[Illustration: Skull of Old Man of Cro-Magnon. FIG. 42.—Front View. FIG. 43.—Vertical View.] Of the age of those Troglodytes of France, M. Lartet remarks: “The presence of the remains of an enormous bear, of the mammoth, of the great cave-lion, of the reindeer, the spermophile, etc., in the hearth-beds, strengthens in every way the estimation of their antiquity; and this can be rendered still more rigorously, if we base our argument on the predominance of the horse here, in comparison with the reindeer, on the form of the worked flints, and of the bone arrow and dart-heads.”[51] This argument, however, overlooks the possibility of the interments long after the accumulation of the hearth-beds with their included relics. Assuming this cavern period of Central France as the later subdivision of the palæolithic age of Europe, its drawings and carvings represent the arts of a remote era, compared even with the polished stone-hammers and chipped flints contemporary with the oldest implements of bronze. It is obvious, therefore, that a comparison between the rude worked flints of the cave-men of Southern France, and the highly finished stone implements of the Bronze Period of Northern Europe, is no true gauge of any intermediate progress or development. The artist to whose pencil or graving-tool we owe the only authentic portraiture of the mammoth, unquestionably possessed skill and intellectual vigour adequate to the production of any stone implement or personal ornament pertaining to the arts of Western Europe at the commencement of its metallurgic period. In truth it is far easier to produce evidences of deterioration than of progress, in instituting a comparison between the contemporaries of the mammoth, and later prehistoric races of Europe, or savage nations of modern centuries. They had advanced, as M. Paul Broca says, “to the very threshold of civilisation.” They possessed arts, industry, and apparently such a degree of social organisation as their external circumstances admitted of. But then, as at many subsequent periods, the elements of progress were arrested at this stage, and the whole work of civilisation had to be begun anew.