This industry represents the last stage of the Old Stone Age. The decline in the art of fashioning flints, begun in Magdalenian times, appears to continue in the Azilian-Tardenoisian. As to the tiny symmetrical flints which are characteristic of this period, among the microliths of almost all the late Magdalenian stations pre-Tardenoisian forms are found which may be regarded as prototypes of the geometric Tardenoisian flints;[(9)] this represents a new fashion established in flint-making under influences coming from the south.

There was also a natural or local Azilian evolution from the Magdalenian types and technique. In general the flint implements which had so long prevailed in western Europe become smaller in diameter and more carelessly retouched, showing marked deterioration even from the late Magdalenian stages. For the preparation of hides and the fashioning of bone we discover unsymmetrical planing tools (grattoirs), also small, well-formed oval scrapers (racloirs), and microlithic scrapers. Borers (perçoirs) with oblique ends and gravers (burins) made of small flakes are the types of implements which most frequently occur, but the great variety of borers, so characteristic of the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian industries, had entirely disappeared in Azilian times.

The marks of industrial degeneration are also conspicuous in the bone implements, which show a very great deterioration in number and quality as compared with the Magdalenian, and which are principally confined to three types—the harpoons, the awls (poinçons), and the smoothers (lissoirs), together with very small bone borers (perçoirs). The distinctive feature of the Azilian bone industry is the flat harpoon of stag horn; it is known that the use of stags' antlers for fashioning harpoons began in the late Magdalenian, when most of them were still being fashioned from reindeer horn. These flat Azilian harpoons succeed the type of the double-rowed, cylindrical harpoons of the late Magdalenian, and are found mainly where the rivers, lakes, or pools offered favorable conditions for fishing. Thus the Azilian bone-harpoon industry, like the Tardenoisian microlithic flint industry, was largely pursued by fisherfolk.

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Fig. 250. Geographic distribution of the principal Azilian and Tardenoisian industrial stations in western Europe, also Campigny and Robenhausen.

We may imagine that the gradual disappearance of the reindeer, an animal much more easily pursued and killed than the stag, was one of the causes of the substitution of the various arts of fishing for those of hunting.

It is to the excessively small or microlithic flints that the name Tardenoisian especially applies, and it is the vast multiplication of these microliths and their wide distribution over the whole area of the Mediterranean and of western Europe which constitutes the most distinctive feature of this industrial stage.[(10)] The triangular flint (Fig. 249) is certainly the most ancient Tardenoisian type. It occurs in the Azilian stations of the Cantabrian Mountains and of the Pyrenees, accompanied by the painted pebbles and with other flints of Azilian type, but without the graving-tools; to the east it is found in the stations of Savoy; and along the Danube it occurs at Ofnet, associated with remains of the lion and the moose, also with ornamental necklaces composed of the perforated teeth of the deer, identical with those found in the type station of Mas d'Azil in the Pyrenees. To the north this typical early Azilian culture extends to Istein, in Baden, where it includes the microlithic flint flakes, the gravers, and the little round scrapers associated here also with the stag and the prehistoric forest and meadow fauna of western Europe. Exactly the same stage of industrial development occurs in the grotto of Höhlefels, near Nuremberg, and in the shelter station of Sous Sac, Ain. We invariably find proofs of the variety of these pygmy flints as well as of their continuity from one station to another. All these facts compel us to assign a very long period of time to the spread of these industrial types.

The question which arises as to the sources of this special Tardenoisian industry again finds archæologists divided. Schmidt inclines to the autochthonous theory and regards the microlithic flint industry as an outgrowth of tendencies already well developed in the Magdalenian. Breuil, on the other hand,[(11)] dwells strongly on the evidence for circum-Mediterranean sources. In putting the questions, Who were the Azilians? Whence did they come? What were their ancestors? he is disposed to give the answer already quoted, that, whichever industry is examined, we are always obliged to look toward the south, toward some point along the Mediterranean, for the origin of these microlithic flints. In Italy, which he believes to have remained in an Aurignacian industrial stage throughout all the long period of Magdalenian time, he finds at Mentone a layer overlying the Aurignacian and containing small flints recalling the geometric forms of the Azilian, as well as a multitude of the small round scrapers (racloirs) characteristic of Azilian times. The upper layers at Mentone on the Riviera are paralleled by those observed near Otranto, in Sicily. It is certain, he continues, that all around the Mediterranean there was a number of distinct centres where microlithic implements of geometric form appeared, and where the accompanying industries, in different stages of development, were related to an Upper Palæolithic culture consisting of a continuous Aurignacian type.