Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

The chief divisions of Upper Palæolithic art are as follows:

1. Drawing, engraving, and etching with fine flint points on surfaces of stone, bone, ivory, and the limestone walls of the caverns.

2. Sculpture in low or high relief, chiefly in stone, bone, and clay.

3. Sculpture in the round in stone, ivory, reindeer and stag horn.

4. Painting in line, in monochrome tone, and in polychromes of three or four colors, usually accompanied or preceded by line engraving, with flint points or low contour reliefs.

5. Conventional ornaments drawn from the repetition of animal or plant forms or the repetition of geometric lines.

Drawings and Engravings of the Early Magdlenian

We have already traced the art of engraving, as it first appears in late Aurignacian times, into the Solutrean; in the latter it is but feebly represented. Its further development in early Magdalenian times is found in the engravings made with more delicate or more sharply pointed flint implements, capable of drawing an excessively fine line; these were doubtless the early Magdalenian microliths. The animal outlines, with an indication of hair, are frequently sketched with such exceedingly fine lines as to resemble etchings; the figures are often of very small dimensions and marked by much closer attention to details, such as the eyes, the ears, the hair both of the head and the mane, and the hoofs; the proportions are also much more exact, so that these engravings become very realistic. Breuil ascribes to the early Magdalenian the engraved mammoth tracings of Combarelles. Engravings of this period are also found in the grottos of Altamira in Spain, and of Font-de-Gaume in Dordogne, and to this stage belongs the group of does at Altamira, distinguished by the peculiar lines of the hair covering the face. The subjects chosen are chiefly the red deer, reindeer, mammoth, horse, chamois, and bison. The striated drawings of Castillo and Altamira, which partly represent hair and are partly indications of shading, belong to this period.

Fig. 197. Primitive outline engravings of woolly mammoths of Aurignacian or early Magdalenian times, from the walls of the cavern of Combarelles. After Breuil.