8 SECRETS OF EARTH AND SEA 



seems either to have migrated or to have been absorbed 

 in the immigrant Neolithic race a race singularly devoid 

 of any tendency to artistic sculpture or engraving. 



The skeletons and skulls of the men of the Reindeer 

 period, or post-Glacial Palaeolithic men, have been dis- 

 covered here and there. They indicate a fine, tall people 

 with well-shaped skulls and jaws, comparable to the 

 nobler modern races. It is convenient to call them 

 Cromagnards, since good skulls of the race have been 

 described from Cromagnon, in France. There is evidence 

 (from skulls) that another race (the negroid so called 

 " Aurignacians ") preceded and coexisted to some extent in 

 Western Europe with them, but we have, at present, no 

 evidence as to whence or how the Neolithic race or the 

 Cromagnard race or any of their predecessors came upon 

 the scene ! 



When we go farther back and reach the actual Glacial 

 period we find a very different state of things. The men 

 who then existed in the caverns are called the Neander 

 men. They were a short, bandy-legged, long-armed, low- 

 browed people, great workers of flints. They had the 

 use of fire, and contended with hyenas and bears and lions 

 for the occupation of their caverns. In their day the 

 day of European glaciation the mammoth was in full 

 occupation of the pine forests on the edge of the glaciers. 

 But the Neander men made no sculptures, or carving, or 

 engravings. The gap between them and the Cromagnon 

 men is much greater than that between an Australian 

 black fellow and an average Englishman ; indeed, the 

 difference is properly expressed by regarding the Neander 

 man as a distinct species Homo neanderthalensis. 



Passing again farther back over an immense period 

 of time, we find Europe warm again ; the glaciers have 

 (for a time) gone or retreated far up the mountains but 

 are found in extension again at a still earlier date. An 



