In 1852 the sepulchral grotto of Aurignac, on the nearest spur of the Pyrenees, in Haute-Garonne, was accidentally discovered by a laborer. It was almost filled with bones, among which were two entire skulls and many fragments, numbering altogether no less than seventeen skeletons of both sexes and of all ages. The mayor of Aurignac ordered all the bones to be taken out and re-interred in the parish cemetery. Thus, in 1860, when Lartet visited this grotto and determined it as the type station of a distinct industry, all the human remains had been lost beyond recovery, and with them all possibility of learning to what race, culture, and geologic age they belonged. On a sloping terrace in front of the grotto was the hearth containing one hundred flint implements, mingled with the remains of a typical reindeer fauna.

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Fig. 140. Section of the Grotto of Crô-Magnon, in which the fossilized skeleton of the 'Old Man of Crô-Magnon,' type of the Crô-Magnon race, was discovered in 1868, together with the remains of four other individuals. After Louis Lartet. Scale = 1-125.

In 1868 Lartet explored a grotto in the little hamlet of Crô-Magnon, near Les Eyzies, on the Vézère, where he found five skeletons, which have become the type of the great Crô-Magnon race of Upper Palæolithic times. The grotto was accidentally discovered by workmen building a road in the Vézère valley. Here Lartet found the skeleton of an old man, now known as the 'old man of Crô-Magnon'; then that of a woman, whose forehead bore the mark of a wound from some heavy blow; close to her lay the fragments of a child's skeleton and near by those of two young men. Flint implements and perforated shells were found with these skeletons.

In May, 1868, the material was first described by Broca,[(16)] his excellent account being later reprinted and amplified in the Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ of Lartet and Christy.[(17)] Broca referred to these skeletons as incontestable proofs of the contemporaneous existence of man and the mammoth. The associated mammalian life was that of the reindeer and the industry is now known to be of the Aurignacian stage. In his classic original description of this type Broca remarks upon the high stature, the face very broad in relation to its height, with very long and very narrow orbits; the large and markedly dolichocephalic skull, with an unusually large brain capacity, noting that the brain capacity of the Crô-Magnon woman surpasses that of the average male of to-day; the forehead correspondingly broad, vertical, convex on the median line; the bones of the limbs robust, and the shin-bones flattened transversely; altogether a very high racial type of skeleton belonging to the species Homo sapiens.

Fig. 141. Head of the very tall skeleton of Crô-Magnon type discovered in the Grotte des Enfants. After Verneau. One-quarter life size.