Fig. 5.
The artistic achievements of the men of the Reindeer Period attained such a high level that even such a conclusion could hardly excite surprise. In their portrayal of animal forms—in their power of seizing the characteristic attitude of the creature represented—they show themselves on a level with those later ‘Minoan’ artists of prehistoric Crete and Greece who produced such masterpieces as the wild goat and kids or the bull-hunt on the Vaphio Cups. We now know that the Minoan race had also a highly developed form of linear script. Might not their remote predecessors on European soil have evolved the same?
Fig. 6.
That they had sufficient intellectual capacity to evolve a system of writing, can hardly be doubted. There were, no doubt, some inferior elements among the population of the Reindeer Period. It is possible that certain low cranial types of the Neanderthal class may have survived till late Pleistocene times; and the stratified remains, for instance, of the Grotte des Enfants at Grimaldi, near Mentone, show that its occupation by scions of a fine proto-European race—akin to the ‘men of Cro-Magnon’—alternated during a certain time with occupation by a race of negroid intruders presenting characteristics as low as those of the Australian black men.[9] But the prevailing type of skull associated with the interments in the Mentone Caves—those of men with upright jaw and finely cut nose—struck no less competent an observer than Sir E. Ray Lankester as exhibiting a perfection of development and a cranial capacity worthy to be compared with those of civilized Europeans of the present day.
We must, however, still remember that, whatever the intellectual capacity of these archaic people, they did not possess that heirloom of the Ages, the accumulated experience of the later races of mankind. Art, indeed, seems to have come to them by nature, and they had other germs of civilization—an incipient cult of the dead, some taste for personal ornament. They were possessed of a variety of arms and implements of stone and bone and other materials. They could kindle fire and even mitigate the darkness of their subterranean vaults with primitive stone lamps. They seem to have been skilful trappers, and had even learned to bridle the horse. Yet many of the most simple acquirements of primitive culture were still unknown to them. They knew neither the potter’s nor the weaver’s, nor the husbandman’s craft. They went mother-naked, and their principal dwellings were the caves and dens of the earth.