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

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

The cavern district of Moravia attracted a relatively large population, and among the numerous stations are the grottos of Kr̆íz̆, Žitný, Kostelík, Bycis̆kala, Schoschuwka, Balcarovaskala, Kůlna, and Lautsch. Near the Russian border bone implements like those of Gudenushöhle on the Danube have been found at the station of Kůlna, and the industrial stratification of Šipka is very clear. Not far from Cracow, across the Russian border, the caverns in the region of Ojcow were entered by men carrying the Magdalenian culture. Another site in Russia is the grotto of Mas̆zycka, and characteristic Magdalenian harpoons, needles, and bâtons de commandement with other implements have also been found to the eastward, in the neighborhood of Kiev, in the Ukraine.

Decline of the Magdalenian Culture

The highest point touched by the Crô-Magnon race in the middle or high Magdalenian appears to correspond broadly with the cold arid period of climate in the interval between the Bühl and Gschnitz advances in the Alpine region, during which the steppe mammals spread widely over southwestern Europe. The saiga antelope, for example, a highly characteristic steppe type, is represented in one of the most skilful bone carvings found in the late Magdalenian layers of Mas d'Azil; also the steppe type of horse is frequently represented in the most advanced engravings of late Magdalenian times. How far this cold, relatively dry climate influenced the artistic and creative energy of the Crô-Magnons is largely a matter of conjecture. The entirely independent records of La Madeleine, of Schweizersbild, and of Kesslerloch concur in associating the highest stage of Magdalenian history of art with the predominance of the steppe fauna and evidences of a cold dry climate. That the mammoth still abounded is seen in the mammoth engravings which are superposed on those of the bison in Font-de-Gaume.

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Fig. 245. Front and side views of a saiga antelope carved upon a bone dart-thrower from the Magdalenian deposits of Mas d'Azil. After Piette.

The succeeding life period is that of the retreat of the tundra and steppe mammals and of the increasing rarity of the reindeer and of the mammoth in southwestern Europe; it corresponds broadly with the returning cold and moist climate of the second Postglacial advance known in the Alps as the Gschnitz stage. With the spread of the forests and the retreat to the north of the reindeer, the principal source both of the supply of food and clothing and of all the bone implements of industry and of the chase, a new set of life conditions may have gradually become established. If it is true, as most students of geographical conditions and of the climate maintain, that Europe at the same time became more densely forested, the chase may have become more difficult, and the Crô-Magnons may have begun to depend more and more upon the life of the streams and the art of fishing. It is generally agreed that the harpoons were chiefly used for fishing and that many of the microlithic flints, which now begin to appear more abundantly, may have been attached to a shaft for the same purpose. We know that similar microliths were used as arrow points in predynastic Egypt.

Breuil[(35)] observes very significant industrial changes in closing Magdalenian times: first, the beginning of small geometric forms of flints suggesting the Tardenoisian types; second, the occasional use of stag horn in place of reindeer horn; third, a modification in the form of bone implements toward the patterns of Azilian times; fourth, the rapid decline—one may almost say sudden disappearance—of the artistic spirit. Schematic and conventional designs begin to take the place of the free realistic art of the middle Magdalenian.

Thus the decline of the Crô-Magnons as a powerful race may have been due partly to environmental causes and the abandonment of their vigorous nomadic mode of life, or it may be that they had reached the end of a long cycle of psychic development, which we have traced from the beginning of Aurignacian times. We know as a parallel that in the history of many civilized races a period of great artistic and industrial development may be followed by a period of stagnation and decline without any apparent environmental causes.