Note 17 — Chapter II · Food, Cannibalism, Mammals Fish, Hunting, and Fishing.

Material proofs of the presence of animals are not wanting. The accumulation of coprolites in the cave of Sentenheim (Alsace) bears witness to the number of bears which once haunted it. Nordmann took from a cave near Odessa 4,500 bones of ursidæ, associated with no less numerous relics of the large cave-lion and cave-hyena.17 The Külock Cave, now some six hundred and fifty feet above the river, contained the remains of no less than 2,500 bears, and similar relics occur by thousands in the osseous breccia of Santenay and in the cave of Lherm, where they form a regular ossuary. It would be easy to quote similar facts from Belgian, German, and Hungarian caves. In almost every case the position of the skeletons seems to show that the bears sought a last refuge in the caves, and that death had surprised them during their winter sleep. Pachyderms were no less numerous than bears. The remains of mammoths are found from the north of Europe to Greece and Spain, and we meet with them in Algeria, in Asia from the Altai Mountains to the Arctic Ocean, and in America in Mexico and Kentucky. They seem to have entrenched themselves especially in Siberia, whence tusks are still exported as an article of commerce. In the extreme North, those parts of Wrangel’s Land which have been explored are strewn with the bones of mastodons, and in some parts of Sonora and Columbia these remains form almost inexhaustible deposits.