PAINTING OF HUMAN FIGURES 249 



changing as the climatic conditions have changed and 

 that when, in two cave-decorations or cave-deposits 

 compared, the animals are different, the cause may be 

 that the one deposit or cave-decoration is more recent 

 than the other. The other explanation is that (as we well 

 know) at one and the same moment very different animals 

 occupy tracts of land which are only a hundred miles or 

 so apart, but differ in climate and general conditions. At 

 this moment there are wild bears and also wolves in 

 France, but none in England ; the elk occurs in Sweden 

 and Russia, but not in the West of Europe ; the porcupine 

 in Italy and in Spain, but not in France. As late as the 

 historic period the African elephant flourished on the 

 African shore of the Mediterranean, but not in Spain ; 

 now it is not found north of the Sahara at all. So we 

 have various possibilities to consider in comparing the 

 animal pictures on the cave walls of Spain with those 

 found in France, and may well suspend judgment till we 

 have knowledge of a greatly extended area. 



I am anxious to draw attention in this chapter to the 

 painted group of ten human figures lately discovered on a 

 rock shelter at Cogul, near Lerida, in Catalonia, and 

 figured and described in the admirable French journal 

 called ' L'Anthropologie.' These figures are those of 

 young women dressed in short skirts and curious sleeves, 

 the hair done up in a conical mass rising from the sides 

 to the top of the head. Each figure is about ten inches 

 high. The great interest about these drawings is that 

 they are probably tens of thousands of years old, and 

 present to us the women of the reindeer or late 

 Pleistocene epoch. No other such painting of the 

 women of this period is known, and the astonishing 

 thing is that, though these are by no means fine 

 specimens of prehistoric art, yet there is a definitely 



