Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and ArtOsborn, Henry Fairfield
History
Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art
Osborn, Henry Fairfield
Art, Primitive; Prehistoric peoples; Stone age
In southern Devonshire is the famous cavern of Kent's Hole, near Torquay,
discovered as long ago as 1825 by MacEnery and described in 1840 by
Godwin-Austen.(68) It is interesting to note that teeth of the sabre-tooth
tiger (_Machærodus latidens_) have been found in this cavern, leading Boyd
Dawkins to believe that this animal survived to late geologic times: it
will be recalled as a contemporary of the early Chellean flint workers at
Abbeville. The animal life of Kent's Hole, as originally described by
Godwin-Austen, included remains of "elephant, rhinoceros, ox, deer, horse,
bear, hyæna, and a feline animal of large size"--fauna now known to belong
to the period of the fourth glaciation.[AI]
[Illustration: FIG. 125. Geographic distribution of the principal
Mousterian industrial stations in western Europe, attributed to the
Neanderthal race.]
To the south are three stations, one of which, La Cotte de St. Brelade, on
the present isle of Jersey, then part of the mainland, has yielded
Mousterian flakes and thirteen human teeth of Neanderthal type.
Still farther to the south, in the Dordogne region, is found the type
station described on a previous page, of Le Moustier, the centre of a
group of eight sites crowded along the north and south shores of the
Vézère, which have become famous for the knowledge they yield of the
successive stages in the development of the Mousterian implements,
beginning with the primitive culture station of La Micoque, and including
La Ferrassie, Le Moustier, La Rochette, Pataud, La Mouthe, Laussel, and
finally the Abri Audit, which marks the closing stage in the development
of the Mousterian industry and, in the opinion of many archæologists, its
transition to the Aurignacian. At several of these places important
discoveries have been made, both of human fossils and of noteworthy
transitions in the progress of invention. Circling round this Vézère group
are the stations of Petit-Puymoyen, La Quina, where implements of the
closing stage of Mousterian industry have been found as well as a human
fossil of the Neanderthal type, and La Chapelle-aux-Saints, which has
yielded the only complete skeleton of a Neanderthal man so far discovered.
[Illustration: FIG. 126. The Mousterian cave of Hornos de la Peña, in the
Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain. Photograph by N. C. Nelson.]
In Spain is the station of San Isidro, near the headwaters of the Tagus,
and the beautifully situated grottos of Castillo and Hornos de la Peña, on
the northern slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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