THE MOST ANCIENT MEN 385 



river gravels of the lower terraces of English and French 

 rivers. By the French it is often called the Moustierian 

 period, because it is well seen in the rich deposits of the 

 caves and plateau of Le Moustier, on the river Vezere 

 (an affluent of the Dordogne), which contain bones of 

 mammoth and rhinoceros, and flint implements of a 

 special form (Fig. 72), but no carvings or artistic work. 

 Hyaenas made some of the caverns into their dens, 

 and the cave-lion and the cave-bear were there too. 

 The men of this period actually contested with these 

 carnivors for the possession of the caves, and made great 

 fires to keep out wild beasts, as well as to grill the meat 

 on which they fed. They were of an inferior race to the 

 Reindeer Men, and had not such command of the situa- 

 tion as their successors. We find their remains, their 

 flint weapons, and in rare cases their own bones as well 

 as the bones of the mammoth and hairy rhinoceros (on 

 which they fed), and the bones of their competitors, the 

 hyaenas, bears, and lions, in the deeper deposits of some 

 caves, underlying, and separated often by calcareous de- 

 posit from, the layers which belong to the subsequent and 

 prosperous days of the Reindeer Men. Most striking is 

 the fact that in the layers of deposit of this older age, 

 there are no works of art nor any implements carved 

 from bone or ivory. These earlier men, devoid of art and 

 living at a low level of savagery, were the Neander Men. 

 It is in this layer and under these conditions that the few 

 broken skulls, agreeing in shape and character with that 

 of the Neander Valley, have been found. 



Lastly we come to division No. 3, the Lower Pleisto- 

 cene, or Epoch of the Hippopotamus. The later climate 

 of this age was mild. It came between two glacial 

 periods, owing to the retreat of the glaciers, which 

 had earlier increased in extent so as to produce the 

 second Great Glacial period. The hippopotamus swam 

 25 



