PALEOLITHIC RACES AND THEIR 

 MODERN REPRESENTATIVES 



By W. J. SOLLAS, D.Sc, F.R.S. 

 Professor of Geology in the University of Oxferd 



Magdalenian Man and the Eskimo 



In caves where the succession of deposits is complete a com- 

 paratively thin layer of loam, often not more than twenty to 

 thirty inches in thickness, is all that separates the Magdalenian 

 stage from the underlying Solutrian ; yet the change in the 

 general character of the industrial cult is complete. The flint 

 implements are less elaborated, ruder in style and lacking in 

 finish ; the elegant Solutrian laurel-leaf points have disappeared, 

 and we meet instead with long thin flakes and splinters which 

 have been converted by a minimum amount of dressing into 

 scrapers, gravers, drills, and other simple tools. It is not to 

 these flints, however, that we must look for the distinctive 

 character of the Magdalenian industry ; they still played an 

 important part, not directly as weapons of the chase, but rather 

 as the implements by which those weapons were made. The 

 new kind of material which had come into use — bone, reindeer's 

 horn, and mammoth's ivory — possessing very different pro- 

 perties from flint, and requiring a different kind of workmanship, 

 effected a revolution in the arts. The arms it furnished to the 

 hunter increased in the number and complication of their forms, 

 and new kinds of implements were devised which added to the 

 comforts of daily life. The stimulus of discovery led to rapid 

 progress in the new industry, and the deposits in the caves 

 reveal three stages in its development, succeeding one another 

 in a definite order from the simpler to the more complex : thus 

 as the characteristic of the first stage we have the simple point, 

 of the second the harpoon with a single row of barbs, and of 

 the third the harpoon with two rows of barbs, one on each side. 

 The simple forms of arrow-head and spear-head which came 

 in with the first stage, but persisted throughout the remainder 

 of the period, are simple cylindrical rods of various dimensions, 



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