Passing again farther back over an immense period of time, we find Europe warm again; the glaciers have (for a time) gone or retreated far up the mountains but are found in extension again at a still earlier date. An inter-Glacial set of animals is now found living in a comparatively warm climate in Western Europe. Another elephant (Elephas antiquus) is there (not the mammoth), and another rhinoceros (not the woolly rhinoceros of the later Glacial period); the hippopotamus flourished then in Europe and swam in the Thames and Severn, and there too, at last is the sabre-toothed tiger, which did not exist at all at a later period! Now was the time when a man, if he could, might have "scribed" the image of a sabre-toothed tiger on a piece of bone, but, so far as we know, he did not and could not. This was ages before other succeeding men walked "on glittering ice fields," and they, in turn, were ages earlier than the artistic Cromagnards of the Reindeer period. The presence of men in the warm inter-Glacial times in Europe is proved by the association of rough but undisputed flint implements with the inter-Glacial animals and by the discovery of a most interesting human jaw (chinless, like that of the Neander men) in what is held to be a præ-Glacial deposit at Heidelberg. We have very little knowledge of Glacial and præ-Glacial man except well characterized flint implements and two skeletons, some detached limb bones, four or five jaws, and as many skulls.[2] But of post-Glacial Palæolithic man we know the skeletons of the Cromagnard race, their sepulture, their decorative necklaces, and their bone and ivory carvings and engravings, and the coloured rock paintings and other work of earlier races (the Aurignacians, and others) belonging to successive epochs or eras, which have been discovered in caves in France, Spain, Belgium, and Austria. It was long after them that the Neolithic people appeared. The preceding remarks will have made it clear that the engraved antler here figured was carved by a man who was not really at all primitive, although he lived probably between twenty and fifty thousand years ago. It will also have been made clear that hundreds of such engravings, more or less fragmentary, are known. Some are very skilful works of art, others of a much inferior quality. Many, however, show an astonishing familiarity with the animal drawn and a sureness of drawing which is not surpassed by the work of modern artists (see Chapter III). The interest of the particular engraved antler which I am describing is that it is the only carving of its age as yet discovered which is more than a drawing or sculpture of a single animal. It is a "picture" in the sense of being a composition. It is not, it is true, painted–it is engraved; but being a composition it is entitled to be called "the earliest picture in the world." Let me describe it a little more fully with the help of the illustrations.