V. The Cro-Magnon race has up to this point shown scarcely any superiority over the hunting tribes of America, unless perhaps it is in the dexterity which they displayed in flint cutting. But the artistic instincts which they showed almost from their first appearance, and the point to which they carried drawing and sculpture in the Madeleine age, gives them quite an exceptional position amongst those nations whose evolution has been arrested at the lowest stage of social life. The relative alleviation of climatic conditions, the diminution of large and ferocious animals involving the multiplication of useful species and especially that of the reindeer, placed at this epoch the Cro-Magnon man in conditions of welfare unknown to his predecessors. He profited by it in developing in a most unexpected manner his very superior talents.
As a general rule the greater number of sculptures representing animals leave, it is true, much to be desired. We can indeed recognise the reindeer represented in high relief; nor would it be difficult to recognise as a mammoth the little carving made from the antler of the reindeer discovered at Montastruc. Nevertheless, these specimens would give but a poor idea of Magdalénean art. The ivory dagger-handles found by M. Peccadeau de l’Isle by the side of the mammoth fortunately confirm this impression. In both a reindeer is represented crouching, the legs bent, the head stretched out and the antlers lying along the body so as not to inconvenience the hand which should hold it. The attitudes are so natural, and the proportions so exact, that a decorative sculptor of the present day, in treating the same subject, could scarcely do better than copy his antique predecessor.
Drawing or rather engraving was much more commonly practised than sculpture. It offers also more points of interest. Armed with their point of flint, the quaternary artists engraved in turn the bone and the antlers of the reindeer, ivory from the mammoth, and stones of different kinds. Sometimes they endeavoured to reproduce the plants or animals around them; at other times they followed their own fancy, and made designs of ornamentation, in which we meet with almost all the principles reinvented many centuries afterwards. The multiplicity and the variety of this kind of engraving show much imagination and a real faculty of invention.
The faculty of imitation is equally striking in drawings representing real objects, animals in particular. They are often very remarkable for firmness of touch, showing a perfect comprehension of the whole, and reproducing the details with such exactness that we are not only able unerringly to recognise the group but even the species represented by the artist. Thus we have found successively the ox, the aurochs, the horse, the reindeer, the elk, the stag, the steinbock, a cetacean, certain fishes, etc. After these faithful representations, the models of which we know, there is no reason to doubt the exactness with which certain extinct animals have been drawn. This very simple consideration gives great interest to the drawing of the cave bear found by M. Garrigou upon a piece of Massat schist, and to those of the mammoth discovered by M. Lartet in the Périgord caves. Thanks to the latter and to what we know from the mammoths preserved in ice in Siberia, an artist of the present day might produce in almost exact detail the portrait of this giant of the ancient world, which disappeared so long ago.
VI. Man figures very rarely in these drawings or sculptures, and the representations of our species which have been met with up to the present time, display a relative inferiority which is indeed most strange. The small ivory statue found by M. de Vibraye at Laugerie-Basse scarcely testifies to even the infancy of the art. It is a woman, whose sex we are able to recognise by a detail doubtless exaggerated, but long, stiff and with very strange protuberances at the lower extremity of the loins. The crouching human form found by M. l’Abbé Landesque in the same locality is still more ill-formed. The drawings of men or women are scarcely better, and the contrast sometimes presented upon the same specimen between them and drawings of animals is most strange. M. l’Abbé Landesque’s reindeer woman is grotesque, whilst the hind legs of the animal, which alone have been preserved, present all the qualities which I have noticed above and which may be observed in the splendid horse’s head engraved upon the other side of the bone. In M. Massénat’s aurochs man, the animal has much beauty both in form and movement; the man is stiff, without proportion or truth.
This contrast is too great and too constant to be accidental. It must be the result of a cause arising perhaps from some superstitious idea similar to certain modern superstitions. When Catlin had finished his first portrait of the Red-Skin, some of the tribe looked upon him as a dangerous sorcerer, who had robbed the model of part of himself. Perhaps some similar idea may have prevented the artists of the Vézère from studying the human figure, for it always happens that when they attempt to reproduce it their graving tool hesitates, and loses all its good qualities.
These imperfect representations, therefore, tell us nothing of the appearance or proportions of the race. The most we can say, if we accept the interpretations of MM. l’Abbé Landesque and Piette, is that it was remarkably hairy. But this opinion, which rests chiefly upon the drawing of the reindeer woman, seems to me to be contradicted by that of the aurochs man, whose small pointed beard scarcely extends as far as the angle of the jaw-bone. The horizontal hatching upon the legs and body cannot, it appears to me, be taken for hairs, because it crosses at right angles the direction which would have been taken by the latter. I should much rather consider them as lines of painting, a kind of decoration which we know to have been held in high estimation amongst these tribes.
VII. However bad they may be, the drawings which I have just described furnish us, nevertheless, with some facts respecting the mode of life pursued by these hunters. That of the aurochs man informs us that they followed the largest game naked, as is often the case with the Red-Skins, their hair raised in a tuft on the top of the head, and armed only with the lance or javelin. The whale man is also naked, and the immense arm which he stretches out as far as the fin of the fish, seems to indicate that he has fought and conquered this monster, which had doubtless run aground in some shallow. But, from this fact alone, it follows that the quaternary man of Périgord must sometimes have left his mountains and travelled as far as the sea-shore. His contemporaries in the Pyrenees did the same, as is proved by the drawings of seals discovered in the grottoes of Gourdan and Duruthy.
Again, those deposits which are situated at the greatest distance inland have often furnished objects which can only have been obtained upon the sea-shore. At Cro-Magnon more than three hundred shells of Littorina littorea, an oceanic species, have been found. On the other hand the Cypræa rufa and C. lurida found upon the Laugerie-Basse skeleton, which I have mentioned above, are unquestionably Mediterranean. Sometimes the molluscs peculiar to the two regions have been found in the same place. In the Gourdan grotto, in the middle of the central Pyrenees, M. Piette found five oceanic species, one Mediterranean, and five common to both seas. The fossil shells of the Périgord deposits were generally brought from the falun of Touraine, those of Gourdan must have been collected, partly in the Landes and in the neighbourhood of Dax, and partly near Perpignan. In this same grotto M. Piette discovered a pumice-stone, which had been used in polishing needles, and which he considered had come from the volcanic region of Agde.
From these, and some other analogous facts, M. Piette and M. de Mortillet have thought there is sufficient reason to suppose that the tribes of the Vézère had no fixed habitation, but led a nomad life, visiting in turn the shores of the two seas, hunting in the mountains during the summer the game of the season, and passing the winter in a warmer climate. We cannot adopt this hypothesis. The ever-increasing fauna among the cooking débris denotes a population, which, as it multiplied in every way, made more and more use of the resources of the country. These same heaps furnished Lartet with reindeer bones of every age, amongst which were those of young fawns. Our great authority concludes from this fact that the tribe was stationary during the entire year, and we believe him to be right. The man of Cro-Magnon, La Madeleine and Gourdan, must undoubtedly have always been within reach of the reindeer, from which they obtained nourishment, arms and clothing. But the migrations of this animal, under the influence of a but slightly varying maritime climate, could not have been very extensive, and the troglodytes of Périgord or the Pyrenees, if they wished to keep within its range, would not have had such expeditions to undertake, as those of the Red-Skins in pursuit of the bison.