30 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



these pebbles, painted with peroxide of iron, in the four cate- 

 gories of numerals, symbols, pictographs, and alphabetical cha- 

 racters, states, in reference to these last, that "13 out of 23 

 Phoenician characters were equally Azilian graphic signs" (loc. at.}. 

 He even suggests that there may be an approach to an inscription 

 in one group, where, however, the mark indicating a stop implies 

 a script running Semitic-fashion from right to left, whereas the 

 letters themselves seem to face the other way. 



A possible connection has been suggested by Sergi between 



the Mas-d'Azil signs and the markings that have 



form P signs' on been discovered on the megalithic monuments of 



Neolithic North Africa, Brittany, and the British Isles. These 



Monuments. 



are all so rudimentary that resemblances are in- 

 evitable, and of themselves afford little ground for necessary 

 connections. Primitive man is but a child, and all children bawl 

 and scrawl much in the same way. Nevertheless M. Latourneau 1 

 has taken the trouble to compare five such scrawls from " Libyan 

 inscriptions " now in the Bardo Museum, Tunis, with similar 

 or identical signs on Brittany and Irish dolmens. There is the 

 familiar circle plain and dotted O O, the cross in its simplest 

 form + , the pothook and segmented square p [~~l , all of which 

 recur in the Phoenician, Keltiberian, Etruscan, Libyan or Tuareg 

 systems. Latourneau, however, who does not call them letters 

 but only " signes alphabe'tiformes," merely suggests that, if not 

 phonetic marks when first carved on the neolithic monuments, 

 they may have become so in later times. Against this it need 

 only be urged that in later times all these peoples were supplied 

 with complete alphabetic systems from the East as soon as they 

 required them. By that time all the peoples of the culture-zone 

 were well-advanced into the historic period, and had long forgotten 

 the rude carvings of their neolithic forefathers. 



1 Bui. Soc. cTAnthrop. 1896, p. 319. 



