BIOLOGY OF MAN 1177 



use of the caverns, which, indeed, they may well have despised as 

 dwellings, since they could not only build good huts, and increase 

 them up to villages, but fortify them against the surviving palaeo- 

 lithic aborigines; indeed up to the great entrenched camps of which 

 the ramparts and dykes still survive over Europe and in our own 

 islands. Where lakes or fluviatile conditions were favourable, or 

 sometimes even in marshes, they constructed great lake-dwellings, 

 or rather lake- villages, now so well known in Switzerland, and on 

 a smaller scale in Britain too. An additional great source of strength 

 lay in their inter-communitary commerce, with established tracks 

 and paths. 



They wove tissues for garments, and made pottery: and, with 

 their cult of the dead — and what other ideals and ideas we know 

 not — they erected megalithic monuments and colossal mounds. 

 Being as yet without metals, they were still dependent upon flint 

 for tools and weapons. Yet while still retaining the old and essential 

 palaeolithic technique for ordinary purposes, and often developing 

 it, as for arrowheads and more, they also gave the enormous ex- 

 penditure of time and labour required for polishing them. Axes 

 and clubs, daggers and arrowheads, chisels, scrapers, etc., were 

 thus brought to the amazingly perfect surface which every museum 

 shows. 



Much of this long succession of early cultures and civilisations — 

 for such they truly were — may plainly be made out in the sections 

 of the Les Eyzies cavern-floors, as well as in fuller detail in its 

 excellent museum; whence its special suitability as a centre for 

 studies, and its selection for descriptive outline here accordingly; 

 without attempt to cover the ever-increasing fields of research. 

 Indeed above and beyond all these phases we come to the age of 

 bronze, with which our historic age begins, though yet so dimly. 

 So even from then, even if not earlier, and to this day, the village 

 life has gone on, and this sometimes, over Dordogne indeed, with 

 suggestions of organic heredity, for occasionally the Cro-Magnon and 

 other types seem to reappear. Above all, here is a yet greater tradi- 

 tion of social heritages, still only beginning to be deciphered — each 

 phase indeed, in time promising a veritable museum-gallery in 

 itself; and in their cavern or terrace superposition to be read upwards, 

 as the accumulating shelves and volumes of prehistory. How this 

 favourably-situated little village has been of old a centre for its 

 region, as this apparently for France, as she so much for Western 

 Europe — and through times immeasurably earlier and longer than 

 those of all historic cities — is a thought worth pondering. Nowhere 

 else can we so clearly and fully visualise the long evolution of 

 humanity, in its ever-renewing struggle for existence, yet culture 

 of existence too. In strict classification the lower paloeolithic men 

 were not of our species {Homo sapiens), since still in important ways 



