with very
slow and uncertain steps, his whole progress in that vast period being
measured by the invention of one or two new forms of stone implements
and a little more skill in chipping them. At its close a great
chill comes over Europe--the last ice-sheet is, it seems, spreading
southward--and we enter the Mousterian period and encounter the
Neanderthal race which we described in the preceding chapter.

It must be borne in mind that the whole culture of primitive times is
crushed into a few feet of earth. The anthropologist is therefore quite
unable to show us the real succession of human stages, and has to be
content with a division of the whole long and gradual evolution into a
few well-marked phases. These phases, however, shade into each other,
and are merely convenient measurements of a continuous story. The
Chellean man has slowly advanced to a high level. There is no sudden
incoming of a higher culture or higher type of man. The most impressive
relics of the Mousterian period, which represent its later epoch, are
merely finely chipped implements. There is no art as yet, no pottery,
and no agriculture; and there is no clear trace of the use of fire or
clothing, though we should be disposed to put these inventions in the
chilly and damp Mousterian period. There is therefore no ground for
resenting the description, "the primeval savage," which has been applied
to early man. The human race is already old, yet, as we saw, it is
hardly up to the level of the Australian black. The skeleton found at
Chapelle-aux-Saints is regarded as the highest known type of the race,
yet the greatest authority on it, M. Boule, says emphatically: "In no
actual race do we find the characters of inferiority--that is to say,
the ape-like features--which we find in the Chapelle-aux-Saints head."
The largeness of the head is in proportion to the robust frame, but
in its specifically human part--the front--it is very low and bestial;
while the heavy ridges over the large eyes, the large flat stumpy nose,
the thick bulge of the lips and teeth, and the almost chinless jaw, show
that the traces of his ancestry cling close to man after some hundreds
of thousands of years of development.

The cold increases as we pass to the last part of the Old Stone Age, the
Solutrean and Magdalenian periods; and nothing is clearer than that the
pace of development increases at the same time. Short as the period is,
in comparison with the preceding, it witne