PALAEOLITHIC RACES 671 



that of stone does not seem a great step, but it was not taken 

 till long afterwards, in the neolithic period. 



At first bone implements are very rare and simple in form, 

 but accompanying them are objects sculptured in the round or 

 in low relief, of which we shall speak later. 



Allusion has already been made to the life of the period. 

 Europe at this time evidently teemed with game, which afforded 

 a rich prey to the Solutrian hunters. At Solutre itself, a station 

 in the Rhone valley a little to the north of Lyons, where the 

 horse seems to have been a favourite food, the broken bones of 

 these animals, left as the refuse of many feasts, form a mass 

 of breccia considerably over 100 yards in length and 10 ft. high ; 

 and at Predmost, in Moravia, where the mammoth was the chief 

 victim, more than two thousand of its molar teeth have been 

 found gathered together in a mass of debris. In connection 

 with this we may recall the observations made by Captain 

 Harris when travelling in South Africa : 



" In many places," he writes, " the ground was strewn with 

 the blanched skeletons of gnus and other wild animals which 

 had evidently been slaughtered by Bushmen, and traces of 

 these troglodytes waxed hourly more apparent as the country 

 became more inhabitable. The base of one hill in particular, 

 in which some of their caves were discovered, presented the 

 appearance of a veritable Golgotha ; several hundred skulls of 

 gnus and bonteboks being collected in a single heap." * 



Under such favourable conditions life seems to have afforded 

 Solutrian man a certain amount of leisure. At all events, his 

 energies were not wholly devoted to the chase, and we now 

 witness the birth of the fine arts. Sculpture, painting, drawing 

 successively make their appearance, and the best examples 

 attain so high a pitch of excellence that enthusiastic discoverers 

 have spoken of them as superior in some respects to the work 

 of the Greeks. Sculptures in the round and in low relief were 

 the first to attract the attention of observers ; but in the course 

 of the last twenty years a series of remarkable discoveries have 

 brought to light whole picture galleries of Solutrian age. The 

 first to set eyes on these was a Spanish nobleman, Marcellano 

 de Sautualo, who when visiting the International Exhibition in 

 Paris of 1878 became acquainted with the discoveries made in 

 the caves of Southern France, and was thus led to investigate 



1 G. W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa, London, 1905, p. 85. 



