324 MM. Lartet and Christy on the Existence of Man 



dissement of Sarlat. One of the grottos of this region (that of Les 

 Eyzies, in the commune of Tayac) has presented us, in a breccia 

 covering the soil in the form of a continuous floor, with an ag- 

 gregation of broken bones, ashes, fragments of charcoal, chips 

 and flakes of flint worked in difi'erent modes, but always in 

 definite and frequently repeated forms, associated with other 

 utensils and weapons manufactured of the bones or horns of the 

 Reindeer. The whole of these things must have been fixed and 

 consolidated into a breccia in the original state of the deposit, 

 and before any re-arrangement, as series of several vertebrae of 

 the Reindeer, and some assemblages of articulations consisting 

 of several pieces, occur precisely in their anatomical connexion ; 

 the long bones with medullary cavities only have been detached, 

 and split or broken in a uniform manner — that is to say, evi- 

 dently with the object of extracting the marrow from them. 

 What we now advance may, moreover, be proved by any com- 

 petent observer, as we have taken care to have this breccia ex- 

 tracted in large slabs; and, after depositing the finest specimens 

 in the museum at Perigueux and in the collection, of the Jardin 

 des Plantes at Paris, we have sent to various museums in France 

 and elsewhere blocks of sufficient size to allow the verification of 

 the observations of which we here give the details. 



This grotto of Les Eyzies, the mouth of which is situated 

 thirty-five metres above the level of the nearest watercourse, the 

 Beune, also contained many pebbles and fragments of rocks 

 foreign to the basin of that little river, and which must have 

 been introduced there by man. Some of these rather large 

 pebbles, chiefly those of granite, are flattened on one side, 

 rounded in their outline, and hollowed above by a cavity of 

 greater or less depth, which bears traces of repeated friction. 



In the grotto there were also numerous fragments of a schis- 

 tose rock, of considerable hardness ; and upon two slabs of this 

 rock we have been able to discern partial representations of ani- 

 mal forms engraved in profile. These are, we presume, the first 

 examples observed of engraving on stone, at this ancient phase 

 of the human period, when the Reindeer still inhabited what 

 are now the temperate regions of Europe *. 



* Figures of animals, dating from this same epoch, were reproduced by 

 one of us in 1861 (Ann. So. Nat. ser. 4, Zool. torn. xv. pi. 13); but one 

 of these figures, readily recognizable as the head of a bear, is engraved 

 upon the horn of a deer. The other also is engraved upon the bone of a 

 Ruminant : it represents two complete animals, which have been thought 

 to resemble the Reindeer. The latter specimen, which was obtained from 

 the grotto of Chaffaut, in the commune of Savigne (Vienne), has been de- 

 posited in the Cluny Museum by M. Merimay, in the name of M. Joli Le 

 Terme, architect at Saumur. It is accompanied by worked flints and 

 reindeer-bones from the same locality. 



