MAN THE CAVE DWELLER 
northern shores of Africa, until it reached the ancient 
land-bridge extending across the Mediterranean Sea by 
way of Sicily to Italy, which it crossed to enter Europe. 
In connection with the skeletal remains of Aurignacian 
man, the name of Lartet will ever be remembered. 
Edouard Lartet, in early life a lawyer, when almost 
sixty years of age became keenly interested in the ex- 
ploration of caves. These are numerous in the depart- 
ments of Haute Garonne and Ariége, in southern France. 
Near the village of Aurignac there existed a small cave, 
now wholly quarried away, which New Stone Age man 
had used as a sepulcher and then walled up with a slab 
of stone. Falls of débris from the hill above had hidden 
its mouth, but it was accidentally discovered in 1852. 
Within were found the remains of seventeen persons, 
which by order of the mayor received Christian burial. 
In 1860, Lartet visited this cave and explored the un- 
disturbed strata, two or three feet thick, which still cov- 
ered its floor. These abounded in charred and broken 
bones of extinct animals—the cave bear, cave lion, cave 
hyena, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, mammoth, and 
others—broken for their marrow by the men who formerly 
lived there. In the terrace in front of the cave he found 
charcoal and other traces of ancient hearths, in which were 
embedded objects of the type we now call Aurignacian, 
including flint implements, carvings in ivory, shell neck- 
laces, pendants of perforated teeth, and weapons of bone 
and reindeer horn. 
Fight years later, Louis Lartet, the son of Edouard, 
while excavating a grotto or rock-shelter at Cro-Magnon, 
near Les Eyzies (Dordogne), made the discovery of five 
skeletons lying amid hearths and implements similar 
to those found at Aurignac. The skeletons belonged to 
men averaging nearly six feet in height and were, on the 
whole, hardly to be distinguished from those of tall men 
of the present day. This site gave the race the name 
which it bears among prehistorians today. 
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