MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
place a great number, including some of the finest of them, 
occur in the innermost recesses of caves, almost inaccessi- 
ble even today and quite invisible without the aid of 
artificial light. Evidently the artists did not intend them 
primarily to be seen and admired by their fellow tribes- 
men. Again, the animals represented include almost ex- 
clusively those upon which men placed their chief reliance 
for food; others, whose flesh was too tough or too unpal- 
atable even for the strong teeth and stronger stomachs of 
the cave people, are very rarely seen. Occasionally the 
artist represented the subject of his drawing or painting 
with a dart sticking in it (see Figs. 13 and 62). The motive 
here was undoubtedly the same which, handed down 
through the ages, caused the medieval witch to thrust pins 
into a wax image of the person whose death she desired to 
bring about. 
But although the cave artist had as his primary and per- 
haps only conscious purpose the insuring of a plentiful 
supply of food animals, his work is often so fine, so sure of 
itself, so full of energy and life and the close observation of 
nature, that in many cases genuine artistic feeling evi- 
dently inspired it (Fig. 46). The cave art foreshadowed in 
the development of this quality the great art of Greece 
many thousand years later; in the latter, too, the primary 
motive was magico- religious, yet it embodied the finest 
expressions of sheer beauty that the world has ever seen. 
The Aurignacian artists depicted other classes of objects 
on the walls of caves, such as representations of human 
hands, either in silhouette or in outline. The noteworthy 
thing about these is the frequency with which they reveal 
mutilation through the cutting off of one or more fingers 
(see Plate 16). As we have seen, the same practice has been 
found to occur among certain uncivilized peoples of more 
modern days, the motive being to express grief or to secure 
the favor of the Unseen Powers. It may be that similar 
ideas induced the ancient Aurignacians thus to mutilate 
themselves. 
[ 204 ] 
