Fig. 37. Early Lower Palæolithic culture-areas (about 100,000-50,000 B.C.). Vertical shading, Chellean-Acheulean culture, with coups-de-poing. The principal European districts containing typical Chellean coups-de-poing are marked “C.” Stippling, “Pre-Mousterian” culture, probably contemporaneous with Chellean and Acheulean, but lacking coups-de-poing. White, uninhabited or unexplored. (Mainly after Obermayer.)
During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.
This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.
215. Upper Palæolithic Culture Growths and Races
With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province, whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they have been previously described (§ [72-81]) ran their course in a middle European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. [38], [39]). Northern Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general, it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.
Fig. 38. Aurignacian culture-areas (about 25,000-18,000 B.C.). 1, West-central European Aurignacian, with art. 2, Italian Aurignacian. 3, Lower Capsian of North Africa and Spain. 4, Lower Capsian of Syria. 5, South Russia, perhaps post-Aurignacian. (Mainly after Obermayer.)
The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form ([Fig. 38]). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.
During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ [240]) that at least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is unproved.
The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and its extent appears limited also ([Fig. 39]). It reveals two principal areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades, were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be significant.