The Neanderthal people spread over Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France and England; and in the soil of all those countries, buried now in some places to a depth of forty feet below the actual surface, they left millions of imperishable memorials of their handiwork—weapons and tools made from chipped flint and other kinds of stone—sharp weapons for throwing and cutting, and tools for dressing skins and shaving wood.
Contemporary with this early race in the wilds of Europe, were the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the cave bear and hyena, the woolly mammoth, the giant deer, the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and other long since extinct creatures. These the Neanderthals hunted, eating their flesh, splitting the larger bones for the marrow, opening the skulls for the brains, making anvils of the large, flat bones, and in the cold winters clothing themselves with the skins. This and more is evidenced to-day by the numerous bones of these animals which are found associated with the tools which Neanderthal man used at least 200,000 years ago.
Turning their attention to art, these people made drawings on bones and stones of various animals and human beings. The human forms are always represented in the nude, and it is noteworthy that they invariably show signs of being covered with hair.
Fig. 27.—Male Giant Gorilla.
Killed by H. Paschen, at Yaunde, in the interior of the Cameroons, and stuffed by Umlauff.
The Neanderthal race had its day and disappeared from Europe. Perhaps it was greatly reduced by the rigors of the fourth glacial period. Perhaps its remaining numbers were decimated in wars with a superior people; for that superior people was at hand.
Some 25,000 years ago, a new race—the Cro-Magnon people—invaded Europe. These people were from Asia. They belonged to a stock totally different from the Neanderthals from whom they wrested a continent. Tall in physique, with high, straight foreheads, and large, well formed brains, they were a hardy race of hunters and the most intelligent and progressive race the world then knew. Their superior industry in the working of flint everywhere superseded the Neanderthal. They had imagination, ideals, and knew the customs of civilized life. They were artists with a high sense of beauty and proportion. Their carvings on bone implements, their sculptures, and the realistic paintings on the walls of their caves represent an art whose delicate finish and superb proportion remained unrivalled in its field until the reign of the Greeks. They decorated their dead with strings of perforated shells, and with them buried flint weapons and offerings of food. Writing of these people with evident enthusiasm, Professor John M. Tyler, in “The New Stone Age in Northern Europe,” observes: “The Cro-Magnon people have excited the wonder and admiration of all anthropologists.”
Fig. 28.—The Baldheaded Chimpanzee.