432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



Spanish rock paintings show dogs or jackals accompanying the 

 hunters, so that the process of domesticating animals had already 

 begun. Hafted axes are depicted as well as cunningly shaped throw- 

 ing sticks. In one case at least we see two opposed bands of archers — 

 marking at any rate a stage in social development in which organized 

 warfare was possible. 



Nor can there be any question as to the age of these scenes and 

 figures, by themselves so suggestive of a much later phase of human 

 history. They are inseparable from other elements of the same 

 group, the animal and symbolic representations of which are shared 

 by the contemporary school of rock painting north of the Pyrenees. 

 Some are overlaid by palimpsests, themselves of Paleolithic chatac- 

 ter. Among the animals actually depicted, moreover, the elk and 

 bison distinctly belong to the late Quaternary fauna of both regions, 

 and are unlmown there to the Neolithic deposits. 



In its broader aspects this field of hmnan culture, to which, on the 

 European side, the name of Eeindeer age may still, on the whole, be 

 applied, is now seen to have been very widespread. In Europe itself 

 it permeates a large area — defined by the boundaries of glaciation — 

 from Poland, and even a large Russian tract, to Bohemia, the upper 

 course of the Danube and of the Rhine, to southwestern Britain and 

 southeastern Spain. Beyond the Mediterranean, moreover, it fits on 

 under varying conditions to a parallel form of culture, the remains 

 of which are by no means confined to the Cis-Saharan zone, where 

 incised figures occur of animals like the long-horned buffalo {BuTba- 

 lus antiquus) and others long extinct in that region. This southern 

 branch may eventually be found to have a large extension. The 

 nearest parallels to the finer class of rock carvings as seen in the 

 Dordogne are, in fact, to be found among the more ancient speci- 

 mens of similar work in South Africa, while the rock paintings of 

 Spain fiLnd their best analogies among the Bushmen. 



Glancing at this late Quaternary culture, as a whole, in view of 

 the materials supplied on the European side, it will not be superflu- 

 ous for me to call attention to two important points which some 

 observers have shown a tendency to pass over. 



Its successive phases, the Aurignacian, the Solutrean, and the Mag- 

 dalenian, with its decadent Azilian offshoot — the order of which 

 may now be regarded as stratigraphically established — represent, on 

 the whole, a continuous story. 



I will not here discuss the question as to how far the disappearance 

 of Neanderthal man and the close of the Mousterian epoch represents 

 a " fault " or gap. But the view that there was any real break in 

 the course of the cultural history of the Reindeer age itself does not 

 seem to have sufficient warrant. 



