"MEN OF THE OLD STONE AGE" 



21 



the New World a sufficient nimihei- of cul- 

 ture traits to distinguish a modern rein- 

 deer culture period. If the association 

 between certain traits and the reindeer 

 is so strong as to carry the former over 

 the range of the latter, it would not be 

 luireasonable to expect that some of the 

 Magdalenian culture did follow the rein- 

 deer down through all these many cen- 

 turies. One of the assigned causes for 

 Magdalenian decline and the retirement 

 of the Cr6-Magnons is the retreat of the 

 reindeer before the encroaching fores- 

 tation of Western Europe. It is cer- 

 tain that the reindeer culture of the 

 Magdalenians would vanish from Europe 

 with the animal, but it is almost equally 

 certain that it would to some extent fol- 

 low the migrating fauna to other regions. 

 Archaeological research in Asia will 

 finally solve this problem. 



Returning to the book before us we 

 see that previous to the dawn of the Neo- 

 lithic which followed the Palaeolithic 

 or Old Stone Age, at least four other 

 A'arieties of men came into Western 

 Europe and laid the foimdations of the 

 present population. (These are enu- 

 merated in the Table on page 500.) 

 Throughout the discussion it is made 

 plain that in the Stone Age we are deal- 

 ing with a culture rather than with a 

 race, for many varieties of man came 

 upon the scene and vanished, while the 

 culture waves rose and fell in what ap- 

 pears to be their own time. The one 

 striking culture coincident with the ap- 

 pearance of the Cro-Magnons has been 

 noted, but other racial variants playing 

 important parts came in before the close 

 of the period. To quote our author: 



"All these steps indicate the posses- 

 sion of certain generic faculties of mind 

 similar to our own. That this mind of 

 the Upper Palaeolithic races was of a 

 kind capable of a high degree of educa- 

 tion we entertain no doubt whatever, be- 



cause of the very advanced order of 

 brain which is developed in the higher 

 members of these ancient races; in 

 fact, it may fairly be assumed from ex- 

 periences in the education of existing 

 races of much lower brain capacity, such 

 as the Eskimo or Fuegian. The emer- 

 gence of such a mind from the mode of life 

 of the Old Stone Age is one of the greatest 

 mysteries of psychology and of history." 



The author regards the Cro-Magnon, 

 Briinn and other human types of the 

 I'pper Palaeolithic Period (p. 491) a.s 

 collaterals of the same ancestral stem and 

 not as having been evolved one from the 

 other. Neither does he consider that 

 the Neanderthal, Heidelberg, etc., devel- 

 oped into other races. There is no good 

 evidence that Western Europe was ever 

 a center of human evolution for new 

 types of men. It was by position 

 doomed to be a marginal area into which 

 rolled successive waves of human life 

 fully differentiated elsewhere. Then he 

 concludes, "We may therefore imagine 

 that the family tree of the races of the 

 Old Stone Age consisted of a number of 

 separate branches, which had been com- 

 pletely formed in the great Eurasiatic 

 continent, a land mass infinitely larger 

 and more capable of producing a variety 

 of races than the diminutive peninsular 

 area of Western Europe." 



It would follow then that the Cro- 

 Magnon mind came into being some- 

 where in the East and may perhaps have 

 left its archaeological traces in Asia, where 

 they await the future investigator. 



This sketch can but inadequately 

 present even this one aspect of Pro- 

 fessor Osborn's many-sided and timely 

 work. The general reader can turn to it 

 again and again for new suggestions. 

 Perhaps no other scientific subject can so 

 deeply stir the imagination as the one 

 hundred thousand years of man's con- 

 tinuous history in Western Europe. 



