A Horse

At some point in time, the ice shelf forced it way down to the very edge of the Mediterranean Sea. This placed the timberline just north of the Swiss Alps moving along a westward position to the Pyrenees Mountain range. Snow and ice would not make for good living conditions, and the limestone caves along the Pyrenees Mountains would provide some underground shelter. What to do on those long winter nights? Doodling and drawing must have been one of the pastimes, for the caves of this region contain some of the earliest human doodles. A study of these drawings show that the horse was the most common figure drawn upon the walls of the caves. [a total of 780 times!] The bison was drawn 759 times. [ A bison was a mammal with a large head, short horns, and heavy forequarters, with a large fleshy hump.] The cow (small bovid) was drawn 212 times, and the ox (large bovid) was drawn 177 times. The reindeer (115 times) and other types of deer (290 times) were drawn. The mammoth was drawn 290 times. Little attention seemed to be placed on the rhino (20 times), the feline (26 times) , and the bear (50 times). Amazing, that the horse would be the animal that claimed the most wall space. It was the horse drawn, two wheel, chariot, that was first developed by the Hittites. The horse must have been a key animal in our Celtic-Iberian migration. A horse, a horse, my DNA for a horse! This would have been one of the last staging grounds for my R1b1b2 DNA before its final migration.

[The source for this information is "Secrets of The Ice Age, A Reappraisal of Prehistoric Man", by Evan Handingham, John Wiley & Sons, Canada, 1979. The totals are summarized from a chart on page 298.]