EAELIEST HUMAN HABITATIONS HOERNES. 573 



The choice of a dwelling place and of a form of building, in order 

 to render it habitable, depends upon three factors of adaptation: (1) 

 The nature of the ground, (2) the maimer of living, and (3) the gen- 

 eral state of civilization. These are the conditions to which every- 

 where the location and the fonn of the habitation are submitted. 

 This accounts for all geographical and historical divergencies. In 

 the earliest times civilization was uncertain and of no importance, 

 while the nature of the ground and the kind of life played a very 

 great part. The first of those factors determines chiefly the form 

 and the second fixes the location of the dwelling. Fishermen and 

 shell-fish eaters, for instance, live during the entire year along the 

 seashore, but the ichthyophags of Caramania (Asia Minor) and Ged- 

 rosia (Beluchistan) , as also the inhabitants of the Ked Rocks of 

 Menton (France) during the glacial period, were troglodytes (cave 

 dwellers), while the Fuegians are obliged to build huts, just as cer- 

 tain of the inhabitants of the seacoast of Denmark had done whose 

 kitchen-middens have survived. In regions of forests and steppes 

 troglodytism is lunited by the mobility of game. 



Thus, cases, which might be considered as the only form of resi- 

 dence of the peoples of western Europe at the end of the paleolithic 

 period, have furnished interesting information on the construction 

 of huts through the drawings recently discovered in many places. 

 I refer to the curious sketches which were first found graven on the 

 walls of the cavern of Combarelles, then, painted red, in the interior 

 of the cavern of Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne (France), and 

 brought to light by Messieurs Capitan and Breuil. Soon after that 

 similar drawings were found in other caves (graven, in Bemifal; 

 painted red, in Marsoulas) . These drawings are figures of dwellings, 

 sometimes showing a substructure with a central pole, and occasion- 

 ally also with props and girders on either side. The explorers of 

 the French caverns express no doubt but that these figures are crude 

 representations of primitive huts (" rudimentary images of huts," 

 Breuil), which obviously could not have been built inside the cav- 

 erns and probably also not in their vicinity. In the cave of Mar- 

 soulas, above the drawing of such a hut, there is line of dots, in which 

 Breuil sees the representation of foliage to figure the roof. Less sig- 

 nificant are the " marks in form of huts " painted in the cavern of 

 La Mouthe (Dordogne), Altamira and Castillo (North Spain) ; the 

 drawing of these two caverns might be considered as images of 

 interlaced bucklers. Equally uncertain are the " red dwelling fig- 

 ures " of the cavern of Niaux (Briege). Somewhat doubtful is the 

 meaning of the carvings on bone and reindeer antlers found in the 

 region of the caverns. Only the drawings mentioned in the first 

 place can be admitted as valid proofs in favor of the theory of the 

 building of huts at the end of the paleolithic period. The figures 



