Fig. 69.—A piece of mammoth ivory carved with spirals and scrolls from the cave of Arudy (Hautes Pyrenées). Same size as the object.
[Transcriber’s Note: The original image is approximately 2¼ inches (5.5cm) high and ¾ inches (2cm) wide.]
We are now in the Palæolithic period, and, what is more, we have quitted what geologists call the recent or modern epoch, and have entered on “geologic” times; this is the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is a legitimate and useful thing thus to draw a strong line between the Neolithic and the Palæolithic portions of the Stone Age. The Neolithic men belong, so to speak, to our own days. They were, even seven thousand years ago, only a little rougher in their tools than were the peasants of the remoter parts of Central Europe a few hundred years ago. They had not even as much tendency to or gift for artistic work as the ploughmen of our own days, and have left none behind them. Excepting that they used stone axes and knives instead of steel ones, they really led the life of mediæval country-folk. But once you pass them in your journey backwards—once you enter the Pleistocene circle—you find that climate, land surface, animals, plants, mode of life are as utterly changed as were you suddenly transferred from the English countryside to Terra del Fuego or to an Eskimo village. The Palæolithic men and their whole surroundings and arts of life have no touch of familiarity for the modern inhabitants of Europe.
Fig. 70.—Carving on an antler of a group of three red deer and four fishes, remarkable for the attitude and movement of the deer: a, hind legs of front deer, the rest broken away: bf, second deer: c, third deer looking back: d, lozenge marks, supposed to be the artist’s signature: bh, the hind legs of the second deer, wonderfully true to nature in their “hanging” pose. From the cavern of Lorthet, near Lourdes (Hautes Pyrenées), deposit of the Reindeer epoch. The carving runs all round a cylindrical rod of bone (as very many of these carvings do), and is here represented as “un-rolled” or “developed,” that is to say, laid out flat. The drawing is a little reduced as compared with the actual carving.
[Transcriber’s Note: The original image is approximately 1½ inches (4cm) high and 2 inches (5cm) wide.]
When we explore this Palæolithic, Pleistocene, or Quaternary epoch—the last of the geologists’ long series of epochs and deposits—we find that it represents by no means a trivial episode in the world’s long change. It is true that compared to geologic periods which follow on below it—namely, the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene of the Tertiary, the Chalk and the vast ages below that white sea-sediment, indicated by the sixty thousand feet of stratified rock (Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, Cambrian!), the Pleistocene exhibits but a small thickness of deposit (amounting to but two or three hundred feet of sand and gravel) as its contribution to the earth’s crust.
