MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
THE MoustTerRiAn Epocu 
Toward the close of the Acheulian epoch the climate 
grew increasingly severe, as the Wurm glacial stage drew 
on. The changes in animal forms to which this led have 
already been noted. A similar alteration manifests itself 
clearly in the human life of the time. To whatever race 
Acheulian man may have belonged, the type of culture 
which he had steadily been developing during the latter 
portion of the third interglacial now gave way to an- 
other, that known as the Mousterian. This change, of 
course, did not take place all at once throughout the whole 
of western Europe. It may very well have required 
hundreds if not thousands of years for completion, and 
no doubt it occurred earlier in some places than in others. 
Thus in certain regions, like the valley of the.Garonne, in 
southwestern France, the Mousterian culture seems to 
have appeared even before the advent of the full Wurm 
glaciation. 
Some students have thought that this developed directly 
though gradually from the Acheulian, in western Europe 
itself. But fundamentally there seems to have been in the 
long run an actual replacement of one type of culture by 
another which had grown up in some different part of the 
world; for pretty clear evidence exists that the Mousterian 
culture appeared in western Europe as an intruder from 
central Europe, out of which the advent of the Great Cold 
had probably driven it. In other words, while the Acheul1- 
ans were dwelling in what is now France and the neighbor- 
ing regions, the Mousterians had been living in Germany 
and thereabouts. However, men of Neanderthal type may 
have existed in western Europe also during the Acheulian 
and even earlier periods. We have as yet far too few 
actual skeletal remains from the latter to enable us to say 
definitely to what type, or types, of men the cultures pre- 
ceding the Mousterian are to be ascribed. 
Some investigators have thought that there is evi- 
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