sses a far greater advance
than had been made in all the rest of the Old Stone Age. Beyond a doubt
men now live in caves, in large social groups, make clothing from the
skins of animals, have the use of fire, and greatly improve the quality
of their stone axes, scrapers, knives, and lance-heads. There is at
last some promise of the civilisation that is coming. In the soil of
the caverns in which man lived, especially in Southern France and the
Pyrenean region, we find the debris of a much larger and fuller life.
Even the fine bone needles with which primitive man sewed his skin
garments, probably with sinews for thread, survive in scores. In other
places we find the ashes of the fires round which he squatted, often
associated with the bones of the wild horses, deer, etc., on which he
lived.

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