244 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vn. 



General Conclusions. 



The reader will have gathered from this and the two 

 preceding chapters an idea of the extraordinary condi- 

 tions under which man lived in Europe in the Pleistocene 

 age. There is retrace of the knowledge of pottery or 

 of spinning, nor at this time were domestic animals or 

 cultivated seeds or fruits known in our quarter of the 

 world. The Palseolithic tribes led a wandering feral Kfe 

 under feral conditions, and had not learned the arts of 

 moulding plants and animals to their various needs, 

 and thus freeing themselves to some extent from bondage 

 to their natural conditions. The reader has seen, further, 

 that man appears in two phases of the hunter stage of 

 human progress the older and lower, or that of the 

 River-drift, and the newer and higher, or - that of the 

 Cave-men. The River-drift man was a hunter of a very 

 low order, but not lower than the modern Australian, arid 

 from his wide range over the Old World was probably of 

 vastly greater antiquity than his successors in Europe. 

 There is no reason for the belief that he possessed any 

 artistic skill. The Cave-man, on the other hand, possessed 

 a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted, 

 and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for 

 seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much 

 inferior to that which is the result of long-continued 

 civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that 

 of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The 

 hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced 

 with his imperfect means at one time foliage (Fig. 91), 

 and at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding 

 (Fig. 86), has left behind the proof of a decided advance 



