Had the men of the Reindeer Period a fully developed speech in addition to this gesture language? That they had the elements of such, of course, stands to reason. Mere animal cries and what may be called ‘voice signs’ might have carried them far, nor would it be possible to say at what point the transition from such primitive methods of oral communication to what might legitimately be called articulate speech was overpassed. But there are at least some weighty reasons for doubting whether this higher stage was really attained by Palaeolithic man. In North America, which, like other parts of that continent, seems to have received its first human settlers at a comparatively late geological date, a considerable amount of physical conformity is perceptible among the Red Indian tribes. But we are confronted by the significant fact that this racial unity is nevertheless compatible with the existence of a multiplicity of native tongues. It has been observed that the number of known stocks or families of Indian languages in the United States amounts to over three score, differing among themselves ‘as radically as each differs from Hebrew, Chinese, or English’.[13] In each of these linguistic families, again, there are several--sometimes as many as twenty--separate languages, which differ again from each other as much as do the various divisions of the ‘Aryan’ group. But if the original forefathers of these tribes had brought with them a fully developed articulate speech, is it conceivable that the languages of their descendants should be so radically different? This phenomenon, moreover, is thrown into further relief by the fact that when we turn to the signs and gestures current among the Red Indian tribes we find a large common element. It may be that the very deficiencies in articulate speech which we may justly assume to have existed during the Reindeer Period gave a spur to other means of personal intercommunication. Not only would the infancy of speech promote the use of gestures, but it may have powerfully contributed towards diffusing the practice of making pictorial records.[14] The possibility, therefore, does not seem to be excluded that men drew before they talked.