THE (OLD STONE AGE 
During the Late Solutrean there appeared, more es- 
pecially in southwestern France, a new type of flint im- 
plement known as a “‘shouldered point,” which was made 
with a projection on one side. This is the first sign that 
man had come to realize the efficacy of a barb in holding 
a weapon in the flesh of a hunted animal. In the Late 
Solutrean we find, too, bone javelin points, and also bone 
needles pierced at one end, exactly like our own save in 
the material of which they are made. These show pretty 
conclusively that the art of fitting and sewing skin cloth- 
ing had made still further progress by this time. In fact 
it is quite likely that during the greater portion of the 
Later Paleolithic, including the Solutrean epoch, man 
wore fur garments not unlike those of the modern Eskimo. 
While the Solutreans far surpassed the Aurignacians in 
flint working, in art they fell far behind, so much so that 
some have doubted whether the Solutrean culture itself 
had any art at all. They suggest that the examples of 
artistic achievement belonging to this epoch represent 
rather the work of surviving Aurignacians who had 
mingled with the Solutrean intruders. 
But whoever the artists were, the Solutrean epoch wit- 
nessed a considerable development of animal sculpture. 
A noteworthy example is a figure of a mammoth carved 
out of a fragment of ivory, found at Predmost, in Moravia, 
several feet beneath the surface of the loess soil, in an 
undoubtedly Solutrean layer (Plate 57). The carving of 
animal figures on the d4tons de commandement also under- 
went a great advance during this period. It is Just posst- 
ble that statuettes of naked fat women, usually regarded 
as peculiar to the Late Aurignacian, may also have been 
executed during the beginning of the Solutrean. If so, 
they, too, may well have been the work of Aurignacian 
survivors rather than of the Solutreans themselves. The 
latter may possibly have been primarily responsible for 
at least one class of decorative designs, namely, those 
of geometric and highly conventionalized type (Fig. 48). 
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