The Swastika is, we have seen, a very early device or symbol in use among ancient races in Europe, Asia and America. Though it has been found on an ingot of metal in Ashanti it was of late foreign introduction there, and is not known in Africa, nor in Polynesia and Australia, nor among the Eskimos. How did it as a mere matter of shape and pattern come into existence? One might suppose that such combinations of lines as the simple cross and this modified cross, with the arms bent each half-way along its length to form a right angle, would be very natural things for a primitive man–or a child–to make when trying to produce some ornamental effect by tracing simple rectilinear and symmetrical figures. No doubt such a "playing with lines" is a common phase or stage of the human search for decorative design. It leads by gradual steps to very complex line-decoration in early pottery and woven work, which is sometimes called "geometrical design." It is, however, the fact, and a very interesting one, that the tendency to make geometrical design is not so pronounced in the very earliest examples of human drawing and ornament known to us, as is the tendency to copy natural objects. And this would appear to be especially the case where the drawing is to be a symbol or significant badge. In the earliest art-work known to us–that of the cave-men of the late Pleistocene period in Western Europe (see Chaps. I., II. and III.)–the artists were busy with attempts (often wonderfully successful ones) to present the outlines of familiar animals (and sometimes plants) by incised carving on bone or painting on the rock walls of caves–preceded, it is true, by a period in which "all-round" sculpture in bone or stone or modelling in clay was the method employed. The extensive use of lines–concentric or parallel, like those on the finger-tips–as decoration of stone work is not known until the later or Neolithic period.[7] On one at least of the incised bone drawings of the Palæolithic cave-men two little diamond-shaped lozenges are engraved. They are seen in the cave-men's drawing of a stag figured on pp. 12, 13 of this book. These lozenges are supposed to be the "signature" of the artist, and, if so, are not only the first examples of a geometrical rectilinear figure as ornament, but the earliest examples known of the use of a badge or symbol as a means of identification.