824 MM. Lartet and Christy on the Existence of Man 
dissement of Sarlat. One of the grottos of this region (that of Les 
Kyzies, 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 different 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 vertebre 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 Périgueux 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 Hyzies, 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. Sc. Nat. sér. 4, Zool. tom. xv. pl. 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 Savigné (Vienne), has been de- 
posited in the Cluny Museum by M. Mérimay, in the name of M. Joli Le 
Terme, architect at Saumur. It is accompanied by worked flints and 
reindeer-bones from the same locality. 
