In Magdalenian times the Crô-Magnon race undoubtedly reached its highest development and its widest geographic distribution, but it would be a mistake to infer that the boundaries of the Magdalenian culture also mark the extreme migration points of this nomadic people, because the industries and inventions may well have spread far beyond the areas actually inhabited by the race itself.

Absence of Magdalenian influence around the northerly coasts of the Mediterranean is certainly one of the most surprising facts. Breuil has suggested that Italy remained in an Aurignacian stage of development throughout Magdalenian times and indicates that there is much evidence that Magdalenian culture never penetrated into this peninsula, for in Italy the Aurignacian industrial stage is succeeded by traces of the Azilian. This geographic gap, however, may be filled at any time by a fresh discovery. In Spain, also, the Magdalenian culture is known only in the Cantabrian Mountains, but never farther south, one of the earliest sites found in this region being the grotto of Peña la Miel, visited by Lartet in 1865, and one of the most famous the cavern of Altamira, discovered by Sautuola in 1875; to the northeast is the station of Banyolas. So far the eastern provinces of Spain have not yielded any implements of engraved or sculptured bone.

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Fig. 238. Geographic distribution of the principal Magdalenian industrial stations in western Europe.

In contrast to this failure to reach southward, the Magdalenian culture is widely extended through France, Belgium, England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and as far east as Russia. It would appear either that the men of Magdalenian times wandered far and wide or that there was an extensive system of barter, because the discovery of shells brought for personal adornment from the Mediterranean seashores to various Magdalenian sites in France and in central Europe seems to indicate a wide-spread intercourse among these nomadic hunters and a system of trade reaching from the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the valley of the Neckar in Germany and along the Danube in Lower Austria. Another proof of this intercourse is the wide distribution not only of similar forms of implements but of very similar decorations; as an instance, Breuil notes the likeness of schematic engravings on reindeer horn in the two primitive Magdalenian layers of Placard, Charente, to those found in the Polish cavern of Mas̆zycka, near Ojcow, and to others in the corresponding layers of Castillo, near Santander, of Solutré on the Saône, and of various sites in Dordogne. A very distinctive geometric decoration on bone is that of broken zigzag lines with little intercalated transverse lines, which we notice at Altamira, in northern Spain, and which also occurs here and there in Dordogne and in Charente and extends to the grottos of d'Arlay in the Jura. Another style of ornament, with deep pectinate and punctuate lines, found in the very ancient Magdalenian of Placard, also occurs in the most ancient layers of Kesslerloch, Switzerland. Spiral ornaments like those on the bone weapons of Dordogne, of Arudy, and of Lourdes are found at Hornos de la Peña, in the Cantabrian Mountains. The spread of analogous decoration is still more striking when we find it occurring in the details of sculpture or in a certain type of dart-thrower (propulseur), which extended from the Pyrenees eastward to the Lake of Constance. Inventions like that of the harpoon and fashions like those of the decorative motifs were carried from point to point.

This influence does not lead to identity. Some of the phases of art and of decoration are confined to certain localities; for example, the engravings of deer on the bone shoulder-blades in the caverns near Santander, Spain, are not duplicated in France; also there are numerous local styles witnessed in the forms and decorations of the javelin, the lance, and the harpoon; these variations, however, do not conceal the element of community of culture and of similar fluctuations of industry and art between widely distant stations.

Many Magdalenian stations were crowded around the sheltered cliffs of Dordogne (Fig. 238). Besides these, we observe the Magdalenian sites of Champs, Ressaulier, and the grotto of Combo-Negro in Corrèze; south of Dordogne and Corrèze are other stations along the Garonne and the Adour. Some of the finest examples of Magdalenian art have come from Bruniquel, on the Aveyron, near the boundary between Tarn-et-Garonne and Tarn, where no less than four important sites have been excavated.