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Fig. 153. Geographic distribution of the principal Aurignacian industrial stations in western Europe.

Fig. 154. Outlook over the Bay of Biscay from the entrance of the cavern of Pindal, in the province of Asturias, northern Spain. Photograph by N. C. Nelson.

Aurignacian Art[AQ]

The strongest proof of the unity of heredity as displayed in the dominant Crô-Magnon race in Europe from early Aurignacian until the close of Magdalenian times is the unity of their art impulse. This indicates a unity of mind and of spirit. It is something which could not pass to them from another race, like an industrial invention, but was inborn and creative. These people were the Palæolithic Greeks; artistic observation and representation and a true sense of proportion and of beauty were instinct with them from the beginning. Their stone and bone industry may show vicissitudes and the influence of invasion and of trade and the bringing in of new inventions, but their art shows a continuous evolution and development from first to last, animated by a single motive, namely, the appreciation of the beauty of form and the realistic representation of it.

Fig. 155. Outline of a mammoth painted in red ochre in the cavern of Pindal, and attributed by Breuil to the Aurignacian. Only two limbs are represented. After Breuil.

This art, as first discovered by Lartet and further made known through the brilliant studies of Piette and Breuil, is industrial (l'art mobilier), consisting of the decoration of small personal belongings, ornaments, and implements of stone, bone, and ivory. According to the later researches of Sautuola, Rivière, Cartailhac, Capitan, and Breuil it is also mural or parietal (l'art pariétal), consisting of drawings, engravings, paintings, and bas-reliefs on the walls of caverns and grottos. It remained for Breuil especially to demonstrate that the mobile and the parietal art are identical, the work of the same artistic race, developing along closely similar lines, step by step. Thus the art becomes a new means not only of interpreting the psychology of the race but of establishing the prehistoric chronology.