H.— ANTHROPOLOGY 163 



the same as that of the lower horizons, shows a certain evolution towards 

 the type of the so-called Azilio-Tardenoisian stations of the South 

 Russian plain. The final stage of the Upper Palaeolithic represented 

 in the lower level of Borshevo II is found also at Honey on the Udai 

 river, and in the upper level of the site discovered in 1897 in the Saint 

 Cyril Street at Kieff. 



It is noteworthy that no blade industry earlier than that of Kostenki I 

 and Gagarino has yet been found in the South Russian plain, and that 

 earlier Palaeolithic stages are represented so far by a single Mousterian 

 station on the Derkul river. Efimenko suggests that the swampy con- 

 ditions which prevailed in this region in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene 

 were unfavourable to human settlement. Certainly there is no geological 

 evidence to suggest that the stations of the Gagarino group are not 

 approximately contemporary with similar sites in central and western 

 Europe. 



In Southern Siberia, roughly two thousand miles to the east of the 

 group of stations just described, Gerassimov has excavated a hut site at 

 Malta, not far from Irkutsk. This contained a most remarkable series of 

 objects in bone and ivory, including points, needles, rods and pendants, 

 some of which are decorated with very small crescentic incisions giving 

 the effect of punctuations. Twenty female statuettes carved in bone 

 are more roughly made and, with few exceptions, less corpulent than 

 those of Gagarino, but clearly belong to the same family. A group of 

 curiously shaped objects supposed by the discoverer to represent 

 birds are interpreted by Breuil as highly conventionalised human figures, 

 but Gordon Childe insists that they are in fact birds. The lithic industry 

 of Malta shows, in a lesser degree, the same mixture of Mousterian and 

 Aurignacian forms as was found in the Yenisei stations and at the 

 Vercholensk Mountain. The fauna, however, includes mammoth, woolly 

 rhinoceros, musk ox and glutton, so the site is clearly older than the 

 Vercholensk Mountain, and probably antidates the Yenisei stations also. 

 The female statuettes form a link with the South Russian plain, but the 

 bone objects as a whole have a very exotic look, and cannot at present 

 be compared exactly with those from any other site. The mixture of 

 Mousterian and Aurignacian forms in the stone industry is a feature 

 which suggests possible connections with the Far East, since in 1924 

 Father Licent and Father Teilhard de Chardin found an industry of 

 similar mixed character in the loess along the course of the Shuitungkou 

 river in northern China. This culture Father Teilhard dates as Upper 

 Palaeolithic and himself compares it with the Yenisei finds. 



The Crimea, although it lies so near to the South Russian plain, appears 

 to belong to a different industrial province, and its caves were inhabited 

 from the final Acheulian onwards. In the cave of Syuren I Bontch- 

 Osmolovski has discovered a blade-industry sequence which appears to 

 correspond rather closely with that of Palestine. It begins with an early 

 form of Middle Aurignacian in which rough keeled scrapers are associated 

 with small, delicately retouched blades. This is followed by a classic- 

 Middle Aurignacian, and the sequence closes with a not very typical 

 Upper Aurignacian in which abundant polyhedric burins are associated 



