213. The Lower and Upper Palæolithic
Within the Old Stone Age, a primary division is to be made between the Lower and Upper Palæolithic. The Lower Palæolithic comprises the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian periods, when Europe was inhabited by Neandertal man, who was distinct from the modern human species, and possibly by a pre-Neandertal race not yet discovered. The Upper Palæolithic, or Reindeer Age, consists of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, with the Azilian as epilogue. Through these Upper Palæolithic periods long-headed branches of Homo sapiens—ourselves—existed: the Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, and Brünn types, some of them foreshadowing the existing Caucasian and Negroid races (§ [14], [16-18]). The longest step forward in the development of European Palæolithic civilization comes in the passage from its Lower to its Upper phase. Before this transition, new achievements were rare and their total small. The use of fire, of flint cores and flakes, of fracturing and retouching, possibly the use of wooden handles, a minimal employment of bone, and a definite disposal of the dead, about sum up known human attainments to the end of the Lower Palæolithic (§ [81]).
Compared with this stock of culture, that of the Upper Palæolithic is elaborate. Bone awls and weapon points; shell necklaces and armlets; clothing; painting of the dead; sculpture and engraving—a greater number of elements than the Lower Palæolithic had been able to accumulate in perhaps 75,000 years—appear in the Aurignacian. The foundations of the whole of the Upper Palæolithic civilization were laid in this period. That the Solutrean added needles and surface retouching of flint, the Magdalenian a more vigorous development of pictorial line and use of colors, lamps, harpoons, and spear throwers, represented in the main only an enriching of the general Upper Palæolithic culture, whose essentials were determined at the outset.[32]