34 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



1'Abbe Breuil, 4 Osborn, and others. The significance of this 

 work, whether religious or merely a manifestation of an artis- 

 tic impulse, is not at all clear. That the great bulk of the 

 representations were of animals has perhaps some bearing on 

 the question; at all events, they give us an insight into the 

 psychic development of a race 25,000 years ago fully in accord 

 with their magnificent physique. 



Among other types of Homo sapiens, more or less con- 

 temporaneous with Cro-Magnon man, is that of Grimaldi, 

 of which the typical skeletons come from the famous Grotte 

 des Enfants near Mentone in southern France. The indi- 

 viduals, a woman and a boy, were apparently laid on the floor 

 of the cavern and protected by stone blocks over which in the 

 subsequently accumulated cave earth there was buried a typical 

 Cro-Magnon man. The Grimaldi individuals show several 

 features which have been interpreted as negroid, long nar- 

 row crania, flattened nose with typical nasal gutters at the 

 base, protruding teeth and slightly retreating chin, and palate 

 and teeth like those of the Australians. Although the lower 

 limbs are disproportionately long, the stature was low. 



Sollas makes much of this occurrence, together with the 

 finding of steatopygous figurines in adjacent Mentone caverns 

 suggestive in their conformation of characteristic bodily curva- 

 tures of the modern Bushmen. He therefore, on these and 

 other data, concludes that "Mentone was inhabited at the 

 beginning of the Aurignacian age by a race allied to the Bush- 

 men." One is very loath, however much the resemblances 

 may point to it, to attribute the glories of Aurignacian art to 

 a negroid race, in the presence of the splendid Cro-Magnons. 

 The Grimaldi men may have been representatives of a wave 

 of invasion from northern Africa which spread for a while 

 into Europe, to retreat once more before the advance of the 



4 References to the works of Breuil may be found in the bibliography of 

 Osborn's "Men of the Old Stone Age." 



