404 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIV. No. 1134 



go back to that earlier world. I myself can 

 never forget the impression produced on 

 me as a privileged spectator of a freshly 

 uncovered interment in one of the Balzi 

 Rossi Caves — an impression subsequently 

 confirmed by other experiences of similar 

 discoveries in these caves, which together 

 first supplied the concordant testimony of 

 an elaborate cult of the dead on the part 

 of Aurignacian Man. Tall skeletons of the 

 highly developed Cro-Magnon type lay be- 

 side or above their hearths, and protected 

 by great stones from roving beasts. Flint 

 knives and bone javelins had been placed 

 within reach of their hands, chaplets and 

 necklaces of sea-shells, fish-vertebra?, and 

 ■studs of carved bone had decked their per- 

 sons. With these had been set lumps of 

 iron peroxide, the red stains of which ap- 

 peared on skulls and bones, so that they 

 might make a fitting show in the under- 

 world. 



Colors, too, to paint his body, 

 Place within his hand, 



That he glisten, bright and ruddy, 

 In the Spirit-Land! * 



Nor is it only in this cult of the departed 

 that we trace the dawn of religious prac- 

 tises in that older world. At Cogul we 

 may now survey the ritual dance of nine 

 skirted women round a male satyr-like 

 figure of short stature, while at Alpera a 

 gowned sister ministrant holds up what 

 has all the appearance of being a small idol. 

 It can hardly be doubted that the small fe- 

 male images of ivory, steatite and crystal- 

 line talc from the same Aurignacian stratum 

 as that of the Balzi Rossi interments, in 

 which great prominence is given to the 

 organs of maternity, had some fetichistic 

 intention. So, too, many of the figures of 

 animals engraved and painted on the in- 

 most vaults of the caves may well have 

 been due, as M. Salomon Reinach has sug- 



i Schiller, ' ' Nadowessier 's Todtenlied. ' ' 



gested, to the magical ideas prompted by 

 the desire to obtain a hold on the quarries 

 of the chase that supplied the means of 

 livelihood. 



In a similar religious connection may be 

 taken the growth of a whole family of signs, 

 in some cases obviously derivatives of fuller 

 pictorial originals, but not infrequently 

 simplified to such a degree that they re- 

 semble or actually reproduce letters of the 

 alphabet. Often they occur in groups like 

 regular inscriptions, and it is not surpris- 

 ing that in some quarters they should have 

 been regarded as evidence that the art of 

 writing had already been evolved by the 

 men of the Reindeer Age. A symbolic 

 value certainly is to be attributed to these 

 signs, and it must at least be admitted 

 that by the close of the late Quaternary 

 Age considerable advance had been made 

 in hieroglyphic expression. 



The evidences of more or less continuous 

 civilized development reaching its apogee 

 about the close of the Magdalenian Period 

 have been constantly emerging from recent 

 discoveries. The recurring "tectiform" 

 sign had already clearly pointed to the ex- 

 istence of huts or wigwams; the "scuti- 

 form" and other types record appliances 

 yet to be elucidated, and another sign well 

 illustrated on a bone pendant from the 

 Cave of St. Marcel has an unmistakable re- 

 semblance to a sledge. 5 But the most as- 

 tonishing revelation of the cultural level 

 already reached by primeval man has been 

 supplied by the more recently discovered 

 rock paintings of Spain. The area of dis- 

 covery has now been extended there from 

 the Province of Santander, where Altamira 

 itself is situated, to the Valley of the Ebro, 

 the Central Sierras, and to the extreme 



5 This interpretation suggested by me after in- 

 specting the object in 1902 has been approved by 

 the AbbS Breuil (Anthropologie, XIII., p. 152) 

 and by Professor Sollas, ' ' Ancient Hunters, ' ' - 

 1915, p. 480. 



