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

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Fig. 266. Restoration of the Neolithic man of Spiennes, Belgium, modelled by Mascré under the direction of A. Rutot.

The prevailing opinion at present is that the Campignian distinctly precedes the typical Neolithic of the Swiss lake-dwellings, a stage known as the Robenhausian. Thus the Neolithic culture becomes fully established in the period of the Swiss Lake Dwellings, remains of which are found at Moosseedorf, Wauwyl, Concise on Lake Neufchâtel, and Robenhausen on Lake Pfaeffikon. The latter is the Robenhausian type station.

Distinctive Features of the Neolithic Epoch

The first of these is the presence of implements of polished stone which find their way gradually into western Europe. The neoliths at first are greatly outnumbered by chipped and flaked implements, and some of the latter show a survival of the familiar types of the Old Stone Age, while others belong to entirely distinct types which had an independent development in the far East.

The chief economic change is seen in the rudimentary knowledge of agriculture and in the use of a variety of plants and seeds, accompanied by the gradual appearance of implements for the preparation of the soil and for harvesting the crops. This new source of food supply leads to the establishment of permanent stations and camps and more or less to the abandonment of nomadic modes of life. Near the ancient camp sites and villages, therefore, are found implements for the preparation of skins and hides, because the chase was still maintained for purposes of clothing as well as for food.

Still more distinctive of the Neolithic is the introduction of pottery, which is at first used in the preparation of food. In the hearths or kitchen-middens and in the refuse heaps of the camps we no longer find evidence of the splitting of the jaws of mammals and of the long and short bones of the limbs, or even of the larger foot bones, in search of marrow, which is such a universal feature of the Upper Palæolithic deposits.

The artistic impulse of the north is very crude and naturalistic. In the Spanish peninsula, accompanying and following the schematic period described in the early part of this chapter, there was a long stage of development in which men were painting on rocks, mostly in the form of silhouettes, naturalistic figures of animals and of people.[(24)]

The presence of the moose in these drawings concurs with that of the two bison represented in the cavern of Cogul and would tend to indicate that these paintings belong to Upper Palæolithic times, although it is now considered that they are of early Neolithic age. The character of these animal designs is totally different from that of the Magdalenian period in the north and is analogous rather to that of the Bushmen of South Africa. The authors of these frescos represent not only the ibex, stag, and wild cattle but also the horse, moose, fallow deer, wolf, and occasionally the birds. There are many features in this art which show its absolute independence of origin from that of the Magdalenian of the north, among them the frequent presence of composition and the almost invariable presence of human figures.