It is to this latest period–the
Elapho-Tarandian of Piette–that the engraved antler figured here (Figs.
1 and 2) belongs.
At an earlier stage of the post-Glacial period men hunted the bison and
other large game in the north of Spain and made coloured drawings of
them on the roofs and walls of their caves, drawings which have been
copied and preserved: whilst the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the cave
lion and bear still inhabited south central France and are pictured on
the walls of caves in that region–as described in Chapter II. Later we
lose all trace of Palæolithic man and his wonderful artistic skill. He
seems either to have migrated or to have been absorbed in the immigrant
Neolithic race–a race singularly devoid of any tendency to artistic
sculpture or engraving.
The skeletons and skulls of the men of the Reindeer period, or
post-Glacial Palæolithic men, have been discovered here and there.
They indicate a fine, tall people with well-shaped skulls and jaws,
comparable to the nobler modern races. It is convenient to call them
Cromagnards, since good skulls of the race have been described from
Cromagnon, in France. There is evidence (from skulls) that another
race (the negroid so called "Aurignacians") preceded and coexisted to
some extent in Western Europe with them, but we have, at present, no
evidence as to whence or how the Neolithic race or the Cromagnard race
or any of their predecessors came upon the scene!
When we go farther back and reach the actual Glacial period we find
a very different state of things. The men who then existed in the
caverns are called the Neander men. They were a short, bandy-legged,
long-armed, low-browed people, great workers of flints. They had
the use of fire, and contended with hyenas and bears and lions for
the occupation of their caverns. In their day–the day of European
glaciation–the mammoth was in full occupation of the pine forests on
the edge of the glaciers. But the Neander men made no sculptures, or
carving, or engravings. The gap between them and the Cromagnon men
is much greater than that between an Australian black fellow and an
average Englishman; indeed, the difference is properly expressed by
regarding the Neander man as a distinct species–Homo neanderthalensis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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