434 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1916. 



funeral custom recurred again in the sepulture of a man of the 

 " Brlinn " race on the eastern boundary of this field of culture. 



In other words, the conditions prevailing were analogous to those 

 of modern Europe. Cultural features of the same general character 

 had imposed themselves on a heterogeneous population. That there 

 was a considerable amount of circulation, indeed — if not of primitive 

 commerce — among the peoples of the Reindeer age is shown by the 

 diffusion of shell or fossil ornaments derived from the Atlantic, the 

 Mediterranean, or from inland geological strata. Art itself is less 

 the property of one or another race than has sometimes been im- 

 agined — indeed, if we compare those products of the modern carver's 

 art that have most analogy with the horn and bone carvings of the 

 cave men and rise at times to great excellence — as we see them, for 

 instance, in Switzerland or Norway — they are often the work of races 

 of very different physical types. The negroid contributions, at least 

 in the southern zone of this late Quaternary field, must not be under- 

 estimated. The early steatopygous images — such as some of these 

 of the Balzi Rossi caves — may safely be regarded as due to this 

 ethnic type, which is also pictorially represented in some of the Span- 

 ish rock paintings. 



The nascent flame of primeval culture was thus already kindled 

 in that older world, and, so far as our present knowledge goes, it 

 was in the southwestern part of our continent, on either side of the 

 Pyrenees, that it shone its brightest. After the great strides in 

 human progress already made at that remote epoch, it is hard, in- 

 deed, to understand what it was that still delayed the rise of Euro- 

 pean civilization in its higher shape. Yet it had to wait for its ful- 

 fillment through many millennia. The gathering shadows thick- 

 ened and the darkness of a long night fell not on > that favored 

 region alone, but throughout the wide area where Reindeer man 

 had ranged. Still the question rises — as yet imperfectly answered — 

 were there no relay runners to pass on elsewhere the lighted torch ? 



Something, indeed, has been recently done toward bridging over 

 the " hiatus " that formerly separated the Neolithic from the Paleo- 

 lithic age — the yawning gulf between two worlds of human existence. 

 The Azilian — a later decadent outgrowth of the preceding culture — 

 which is now seen partially to fill the lacuna, seems to be in some 

 respects an impoverished survival of the Aurignacian.^ The ex- 

 istence of this phase was first established by the long and patient 

 investigations of Piette in the stratified deposits of the cave of 

 Mas d'Azil in the Ariege, from which it derives its name, and it has 

 been proved by recent discoveries to have had a wide extension. It 

 affords evidence of a milder and moister climate — well illustrated by 



. 1 Breuil, '■ Congr. Pr^hist.," Geneva, 1912, p. 216. 



