The work has suffered, of course, from many a human limitation. Not the least of these has been the desire to interpret knowledge too quickly, to freeze it into forms and classifications, and to stand doggedly by those forms and classifications when they have become weakened by new knowledge. The student and the intelligent layman have been confused by all this. They have been particularly confused—as we think we can show—when it comes to early man in the New World. [Illustration: _Aurignacian and Magdalenian men of France drew and painted animals, almost never the human form. The artists who worked in the caves and rock shelters of eastern Spain drew figures of hunters and women, as well as of animals. These artists may have been Capsians who lived in North Africa in the Aurignacian period and spread into Europe at some time between then and the Neolithic. The style resembles that of the African Bushmen. The two archers on the left are from the cave of Saltadora; the two at the right, from the Cueva del Mas d’en Josep. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_] The Danger in Universal Time-Scales When we apply to the paleolithic cultures of the rest of the world the names of the European culture sequence—Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian—we produce acrimonious argument and not much more. These terms are of no use in the rest of the world except as a description of types of tools. In parts of Africa, for example, Mousterian and Aurignacian objects are found together; in other parts, Mousterian and Solutrean. In the first case, the Aurignacian includes primitive pottery; in the second, Aurignacian is missing altogether. [Illustration: _An archer drawn in the cave of Saltadora, Spain. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_] [Illustration: _An archer from Alpera, Spain. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_] Tied in with the mistake of setting up prehistory in Europe as a frame for prehistory elsewhere, lies the worse mistake of trying to read general time in terms of things and ideas which are purely local. The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Stone Ages mean less than nothing as a dating machine for more than a single locality. “The Stone Age,” says Childe, “ended before 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, about 1600 B.C. in Denmark, and A.D. 1800 in New Zealand.”[28] Postglacial means one thing in Germany and another in Sweden, one thing in Buffalo and another in Winnipeg. [Illustration: MAGDALENIAN ENGRAVINGS _These extraordinary drawings of horses and a mammoth are a transcript of the art of primitive man found upon the walls of the cave of Font-de-Gaume. (After Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)_]