We must, however, still remember that, whatever the intellectual capacity of these archaic people, they did not possess that heirloom of the Ages, the accumulated experience of the later races of mankind. Art, indeed, seems to have come to them by nature, and they had other germs of civilization--an incipient cult of the dead, some taste for personal ornament. They were possessed of a variety of arms and implements of stone and bone and other materials. They could kindle fire and even mitigate the darkness of their subterranean vaults with primitive stone lamps. They seem to have been skilful trappers, and had even learned to bridle the horse. Yet many of the most simple acquirements of primitive culture were still unknown to them. They knew neither the potter’s nor the weaver’s, nor the husbandman’s craft. They went mother-naked, and their principal dwellings were the caves and dens of the earth. This is emphatically not a people to be credited with an advanced form of script. It seems more probable that the groups of linear signs that occur should rather be regarded as mnemonic symbols, and the mere isolated characters perhaps as individual marks. Some, it may be, had acquired a magical value. A mnemonic series may be paralleled by the well-known example of a mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine-man, in which every sign suggests a whole order of ideas. It is noteworthy that among the more abbreviated representations from the hands of the men of the Reindeer Period the human figure is little brought into play, though the eye and hand do occur. In general, moreover, we see little of the reaction of gesture language on their pictorial records. In a scene from the walls of the Cave of Les Combarelles,[10] however, a male figure is depicted with a hand raised, and the other held straight out--evidently representing some expressive utterance of gesture language (Fig. 7). Another good instance of a gesture occurs among the strange anthropoid figures with animal profiles, which, nevertheless, Messieurs Cartailhac and Breuil consider to represent human subjects masked or travestied.[11] On the roof of the hall of the Altamira Cave is one of these quasi-human subjects, with the arms raised, with open palms in front of its head, an attitude on which its discoverers justly remark: ‘It is impossible to overlook the analogy of this gesture with that which throughout all antiquity and amongst nearly all peoples indicates supplication or prayer.’[12] As a sign of adoration it has given rise to the Egyptian hieroglyphic _Ka_. [Illustration: FIG. 7.]