Above, one of the carved and perforated reindeer antlers of the Magdalenians, which are sometimes described as bâtons de commandement; the Eskimos used a somewhat similar tool for straightening their arrows. Left, the Venus of Willendorf, an Aurignacian carving in stone, found near Spitz, Austria. The woman’s head from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy, France, may be either Aurignacian or Magdalenian. The horse’s head, made of reindeer antlers, from Mas d’Azil, France, is Magdalenian. (After Osborn, 1915.)
For many years the French clung to what Hooton calls the rather chauvinistic myth that here, in the waning years of the Great Ice Age, we find a superior kind of man that was predominantly a product of the French area. Certainly he was a remarkable person in many ways. For one thing, he discovered art. He painted on the walls of his caves and carved on pieces of bone and elephant ivory pictures of mammoths, bison, and boars, and he made sculptures of fat women in stone. Also, he began to fish in the swift streams that ran off from the glaciers. He hunted reindeer and made use of their antlers as tools. For quite a time he was supposed to represent the peak of achievement by early man.
Before long, however, the Cro-Magnon became only a factor in a broader culture, described as the Aurignacian, and soon the Aurignacian suffered from scientific fission. Through this whole period and, indeed, until the end of the Old Stone Age, new tools in the form of blades, chisellike burins, and implements of reindeer bone make their appearance; but they vary in shape and in the time of their emergence. Some of these tools divide what was formerly called the Aurignacian into three parts: the Châtelperron, the Middle Aurignacian, and the Gravettian. The Châtelperron people developed a narrow, curved blade out of a tool vaguely Mousterian. The Middle Aurignacians appeared as invaders with thin blades and scrapers notched or narrowed halfway along each side. Finally, a people who had hunted mammoths in southern Russia—the Gravettians—turned up in France as the inventors of a thin, narrow, and straight blade made by carefully detaching sliver after sliver from a well shaped core of flint. Sometimes one edge was blunted to make it handier to use; occasionally the point of a blade or other tool was chipped off diagonally to produce a chisellike engraving tool. Another type of tool, the Font Robert point with a stem, also appeared (see illustration, [page 101]).
How blades were split off a core. The technique was perfected by the Gravettians, an Aurignacian people, and was practiced by the Aztecs of Mexico. (After Evans, 1872.)
Henry Fairfield Osborn once dated the European advent of the Aurignacians at about 27,000 years ago, Nelson at 20,000, Mather at 15,000.[22] Zeuner, however, believes they flourished from about 100,000 until 75,000 years ago.[23] Dating the last of the glaciers was the key to this dispute. Radiocarbon dates now suggest that the Aurignacian period survived in Europe and the Near East until 18,000 to 34,000 years ago.[24] Its beginnings may well extend beyond the range of this method.
Upper Paleolithic tools from long flakes taken off cores after the manner shown on [page 100]. The burin, or graver, at the upper left is probably Upper Aurignacian, though commoner in the Magdalenian culture. The others are usually called blades. (The burin, after Burkitt, 1933; the blades, after MacCurdy, 1924.)
The Aurignacians are a variegated lot, which argues further for subdividing them. One specimen, the tall, high-domed Cro-Magnon, is variously credited with producing the modern European man, the Eskimo, and even the Indian of America. Another specimen, the Grimaldi from the Riviera, is distinctly Negroid. Another—from hints in several places—seems to be Mongoloid. Apparently, the Aurignacians were almost variegated enough to have peopled the modern world. But almost as much could be said for the inhabitants of an upper level in the Choukoutien Cave near Peking. There, in one spot, they divide nicely into Negroid, Eskimoid, and Melanesoid.