The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European historyGrant, Madison
History
The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history
Grant, Madison
Ethnology -- Europe
In the Solutrean Period the Cro-Magnons shared Europe with a new race
known as the Brünn-Předmost, found in central Europe. This race is
characterized by a long face as well as a long skull, and was,
therefore, harmonic. This Brünn-Předmost race appears to have been well
settled in the Danubian and Hungarian plains and this location indicates
an eastern rather than a southern origin.
Good anatomists have seen in this race the last lingering traces of the
Neanderthaloids but it is more probable that we have here the first
advance wave of the primitive forerunners of one of the modern European
dolichocephalic races.
This new race was not artistic, but had great skill in fashioning
weapons and possibly is associated with the peculiarities of Solutrean
culture and the decline of art which characterizes that period. The
artistic impulse of the Cro-Magnons which flourished so vigorously
during the Aurignacian seems to be quite suspended during this Solutrean
Period, but reappears in the succeeding Magdalenian times. This
Magdalenian art is clearly the direct descendant of Aurignacian models
and in this closing age of the Cro-Magnons all forms of Paleolithic art,
carving, engraving, painting and the manufacture of weapons, reach their
highest and final culmination.
Nine or ten thousand years may be assigned to the Aurignacian and
Solutrean Periods and we may with considerable certainty give the
minimum date of 16,000 B. C. as the beginning of Magdalenian time. Its
entire duration can be safely set down at 6,000 years, thus bringing the
final termination of the Magdalenian to 10,000 B. C. All these dates are
extremely conservative and the error, if any, is in assigning too late
and not too early a period to the end of Magdalenian times.
At the close of the Magdalenian we enter upon the last period of
Paleolithic times, the Azilian, which lasted from about 10,000 to 7,000
B. C., when the Upper Paleolithic, the age of chipped flints, definitely
and finally ends in Europe. This period takes its name from the Mas
d’Azil, or “House of Refuge,” a huge cavern in the eastern Pyrenees
where the local Protestants took shelter during the persecutions. The
extensive deposits in this cave are typical of the Azilian epoch and
here certain marked pebbles may be the earliest known traces of symbolic
writing, but true writing was probably not developed until the late
Neolithic.
With the advent of this Azilian Period art entirely disappears and the
splendid physical type of the Cro-Magnons is succeeded by what appear to
have been degraded savages, who had lost the force and vigor necessary
for the strenuous chase of large game and had turned to the easier life
of fishermen.
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