=The caves of southern France.= These contain the fullest records of the race, much like the Eskimos in bodily frame, which lived in western Europe at the time of the mammoth and the reindeer. The floors of these caves are covered with a layer of bone fragments, the remains of many meals, and here are found also various articles of handicraft. In this way we know that the savages who made these caves their homes fished with harpoons of bone, and hunted with spears and darts tipped with flint and horn. The larger bones are split for the extraction of the marrow. Among such fragments no split human bones are found; this people, therefore, were not cannibals. Bone needles imply the art of sewing, and therefore the use of clothing, made no doubt of skins; while various ornaments, such as necklaces of shells, show how ancient is the love of personal adornment. Pottery was not yet invented. There is no sign of agriculture. No animals had yet been domesticated; not even man's earliest friend, the dog. Certain implements, perhaps used as the insignia of office, suggest a rude tribal organization and the beginnings of the state. The remains of funeral feasts in front of caverns used as tombs point to a religion and the belief in a life beyond the grave. In the caverns of southern France are found also the beginnings of the arts of painting and of sculpture. With surprising skill these Paleolithic men sketched on bits of ivory the mammoth with his long hair and huge curved tusks, frescoed their cavern walls with pictures of the bison and other animals, and carved reindeer on their dagger heads. [Illustration: Fig. 374. Restoration of Head of Pithecanthropus erectus] =Early man on other continents.= Paleolithic flints curiously like those of western Europe are found also in many regions of the Old World,--in India, Egypt, and Asia Minor,--beneath the earliest vestiges of the civilization of those ancient seats, and sometimes associated with the fauna of the Glacial epoch. In Java there were found in 1891, in strata early Quaternary or late Pliocene in age, parts of a skeleton of lower grade, if not of greater antiquity, than any human remains now known. _Pithecanthropus erectus_, as the creature has been named, walked erect, as its thigh bone shows, but the skull and teeth indicate a close affinity with the ape. In North America there have been reported many finds of human relics in valley trains, loess, old river gravels buried beneath lava flows, and other deposits of supposed glacial age; but in the opinion of some geologists sufficient proof of the existence of man in America in glacial times has not as yet been found.