Out of the love that he bore them, scribing them clearly on bone,
Straight on the glittering icefield, by the caves of the lost Dordogne,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fell to his scribing on bone.
The fact is that several prehistoric races have succeeded one another in Western Europe during the immensely long period—amounting to hundreds of thousands of years—during which man existed before the dawn of history. The "lost" or "prehistoric Dordogne" was like the present historic Dordogne in regard to the fact that many races and dynasties successively held possession of it and left their work in its soil and caves.
Passing back through the historic age of iron and the sub-historic age of bronze, we come to a time, about four thousand years ago, when there were no men in the west of Europe who made use of metals at all, although, for a thousand or two years earlier, men were using bronze and copper in the East. European races immediately before the first use of metals made beautiful implements of stone (chiefly flint), and finished them by grinding and polishing them. These men are spoken of as Neolithic men, or men of the Neolithic period. They had herds and cultivated crops, and they built after a fashion rough houses in wood and tombs and temples with great slabs of stone. They made pottery and woven cloth. The animals and plants of Europe were the same in those late prehistoric times as they are to-day. The Lake dwellings of Switzerland belong to this epoch and yield us their remains as evidence. The men had very nearly the same set of domesticated animals as we have to-day, but they had no skill in carving outlines of animals. Their only decorative work consisted of parallel lines, straight or in zigzags or in circles, graven on the great stone slabs which they erected.
We can trace them back to some seven thousand years B.C. and then comes a huge gap—we do not know how many thousand years—in our evidence as to what was going on in this part of the world. We find convincing proof that before this interval the climate was much colder than it is to-day, and that the land surface of Europe was in many respects very different from what it became later. Britain was continuous with the Continent. There were in that remote period human tribes spread over the less frigid valleys of Europe. They had no fields, no herds; they fed on the roasted flesh of the animals they chased and on the fish they speared, and on wild fruits and roots. They dwelt chiefly, if not wholly, in caves, probably also in skin tents, but they did not build either in wood or in stone. The age which we thus reach is called the Palæolithic, or "ancient" Stone age, because men made use of stone, which they chipped into shape, but, unlike the Neolithic people, never polished it. We find enormous numbers of these rough or Palæolithic stone implements both in caves and in the gravels deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. They are so abundant as to prove the existence of a very considerable human population in the remote ages when they were fashioned and used. The changes which have taken place and the time involved since some of these Palæolithic implements were made and used may be guessed at (but cannot be definitely calculated) from the fact that the beds of the rivers which formed the gravel terraces in which they are found in England were, in many cases, from one to six hundred feet above the level of the present rivers. The land surface has risen and the rivers have simultaneously excavated deep and wide valleys leaving terraces of gravel high up on their sides. These show where the rivers once flowed. The vastness of the excavation of the valley from the level of the old river bed 600 ft. up on the sloping hill-side to its present low-lying bed in the floor of the valley—gives us some measure of the time which has elapsed in the process.
No one can tell, at present, the limit in the past of Palæolithic man. The period of time over which his existence extended, as indicated by the trimmed flints undoubtedly made by human workmanship, is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years. In Western Europe races came and went, succeeded one another and disappeared, either migrating or absorbed or more rarely destroyed by the later invaders. Naturally enough, in the later deposits of rivers and in the higher layers of earth and limestone cake which fill many caves to the depth of 30 or 40 ft. we find the remains of man's workmanship more abundantly than in the older deposits.
We can broadly distinguish in the Palæolithic epoch three (perhaps four) periods, separated by the occurrence of great extensions of the northern or arctic ice cap of such a volume as to cover North Europe and North America, and the simultaneous extension of the glaciers of the mountains of Europe. This period of the alternating extension and retreat of the great northern glaciers is known as the Glacial period, or Ice Age. The latest Palæolithic men are subsequent to it—that is, post-Glacial. We can distinguish several successive ages of these post-Glacial Palæolithic men, altogether distinct from and anterior to the Neolithic men. In the earlier of these ages many of the great animals of the Glacial period—now extinct or withdrawn to other regions—still survived in Europe. The mammoth survived, but was fast dying out in the south and centre of France, and we find its outline scratched on ivory and on bone by the early post-Glacial men. The lion still survived in Europe, also the hyena, the bear and the rhinoceros. The reindeer seems to have been especially abundant, and to have been associated with the men of this period. The horse was very abundant, and was largely eaten by the earlier post-Glacial people. From the first these men show extraordinary artistic skill, and have left in their caves many carvings on ivory, bone and stone. In the oldest deposits of the post-Glacial age the carvings are complete all-round sculptures of small size or carvings in low relief, all of rough primitive workmanship. Larger life-size sculptures in rock are also found. In later deposits we find better sculpture and also engraving on flat pieces of bone and ivory, and also on stone. This art persisted, and attained its greatest perfection in the latest deposits of all in which the work of Palæolithic man is found. The reindeer persisted through this post-Glacial period (hence often called "the reindeer period") until the gradual increase of temperature and change of herbage and forest led to its migration northwards and to the relative abundance of the red deer. It is to this latest period—the Elapho-Tarandian of Piette—that the engraved antler figured here (Figs. 1 and 2) belongs.
At an earlier stage of the post-Glacial period men hunted the bison and other large game in the north of Spain and made coloured drawings of them on the roofs and walls of their caves, drawings which have been copied and preserved: whilst the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the cave lion and bear still inhabited south central France and are pictured on the walls of caves in that region—as described in Chapter II. Later we lose all trace of Palæolithic man and his wonderful artistic skill. He seems either to have migrated or to have been absorbed in the immigrant Neolithic race—a race singularly devoid of any tendency to artistic sculpture or engraving.
The skeletons and skulls of the men of the Reindeer period, or post-Glacial Palæolithic men, have been discovered here and there. They indicate a fine, tall people with well-shaped skulls and jaws, comparable to the nobler modern races. It is convenient to call them Cromagnards, since good skulls of the race have been described from Cromagnon, in France. There is evidence (from skulls) that another race (the negroid so called "Aurignacians") preceded and coexisted to some extent in Western Europe with them, but we have, at present, no evidence as to whence or how the Neolithic race or the Cromagnard race or any of their predecessors came upon the scene!