* = twice mentioned (in different classifications).
+ or ++ denotes an unusual or culminating development.
Whether the Neanderthals were exterminated entirely or whether they were driven out of the country is not known; the encounter was certainly between a very superior people, both physically and mentally, who possibly had the use of the bow and arrow, and a very inferior and somewhat degenerate people that had been already reduced physically and perhaps numerically by the severe climatic conditions of the fourth glaciation. The Neanderthals were dispossessed of all their dwelling-places and industrial stations by this new and vigorous race, for at no less than eighteen points the Aurignacian immediately succeeds upon the Mousterian industry and in a few instances Crô-Magnon burials occur very near the Neanderthal burial sites.
In the racial replacements of savage as well as of historic peoples the men are often killed and the women spared and taken into families of the warriors, but no evidence has thus far been found that even the Neanderthal women were spared or allowed to remain in the country, because in none of the burials of Aurignacian times is there any evidence of the crossing or admixture of the Crô-Magnons and the Neanderthals.
Pl. VI. The head of the Crô-Magnon type of Homo sapiens, a race inhabiting southwestern Europe from Aurignacian to Magdalenian times. Antiquity in western Europe estimated as at least 25,000 years. After the restoration modelled by J. H. McGregor. For the bodily proportions of this finely developed race compare Pl. VII.
The chief source of the change which swept over western Europe lay in the brain power of the Crô-Magnons, as seen not only in the large size of the brain as a whole but principally in the almost modern forehead and forebrain. It was a race which had evolved in Asia and which was in no way connected by any ancestral links with the Neanderthals; a race with a brain capable of ideas, of reasoning, of imagination, and more highly endowed with artistic sense and ability than any uncivilized race which has ever been discovered. No trace of artistic instinct whatever has been found among the Neanderthals; we have seen developing among them only a sense of symmetry and proportion in the fashioning of their implements. After prolonged study of the works of the Crô-Magnons one cannot avoid the conclusions that their capacity was nearly if not quite as high as our own; that they were capable of advanced education; that they had a strongly developed æsthetic as well as a religious sense; that their society was quite highly differentiated along the lines of talent for work of different kinds. One derives this impression especially from the conditions surrounding the development of their art, which are still mysterious and an interpretation of which we shall attempt to give in the following chapter.
Cultural, Racial, and Climatic Divisions