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
One of the animals of the Aurignacian period which is best known is the
'horse of Solutré.' Around the great Aurignacian camp at Solutré there
accumulated the remains of a vast number of horses, which are estimated at
not less than 100,000; the bones are distributed in a wide circle around
the ancient camp, consisting of broken or entire skeletons compacted into
a veritable magma, with which occur also remains of the reindeer, the
urus, and the mammoth interbedded with all the types of Aurignacian
implements. The majority of these horses belong to the stout-headed,
short-limbed forest or northern type, measuring 54 inches (13.2 hands) at
the withers, and about the size of the existing pony.(13) The joints and
hoofs were especially large, and the long teeth and powerful jaws were
adapted to feeding on coarse grasses; the greater part of the remains are
those of horses from five to seven years of age. There is no evidence that
the men of Aurignacian times either bred or reared these animals; they
pursued them only for food. The discovery that the horse might be used as
an animal of transport appears to have been made in the far East, and not
in western Europe.
The animal and plant life of the Aurignacian station near Krems, on the
Danube, above Vienna,(14) includes a strong element of the tundra
forms--the arctic fox, wolverene, mammoth, rhinoceros, musk-ox, reindeer,
hare, and ptarmigan. The steppe fauna, on the other hand, is rare,
including only the suslik, but not the saiga antelope or any of the other
characteristic steppe types. The principal objects of the chase were not
only the mammoth, which was extraordinarily abundant, but also the
reindeer and wild horses; the ibex is rare.
Obermaier observes that the chart of the geographic distribution of the
Aurignacian shows this culture to belong essentially to the provinces
surrounding the entire Mediterranean, from Syria (the grottos of Lebanon)
through north Africa (Algiers) to Spain. It also has a strong development
throughout France, entering middle and southern Germany and passing along
the Danube to Austria, Poland, and southern Russia (Mezine) north of Kiev.
There is no doubt that the mammoth hunters of Krems belonged in this
wide-spread distribution; the shells used for ornaments, which
unmistakably recall those of the Riviera, are only in part local from the
neighborhood of Vienna; the larger part is from the Mediterranean. We may
imagine that these shells passed through several hands among this race of
nomadic hunters, and this is not surprising in view of the girdle which
the Aurignacian stretched around the entire Mediterranean Sea.
DISCOVERY OF THE CRÔ-MAGNON RACE
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