to the
domesticated variety of Sus scrofa palustris, may still be seen.
Amidst all this profusion of animal remains extremely few bones of Man
have been discovered; and only one skull, dredged up from Meilen, on
the Lake of Zurich, of the early stone period, seems as yet to have been
carefully examined. Respecting this specimen, Professor His observes
that it exhibits, instead of the small and rounded form proper to
the Danish peat-mosses, a type much more like that now prevailing
in Switzerland, which is intermediate between the long-headed and
short-headed form. (Rutimeyer "Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz"
page 181.)
So far, therefore, as we can draw safe conclusions from a single
specimen, there has been no marked change of race in the human
population of Switzerland during the periods above considered.
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