FieldJ 



News 



Published Monthly by Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago 



Vol. 4 



OCTOBER, 1933 



No. 10 



SOLUTREAN EPOCH DEPICTED 

 IN HALL OF STONE AGE 



By Henry Field 

 Assistant Curator of Physical Anthropology 



The fourth group' in the recently opened 

 Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World 

 (Hall C) represents a scene of the Solutrean 

 epoch. In this period, estimated at about 

 22,000 years ago, the climate was growing 

 colder, and the horse and reindeer were the 

 chief sources of food. Along the banks of 

 the Danube, then swinging westward into 

 southwestern France and northern Spain, 

 came a race of invaders 

 who, in appearance, 

 were almost identical 

 with the modern 

 Eskimo and may have 

 been the Eskimo's 

 ancestors. Anthro- 

 pologists have named 

 these people Solu- 

 treans after the type 

 station containing 

 their artifacts in the 

 commune of Solutre, 

 Saone-e t-Loire , 

 France. They were 

 probably inferior in 

 physique to their 

 predecessors, the Au- 

 rignacians. They left 

 for posterity some 

 sculptures of an im- 

 posing character, and 

 they developed a 

 peculiar technique for 

 fashioning flint spear- 

 heads and lances 

 which gave their prod- 

 uct a degree of per- 

 fection not found 

 again until advanced 

 neolithic times, thou- 

 sands of years later. 



In the Museum 

 group there is repro- 

 duced the famous 



Solutrean frieze of Le Roc in the Charente 

 district of France. This reproduction was 

 made possible by the courtesy of Dr. Henri 

 Martin, discoverer of the frieze, who 

 furnished the Museum with casts of the 

 original sculptures. The five blocks have 

 been arranged in the position in which 

 they were placed by the Solutrean artists. 

 On the left is a path leading to a cave, 

 and on the right, sheltered behind large 

 trees, can be seen the entrance to another 

 cave. The vegetation of the time is repre- 

 sented in the background of the group. 

 In the foreground a Solutrean sculptor of 

 Mongoloid type is shown at work, carving 

 the outline of a horse on a block of stone. 

 Flint chips and flakes collected at Le Roc 

 are scattered on the ground. 



The five sculptures of Le Roc, reproduced 

 in this group, represent: (1) a masked 

 human being, dancing; (2) two small horses, 



♦The first three groups, Chellean, Neanderthal, and 

 Aurignacian, have been pictured and described in the 

 July, August, and September issues of Field Museum 

 News. 



and an animal with elongated muzzle and 

 raised tail; (3) a musk-ox charging a man 

 who is fleeing; (4) more horses and an ox; 

 and (5) a small horse following a fantastic 

 animal with a head like that of a boar or 

 carnivore, an elliptical eye, elongated muz- 

 zle, pointed ears, and no horns. 



In a case opposite the group are exhibited 

 Solutrean artifacts from Le Roc and other 

 sites, including the type series from Solutr6. 



The group is the work of sculptor Frederick 

 Blaschke, executed on plans made by the 

 writer, who visited Le Roc to obtain data 



•i^ 



Copyright Field Museum of Natural Higtory \ Solutrean SculptOr 



Group in the Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World showing a man of about 22.i 

 Solutrean frieze of Le Roc in the Charente region of France is reproduced in this exh: 



for the group. Staff Artist Charles A. Corwin 

 prepared the painted background. 



Gaekwar of Baroda Visits Museum 



His Highness the Maharaja Gaekwar Sir 

 Savaji Rao III, ruling monarch of Baroda, 

 was a visitor at Field Museum on August 29, 

 and made a tour of some of the principal 

 exhibits, accompanied by Director Stephen 

 C. Simms. 



Among other distinguished visitors re- 

 ceived at the Museum during the past month 

 were Sir Arthur Smith-Woodward, former 

 curator of paleontology of the British 

 Museum; Dr. Victor Van Straelen, Director 

 of the Musee Royale d'Histoire Naturelle 

 de Belgique, Brussels; Dr. A. W. Grabau, 

 professor of paleontology at the National 

 University of China and chief paleontologist 

 of the Chinese Geological Survey, Peiping; 

 and Professor Richard Willestatter of 

 Munich, winner of the 1918 Nobel prize in 

 chemistry. 



LIMBLESS LIZARDS AND 

 SNAKES WITH LEGS 



By Karl P. Schmidt 

 Assistant Curator of Reptiles 



Lizards have a familiar typical form — that 

 of a scaly quadruped with a long tail. It is 

 accordingly remarkable to find that many 

 lizards whose four-footed relatives are easily 

 recognizable have wholly lost their limbs 

 and, with elongation of body and tail, have 

 become snake-like in body form. Every 

 continent exhibits this type of lizard evolu- 

 tion, which has evidently taken place inde- 

 pendently from a 

 great variety of four- 

 limbed ancestors. 

 Every stage in the loss 

 of limbs and elonga- 

 tion of body is 

 exhibited in the skink 

 family, which includes 

 species with five, four, 

 three, and two toes, 

 and with limbs 

 reduced to mere 

 stumps or entirely 

 absent. 



This mode of evolu- 

 tion is frequent 

 among lizards with 

 burrowing habits and 

 is, in such species, fre- 

 quently accompanied 

 by loss of eyes and 

 ear openings. Such 

 lizards, except to the 

 technically trained 

 students, may be 

 indistinguishable from 

 similarly blind 

 burrowing snakes. 

 Others, however, re- 

 tain the active senses 

 of their ancestors and 

 are readily distin- 

 guishable from snakes 

 by their movable eye- 

 lids and ear-openings, 

 structures which are absent in snakes. The 

 common "glass snake" of North America, 

 which reaches the vicinity of Chicago, is a 

 limbless lizard of this class. 



These creatures exhibit plainly enough the 

 mode of derivation of snakes from a lizard 

 ancestry. The relation of the snake tribe to 

 lizards is made evident by the presence of 

 vestiges of hind limbs in the pythons and boa 

 constrictors, which include a series of bones 

 within the body, at each side of the vent, 

 with a large external claw. None of our 

 Chicago snakes belong to this primitive 

 group, whose only representatives in North 

 America are two small snakes, the rosy boa 

 and the rubber boa, found in California. 



Limbless lizards are more abundant and 

 varied in Africa than in any other region. 

 A small collection of reptiles and amphibians 

 recently received by Field Museum from 

 Port Nolloth, South Africa, includes four 

 species of these remarkable forms. One of 

 these has vestiges of hind limbs, while three 

 are entirely without external sign of limbs 

 or eyes. 



,000 years ago. 

 ibit. 



The famous 



