This is emphatically not a people to be credited with an advanced form of script. It seems more probable that the groups of linear signs that occur should rather be regarded as mnemonic symbols, and the mere isolated characters perhaps as individual marks. Some, it may be, had acquired a magical value. A mnemonic series may be paralleled by the well-known example of a mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine-man, in which every sign suggests a whole order of ideas.
It is noteworthy that among the more abbreviated representations from the hands of the men of the Reindeer Period the human figure is little brought into play, though the eye and hand do occur. In general, moreover, we see little of the reaction of gesture language on their pictorial records. In a scene from the walls of the Cave of Les Combarelles,[10] however, a male figure is depicted with a hand raised, and the other held straight out—evidently representing some expressive utterance of gesture language ([Fig. 7]).
Another good instance of a gesture occurs among the strange anthropoid figures with animal profiles, which, nevertheless, Messieurs Cartailhac and Breuil consider to represent human subjects masked or travestied.[11] On the roof of the hall of the Altamira Cave is one of these quasi-human subjects, with the arms raised, with open palms in front of its head, an attitude on which its discoverers justly remark: ‘It is impossible to overlook the analogy of this gesture with that which throughout all antiquity and amongst nearly all peoples indicates supplication or prayer.’[12] As a sign of adoration it has given rise to the Egyptian hieroglyphic Ka.
Fig. 7.
Had the men of the Reindeer Period a fully developed speech in addition to this gesture language? That they had the elements of such, of course, stands to reason. Mere animal cries and what may be called ‘voice signs’ might have carried them far, nor would it be possible to say at what point the transition from such primitive methods of oral communication to what might legitimately be called articulate speech was overpassed.
But there are at least some weighty reasons for doubting whether this higher stage was really attained by Palaeolithic man. In North America, which, like other parts of that continent, seems to have received its first human settlers at a comparatively late geological date, a considerable amount of physical conformity is perceptible among the Red Indian tribes. But we are confronted by the significant fact that this racial unity is nevertheless compatible with the existence of a multiplicity of native tongues. It has been observed that the number of known stocks or families of Indian languages in the United States amounts to over three score, differing among themselves ‘as radically as each differs from Hebrew, Chinese, or English’.[13] In each of these linguistic families, again, there are several—sometimes as many as twenty—separate languages, which differ again from each other as much as do the various divisions of the ‘Aryan’ group.
But if the original forefathers of these tribes had brought with them a fully developed articulate speech, is it conceivable that the languages of their descendants should be so radically different? This phenomenon, moreover, is thrown into further relief by the fact that when we turn to the signs and gestures current among the Red Indian tribes we find a large common element.
It may be that the very deficiencies in articulate speech which we may justly assume to have existed during the Reindeer Period gave a spur to other means of personal intercommunication. Not only would the infancy of speech promote the use of gestures, but it may have powerfully contributed towards diffusing the practice of making pictorial records.[14] The possibility, therefore, does not seem to be excluded that men drew before they talked.