Advanced as early man in America may have been in his stone industry, he seems to have been singularly backward in making the kind of spiritualized artifact which we call art. In the caves of France and Spain men of the Old Stone Age left remarkable paintings and sculptures of animals. There is nothing like this of corresponding age in the Americas. Early man in Europe and in Northern Asia turned out many little figures of women—undoubtedly symbols of fecundity, since the female characteristics are highly exaggerated; but in the New World female figurines are to be found only in later levels such as those of the Eskimo, Southwestern, and Middle American cultures, all of which date from close to the birth of Christ. Of all the forms of art, we have few examples that may have been made by early man. In the United States there are the dubious trio of crude, round heads which Sellards reports from a gravel pit in Henderson County, Texas.[59] During the digging of a canal in the Valley of Mexico in 1870, a workman picked out of a fossil-bearing stratum a bony section of what was described as an extinct llama, or camel, carved in the shape of a coyote’s head. It was about forty feet below the surface of the ground in the same layer of earth with fossils of elephant, horse, giant armadillo, and camel.[60] The Lindenmeier Folsom site produced decorated discs of bone, possibly used as game markers. Most interesting of all is the fragment of mammoth or mastodon bone recovered in the summer of 1959 about ten miles southeast of Puebla, Mexico, by Juan Armenta Camacho. On a six-inch wedge of bone, estimated to have been 30,000 years old, are the crudely carved outlines of bison, tapir, and mammoths or mastodons, carved while the bone was still fresh.[61] [Illustration: EARLIEST DRAWINGS BY NEW WORLD MAN? _Four drawings, by Fernando Ramirez Osorio, from a number of engravings on a portion of pelvic bone of an extinct form of elephant found near Puebla, Mexico. The animal at the upper left may be a tapir, the one at the lower right a bison. The other two engravings probably represent mammoths or mastodons. The straight lines in the drawings of the tapir and the bison may be symbols of the hunt such as appear in European caves. A new test for early dates gives an age of over 30,000 years. From the same geological formation have come remains of nearly thirty extinct animals, some thought to be of the third interglacial age, as well as crude tools. (Courtesy of Douglas Cornell, science editor of Visión.)_] Hand Axes in the Americas