THE ADVANCE OP PREHISTORIC HUMANITY 107 



making implements (in Neolithic graves) are flint and 

 iron pyrites, I infer that he made the discovery by 

 knocking sparks out of pieces of iron ore, of which he 

 was trying to make implements; but it is generally 

 conjectured that he first obtained it by the common 

 savage practice of rubbing sticks. We get also the first 

 indications of clothing. Flint scrapers are found, which 

 seem to have been used for scraping the insides of skins. 

 Bone needles, skilfully rounded and pierced with flint 

 borers, are found in the French caves, and even buttons 

 soon occur. For thread he must have used the sinews 

 of the reindeer that spread over the icy face of Europe 

 as far as the Pyrenees. Moreover, the artist appears 

 for the first time, and some of his scratchings on bone 

 and stone show a considerable skill in the delineation of 

 form. He also made fair progress in small sculpture, 

 and began to adorn the walls of his cavern with coloured 

 figures. 



Apart, however, from this curious artistic development, 

 which was nearly confined to France and soon became 

 quite extinct again, the progress made in the long Paleo- 

 lithic period was slight. The stone weapons and tools 

 have a finer finish and much greater variety, but during 

 those 150,000 years it did not occur to any human being 

 that a far better edge could be obtained (on quartz, 

 basalt, etc.) by grinding and polishing. The only home 

 is the natural cavern, and there is as yet no pottery, no 

 trace of a rudimentary husbandry, and no kind of 

 weaving. The dead seem never to have been buried, 

 there are no characters that could be construed as a 

 crude beginning of writing, and no symbols or marks that 

 we have serious reason to regard as religious. The 

 Franco-Spanish caverns, with their long stretches of 

 ornamentation and the thick rubbish of weapon factories, 

 bone heaps, etc., indicate that men now lived in large 



