But the most remarkable indication of progress in the "cave-man" is his
artistic skill. Exaggerated conclusions are sometimes drawn from the
statuettes, carvings, and drawings which we find among the remains of
Magdalenian life. Most of them are crude, and have the limitations of a
rustic or a child artist. There is no perspective, no grouping. Animals
are jumbled together, and often left unfinished because the available
space was not measured. There are, however, some drawings--cut on bone
or horn or stone with a flint implement--which evince great skill in
line-drawing and, in a few cases, in composition. Some of the caves
also are more or less frescoed; the outlines of animals, sometimes of
life-size and in great numbers, are cut in the wall, and often filled in
with pigment. This skill does not imply any greater general intelligence
than the rest of the culture exhibits. It implies persistent and
traditional concentration upon the new artistic life. The men who drew
the "reindeer of Thayngen" and carved the remarkable statuettes of women
in ivory or stone, were ignorant of the simplest rudiments of pottery or
agriculture, which many savage tribes possess.
Some writers compare them with the Eskimo of to-day, and even suggest
that the Eskimo are the survivors of the race, retreating northward with
the last ice-sheet, and possibly egged onward by a superior race from
the south. It is, perhaps, not a very extravagant claim that some
hundreds of thousands of years of development--we are now only a few
tens of thousands of years from the dawn of civilisation--had lifted
man to the level of the Eskimo, yet one must hesitate to admit
the comparison. Lord Avebury reproduces an Eskimo drawing, or
picture-message, in his "Prehistoric Times," to which it would be
difficult to find a parallel in Magdalenian remains. I do not mean
that the art is superior, but the complex life represented on the
picture-message, and the intelligence with which it is represented, are
beyond anything that we know of Palaeolithic man. I may add that nearly
all the drawings and statues of men and women which the Palaeolithic
artist has left us are marked by the intense sexual exaggeration--the
"obscenity," in modern phraseology--which we are apt to find in coarse
savages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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